Sarah Guo - What the 250 People Building AI Believe

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:01)
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**SPEAKER_2** (1:51)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of PositiveSum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of PositiveSum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of PositiveSum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit p-s-u-m.v-c.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:19)
Sir, where to begin what will hopefully be a really fun conversation?
I guess because you and I are interested in so many of the same things, I'm just curious what's on your mind today. I think we're both feeling a little frenzied and it's been going for a while, and it feels like if anything it might get more frenzied and more chaotic, both for what you do but also the world around what you do. So just in this moment, what does it feel like? What's on your mind?

**Sarah Guo** (2:46)
An obvious thing for anyone thinking about how to navigate this period as an investor is just, how does it unfurl and how is it different from the past? What do I do if I can't backtest? I was talking to a investor friend last night, and the analogy he gave me was, I keep saying I want to press the brakes as hard as I can, but I'm not doing it. Going 90 miles an hour. I do think the question is, do you miss the opportunity on one side, or do you make the mistake of every boom bust cycle in technology history? Especially if you combine that with, what does it mean when you're also four years into building a firm for the durability of the firm and the careers of the people? I think it's a complex question.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (3:34)
Do you think that we got it right in the profile that we wrote, that you're making a specific, I think we called it a wager, a bad positioning, whatever you want to call it, that there is a really important, fundamental thing happening between a couple of labs in AI and everybody else, and that we need to take up arms to make sure we don't end up in a very monolithic outcome. Do you think about it that way?

**Sarah Guo** (4:00)
I would answer in a maybe different way, which is I believe in the great man and great woman theories of history. If you have very high agency people in all of these places and they have the correct risk capital or support in the network or environment, yeah, you change outcomes. You look at very important questions of what happens to open source models and like US industrial policy. If you think about the opportunity for the ecosystem in the future, is there going to be a competitive Western open source model? Like it actually leads to like, did anybody make one? Could they like raise the money or were they willing to commit the capital and gather the talent base? Build all the infrastructure and fight for the frontier or not? I definitely think that individual people and entrepreneurs can affect the outcome. I don't necessarily think of it as a war. I am working closely with and co-invested with and have many friends at the labs.