She Knows the 250 People Building AI. Here's What They Actually Believe.

Sarah Guo (0:00)

It is a violently competitive landscape. I think people are very concerned that it is a globally competitive landscape. There's insecurity in that, because I think it's a bit narrative breaking as well. The belief is, like, with recursive self-improvement of AI research, models that can improve the models themselves, we are a year, two years away from some sort of exponential intelligence.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy (0:39)

Sarah, where to begin 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, you 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 (1:08)

An obvious thing for anyone thinking about how to navigate this period as an investor is just, well, how does it unfurl, and how is it different from the past?

What do I do if I can't backtest? Right? I was talking to a investor friend last night, and the analogy he gave me was like, I keep saying I want to press the brakes as hard as I can, but I'm not doing it. I'm 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? I think it's a complex question.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy (1:50)

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.

Sarah Guo (2:00)

Yes, I'm along.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy (2:01)

Yeah. 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 (2:19)

I would answer in a maybe different way, which is I believe in the great man and great woman theories of history. I just believe that 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, you change outcomes. You look at very important questions of what happens to open source models and 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? It actually leads to, did anybody make one? Could they raise the money or were they willing to commit the capital and gather the talent base? And build all the infrastructure and fight for the frontier or not, right? And so I definitely think that people can, 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, the big labs and small. But I think it's fair to say the extreme point of view that some folks may had in outside of those big labs of the owner of one to three frontier models consumes the economy. I do not want that future, very clearly. And I don't think we are going to end up there.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy (3:48)

Do you actively want to be a great woman in this sense of the theory?

Sarah Guo (3:53)

No, I think the like, and I don't mean that from like a personal humility perspective, it's just like it's not in my set of goals, right? Like I want to be the best investor in the things that I tried to do. And so it's not out of lack of ambition or even confidence. It's, I think some people are driven by like, I want to be the person that like made this happen. And like my realization of, I thought it was going to be like a software entrepreneur for the longest time.

And my decision that like, from an identity perspective, I was going to be an investor actually had a lot to do with the idea of like, I'm deeply curious. I like to understand things. I like to be right. And then I like to, I care. I'm very motivated by working with extraordinary people. And then, you know, if I have a set of skills, using those to make them more successful, and that looks like a pretty good fit for early stage investing, right? If I want to work with the very best people and I want the companies to have impact, like I think the firm can support a movement and support change we want to see, but I don't think it has to be me.