Dylan Patel, SemiAnalysis, Nebius, Glean, Legora.. 12 Hot Takes From The Biggest Names in AI

Day 2 of RAISE Summit in Paris, the biggest AI summit in Europe. 12 founders, operators, and investors give us their hottest takes on the debates splitting the room right now: is token maxing genius or a waste, is open source dying or about to take over, and are we in a bubble. The disagreements were the best part. Dylan Patel (SemiAnalysis) loves token maxing and says open source is dying quickly, while others call token maxing the wrong approach entirely. Qasar Younis (Applied Intuition) on the opulence phase of the cycle and the pullback he sees coming. Apoorv Agrawal (Altimeter) on the four seasons of AI and planning for the climate, not the weather. Plus enterprise ROI, physical AI, petabyte-scale search, and why data is back."Open is dying quickly." - Dylan Patel, SemiAnalysis. "There are four seasons in AI. They're called OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, and Google." - Apoorv Agrawal, Altimeter. Guest lineup:Dylan Patel, CEO, SemiAnalysisQasar Younis, CEO, Applied IntuitionApoorv Agrawal, Partner, Altimeter CapitalArvind Jain, CEO, GleanAriel Cohen, CEO, NavanCJ Desai, CEO, MongoDBGil Feig, CTO, MergeNikhil Benesch, CTO, TurboPufferBarak Kaufman, Chief Strategy Officer, WonderfulMax Junestrand, CEO, LegoraMarc Boroditsky, CRO, NebiusLaura Diorio, Social Media, NYSEThis episode is brought to you by Brex, MongoDB, and Assembly AI. Molly on X: https://x.com/MollySOShea𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery • MongoDB–Millions of developers and more than 65,200+ customers across industries, including ~75% of the Fortune 100, rely on MongoDB for their most important applications. With integrated capabilities for operational data, search, real-time analytics, & AI-powered data retrieval, MongoDB helps organizations everywhere move faster, innovate more efficiently, & simplify complex architectures. https://mongodb.com/ai• AssemblyAI–Millions of developers use AssemblyAI to power their voice ai applications and features. One API gives you access to best-in-class speech-to-text, voice agent, and speech understanding models for both pre-recorded and real-time audio. Granola, ClickUp & HeyGen are scaling with AssemblyAI - get $50 of free credits today at http://AssemblyAI.com/sourcery𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒00:00 RAISE Summit Day 200:12 Qasar Younis (Applied Intuition)03:46 AI Trends at RAISE05:29 Applied Intuition Updates09:46 Bubble Risks and Books15:37 Self-Driving Future17:29 Dylan Patel (SemiAnalysis)22:05 Tokenmaxxing Debate24:31 Marc Boroditsky (Nebius)28:37 Arvind Jain (Glean)32:02 Laura Diorio (NYSE)35:03 Apoorv Agrawal (Altimeter): Four Seasons of AI38:23 Nikhil Benesch (TurboPuffer)42:18 CJ Desai (MongoDB): Agent Data Layer43:00 Barak Kaufman (Wonderful)45:34 Max Junestrand (Legora)49:35 Gil Feig (Merge)51:58 Ariel Cohen (Navan): Bullish on Humans54:54 CJ Desai (MongoDB): Data Is Back#podcast #investing #technology #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup #siliconvalley

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Raise.

• 0:00Molly O'Shea?

  Raise. Raise. Raise.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Paris.

• 0:02Speaker 02

  Paris.

• 0:03Speaker 00

  Paris. Paris is beautiful, but it's hot as fuck.

• 0:09Speaker 00

  Paris in the middle of the summer, the middle of the heat. People are ignoring it. They're showing up.

• 0:16Molly O'Shea?

  We have Kasser of Applied Intuition. Kasser, how are you doing?

• 0:19Speaker 02

  I'm doing fantastic. Thanks for having me again. Good to see you.

• 0:22Molly O'Shea?

  So you're coming off of what some people are saying, a historic commencement speech. You didn't get canceled for talking about AI. So what happened there?

