Mohit Agrawal

The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen. Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation). Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there. Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI. As a result, 1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb. Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more. 2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future). Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire" 3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed. Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies. 4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either. No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money." I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here. Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success". Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.

BREAKING: Marco Rubio is now the clear favorite to win the 2028 Presidency

Brian sits on the board of Y Combinator. He said the last batch had 175 companies and only 16 of them weren't enterprise. "Here are the reasons I think it's happening. Number one, when ChatGPT came out, people were afraid it was going to kill their business. Number two, the business model is tricky. There is no consumer business model for AI that I've seen. For example, ChatGPT, there's three ways it can monetize subscriptions. Unfortunately, they're probably going to hit a local maximum percentage of users. Ads, they're hitting a local maximum because Claude and Gemini are not going to do ads. And e-commerce, they shut down the third party apps. And so the first thing is you need to have a business model around consumer AI. People are not trained to pay for information. The second problem is distribution is mature. Like the app store. Now again, top three apps in the app Store are AI, so it does prove you have something revolutionary, you'll find your way to the top. The third thing is, while I think Silicon Valley, we like to describe ourselves as rebels. I think it's very trend based and vibe based. And I think the trend is enterprise. Maybe finally the reason people aren't doing consumer companies is that they're just harder. You have to be good at a lot more things. You generally have to be better at design, marketing, culture, press. It's not purely technology and sales. But my prediction is that we're living in the age of enterprise AI, and I think in the next 12 to 24 months you're gonna see the beginning of a consumer AI renaissance. Almost every app on my home screen has not changed since AI, including Airbnb. I think that's gonna change in two years."

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I've heard commentators say Musk has nothing to lose from the lawsuit against OpenAI, even if he loses the case, but I don't think that's true. Now every time I see an xAI model release claim to match some other model at some benchmark, I just remember Musk saying at trial that xAI distills OpenAI models. Perhaps there's real technical advances here, or maybe it's all surreptitious distillation. Doubt has been cast.