Workflow
20VC with Harry Stebbings
icon
Search documents
Analysing Chat GPT-5
We looked a lot at how GPD5 would impact our users before we decided okay let's put this into the product and we looked at how long time it took to get responses. We looked at our quantitative evals and then we just vibe checked it in many different ways and what we concluded was that it's often times too ambitious for our users and that's why we decided hey this is very smart so let's give it to all our users and see what they tell us in terms of what's good and what's bad. What we found was that for the u ...
Jason's Advice to Founders
I've done several B2B plus AI deals in the last 18 months that I love that will do great. And the advice I give to all those founders is don't expect any money. 80% of the folks I can refer you to are not going to take your meeting.It's a reality. ...
Why LLMs are like Power Plants
Infrastructure Importance - Countries benefit from having infrastructure within their borders [1] - Power plants, such as nuclear and water power plants, are considered beneficial infrastructure [1] Language Models as Infrastructure - Language models are viewed as similar to infrastructure [1]
Why Every Country Needs Their Own LLM
Language Model Importance - Having a language model tailored to a specific country is crucial for building infrastructure for its people [1] - Using generic models built elsewhere may not adequately empower a country's economy due to a lack of cultural fluency [1] Localization Benefits - A language model that understands the local context, dialect, and culture is essential for empowering the people of a country [1]
Non-US Tech is Winning?
I think us being Canadian is an asset. There's a lot of companies in Canada and around the world that are interested in working with non-American tech companies. You know, over the past few years, America has shown that they're willing to like turn off access to tech based on political reasons, right.We've seen connections between American tech and the American government is like less clear as time goes on. What does that mean. It means that Trump influences US tech companies.Seems to be. Yeah. It was like ...
Sam Altman’s Disservice to AI
I don't think Sam Alden has done a service to the world by talking about how close AGI is. I think he has made several predictions now that are wrong and that were obviously wrong at the time he made them. >> I think AI will probably lead to the end of the world.>> You know, he's made illusions to things. He did a world tour where he spoke to every major leader the world over to tell them, hey, this technology is going to poses an existential threat. And I think that was academically disingenuous and I thin ...
Cohere Founder, Nick Frosst: How To Compete with OpenAI & Anthropic, and Sam Altman’s AI Disservice
Company Focus & Strategy - Cohere is uniquely focused on bringing large language model (LLM) technology to enterprise, training models for enterprise tool use and API integration within businesses [1] - Cohere trains efficient models that can fit on two GPUs, aiming for a balance between performance, cost, and accessibility for enterprise deployment [1] - Cohere prioritizes Return on Investment (ROI) over Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), focusing on helping enterprises achieve practical AI deployments [14] Model Training & Data - While the transformer architecture remains largely unchanged, Cohere focuses on refining training methods, including the use of synthetic data to augment real-world data [1] - Data quality remains a bottleneck, requiring a combination of real-world and synthetic data, with in-house annotators creating real data [1] - Cohere releases model weights for non-commercial usage, aiming to build credibility within the research community while maintaining a commercial business model [10] Competition & Market - Cohere differentiates itself from consumer-focused companies like OpenAI and Anthropic by concentrating on enterprise solutions and knowledge worker augmentation [14] - The company views being Canadian as an asset, attracting companies interested in working with non-American tech companies due to geopolitical considerations [18] - Cohere believes that benchmarks are not always an accurate reflection of the utility value of models, as they can be gamified and may not align with enterprise use cases [4] Talent & Workforce - Cohere acknowledges the war for AI talent but emphasizes the importance of stability, purpose, and value alignment in attracting and retaining employees [5] - The company believes that LLMs will augment human work, automating boring tasks and allowing people to focus on creativity, communication, and strategic thinking [8] - Cohere foresees changes to the workforce similar to those brought about by previous technological revolutions, emphasizing the need for policies to ensure a smooth transition and address income inequality [8][9] Future Predictions - By 2026, Cohere predicts that users will be able to use language to interact with computers to automate tasks like filing expenses [21] - The company believes that the skill of prompting will become less relevant as language models are trained to better fit how people expect them to work [12] - Cohere anticipates that language will become a more important part of how people interact with computers, though graphic user interfaces will still be valuable [18]
Why founders shouldn't optimize for culture 🙅‍♂️
The only thing that matters for culture is growth, like business growth. Because for a business that's growing at like an amazing clip, it's always going to have cultural sort of issues that, you know, make it kind of suck to like work there. But everybody's okay with that and leaned in because they see a path for themselves because what they're solving for will be more comp, more career progression, bigger scope, manage a team.they have a line of sight towards that. But then if you don't have enough growth ...
#1 reason hiring managers f**k up 📉⁠
I think the most common way that I see hiring managers screw up hiring is over delegation which then is compounded by the fact that they have like muddy thinking. They don't know what they want and they haven't taken the time to like really sus that out. So then you think you're hiring a recruiter and it's the recruiter's job to like hire for you, but the recruiter doesn't really get what you want because you don't know what you want.And so the best hires will come from like super active involvement by the ...
These roles get fired most often 👀
The three roles that I see that get fired over and over are CPO, CMO, and head of talent. They typically have 1 and a half to twoyear stints and then they like move on to their next thing, you know, sort of like quietly and discreetly. Most folks don't understand that they were fired, but when you're in the senior leadership team, you do.Why does that happen. I think it's very similar to the same deal of like any mishhire. It's muddy thinking.Like founders vaguely know what they want. ...