How The AI Bet Pays Off + AI Lab Strategy Game — With David Cahn

How much money does the AI industry need to generate to pay back its investments? And which company is employing the winning strategy? That's coming up with Sequoia partner David Khan. Right after this. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for Cool Headed, and nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We have a great show for you today. David Kahn, whose writing we've read on the show week after week, is here with us today to talk about what it's gonna take to pay back all the investment going into AI. And then we'll go company by company and decide which ones

Have the winning strategy. And which ones might not. So David, it's great to see you. Finally, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Alex. So your writing came onto our radar. Um

first one you were basically talking in twenty twenty four about the ROI needed, uh to make the AI bets pay off. This was long before the term AIROI was in vogue. Uh and there was a sort of determination that there was some promise in this technology. And so of course you'd want to to uh to spend a lot of money in it. because you don't want to be left out, right? Um but you actually very early on started to say, hey, let's uh at least put some numbers around this to see what it will take to pay off what was coming in. And and it started in twenty twenty four where you wrote this AI's two hundred billion dollar question. And for us it caught our attention because

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