Mike Krieger, Instagram CoFounder & Anthropic CPO: Where Will Value Be Created in an AI World?|E1265

I think models over time get more different, rather than more similar. I still think we are in like day one around, is AI an indispensable part of most people's work? And I think the answer is no. I think the DeepSeek piece, people seem surprised that there were cutting edge research teams there. And if you were paying attention, that part should not have been the surprising piece. I think we've, if anything, underinvested a bit in two things. One is just having a faster iteration speed on first product ... products. And then on second part, on the API side...

Ready to go? (instrumental music) Mike, dude, I am so excited for this. I've literally just been out for a walk and I've been listening to like every show that you've done in the last year. And so, I told you before, I don't wanna start with the, "Oh, how did you get into tech?" And all the normal rubbish. I wanna start with a very challenging first question, which is, I, as a venture investor today, have to determine where value is in the future. And I look at the world today, and I don't know. And so my question to you is, when we look forward, where will value be generated in an AI-driven decade that we have ahead of us?

I think it's an awesome question. I get a version of this question often from entrepreneurs who, you know, "I went from, you know, uh, purely building startups myself, to now running a company that is, uh, partly enabling these startups to get created or helping boost their, their fortunes." And the question I get often is like, "Well, what can I build that is not gonna be in the lane of an Anthropic or, you know, another one of these labs?" And, um, I don't have a perfect answer, 'cause it's hard. I have the crystal ball, but like my, my sense of where it ends up being most valuable to exist, is places where you have some differentiated go-to-market, some differentiated knowledge of some particular industry or some special data that only you have access to. Ideally, two or, or even three of those as well. So, companies that are, you know, within a financial sector, within a legal sector, within healthcare. I mean, healthcare I've like gotten exposed to, and it is, you know, a tremendously complex, uh, sort of ball of yarn. And like the work upfront, it's not the sexy work, it's actually not the work that you're gonna be able to really do in a, you know, accelerator or, you know, a short amount of time. But it is the worth and the legwork that you've put in, I think those are durable places to generate value. And then, you know, you can sit in a place where you can pull on what's great from the foundation models. You can do your own fine-tuning if you need it. You can do your own AI sort of specialization, if needed. But the thing that's gonna give you legs and like be durable over the long run is being able to sell into those places, have something that you understand about those places uniquely, and then get better for being deployed there over time.