Chetan Puttagunta and Modest Proposal - Capital, Compute & AI Scaling

My guests today are Chetan Puttagunta and Modest Proposal. Chetan is a General Partner at venture firm Benchmark, while Modest Proposal is an anonymous guest who manages a large pool of capital in the public markets. Both are good friends and frequent guests on the show, but this is the first time they have appeared together. And the timing couldn’t be better - we might be witnessing a pivotal shift in AI development as leading labs hit scaling limits and transition from pre-training to test-time compute. Together, we explore how this change could democratize AI development while reshaping the investment landscape across both public and private markets. Please enjoy this discussion with Chetan Puttagunta and Modest Proposal.

My guests today For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.

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Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com).

Show Notes:

(00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like the Best

(00:05:30) Introduction to LLM Scaling Challenges

(00:07:25) Synthetic Data and Test Time Compute

(00:08:53) Implications of Test Time Compute

(00:11:19) Public Tech Companies and AI Investments

(00:16:58) Small Teams and Open Source Models

(00:29:02) Strategic Positioning of Major AI Players

(00:35:49) AGI and Future Prospects

(00:46:50) AI Application Layer and Investment Opportunities

(00:54:18) The Paradigm Shift in AI Reasoning

(00:55:34) Investing in AI-Powered Solutions

(00:58:46) Economic Impacts of AI Advancements

(01:00:19) The Future of AI and Model Stability

(01:02:52) Private Market Valuations and Compute Costs

(01:05:05) Infrastructure and Utilization in AI

(01:12:50) The Role of Hyperscalers and GPUs

(01:18:02) The Evolution of AI Applications

(01:27:56) Philosophical Questions on AGI and ASI

(01:34:31) The Importance of Innovation Hubs