• 0:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was at my undergrad. I think, I mean, to give credit where credit is due, I think it's, you know, I went to this place called the General Motors Institute, Kettering University now. I talk about it in the commencement speech. And let's say the audience, it's not like east coast, west coast elite schools. Where I think like the GMI, you know, mostly guys, the GMI guys are like more, you know, Midwest pragmatic. So I didn't expect booze, thankfully. And I'm, you know, from there and hometown, hometown person. So, but yeah, I mean, I gave, I think, what is my authentic opinion, which is, I think you can't have a lot of anxiety about this year, new grad. I mean, if you talk to new grads,

• 1:16Speaker 02

  we hire obviously lots of them. That's the prime fears, like, is my career done? Is everything? And I just don't believe that. I like fundamentally, I don't believe like, jobs are all going away. And I just, it doesn't, if there's something in my mind, that could be, this might age really poorly.

• 1:33Molly O'Shea?

  By the way, it's also not true already. It has been reported that jobs have only increased.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. And if you look at like, when I was graduating, there was this whole big looming technological reckoning. And that was the, that was the internet. And, you know, all these things were being changed at the time. And there was a whole view of like, what's going to happen to the businesses I'm still in, you know, 25 years later. And obviously, we still drive and we still, you know, we still need construction equipment. And we, so I think there's something similar in the future. Like, these things are not going away. They're going to change because technology changes things. So I talked about that. And I think it like landed well. I think the risky bet in the commencement speech was, it wasn't like, Everything will be, you know, lollipops and rainbows. It's like, hey, that's life.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  Like, your twenties are actually a pretty tough time in your life. You gotta kind of figure out how to get in the right, you know, groove. And you have to do this in this, like, very volatile environment that we have. Yeah.

• 2:34Molly O'Shea?

  Well, that's a soft way to put it. I think Jensen Huang once said at Stanford, "I wish you all pain and suffering." So...

• 2:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. It's part of that. And I think, like, there's like the other extreme, which is like, imagine you don't have to work, or you don't, you don't... That's very unfulfilling, too. And if, so if you are gonna work, then you should work on things that are really important, because you only get to live once. And so I think, like, I'm a believer, like, you know, doing the laundromat, like, you know, the classic immigrant, like, laundromat or doing... Those jobs, my parents, those jobs are just as hard. And every time people ask me, like, as a founder, like, "Oh, must be tough," like, applied and or whatever, it's like, "Yeah, but you know what's harder? Like, working at, like, Taco Bell. Like, that's

• 3:23Speaker 02

  a hard job." And so I think, like, for new grads, you have to have that perspective, too, which is like, there's gonna be difficulty, even if there wasn't an AI boom. There's always difficulty. That's the part of, you know, of growing up and finding your way and stuff like that. So I managed to wrap that in like a more cohesive way in 10 minutes.

• 3:43Molly O'Shea?

  An inspiring bow.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:46Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, so to bring it to current day, we're at the Rais Summit in Paris. AI is buzzing all around us. It's like a big expo. What are the trends that you're seeing in the room and around what's going on right now in AI?

• 4:01Speaker 02

  Obviously, the broad stuff that we don't need to talk about are things about the IPOs that are happening and kind of just how some companies are, you know, sucking up lots of revenue. Super positive. That proves that there's something there. It's not hollow. I think the... Below the surface, which is like the rumblings is what's that reconciliation? And that reconciliation in enterprise, the world that we are, we're an enterprise company is like budgets and cost consciousness is becoming like a more core theme. Whereas let's say if we were talking 12 months ago, there was way more of give me everything and I'll take five of it. And now it's like, what are you giving me and how much I'm going to pay?

• 4:44Speaker 02

  And I think that reconciliation will have downstream impacts on everybody. Not only the big companies going public, but also the small startups that are trying to find their little niche group. So I think that's a big talking, talk about in the physical AI world where we're at. The, the way to think about physical AI versus let's say like the large language model universes. The diffusion is slower because you're dealing with safety, you're dealing with physical machines in the real world. And so it's way more linear so that you don't have these like big spikes and crashes. There aren't like new entrants that come in and this is just because it's safety oriented. So that's a bit more of what, you know, when we last talked or, or in the last year, it's kind of continuing the same trajectory.

• 5:29Molly O'Shea?

  So when we last talked, you had a lot of big announcements that came out. Since then you've had even more. So what's going on at Applied Intuition?

• 5:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, one part of it is we are like a sizable company. So we have a thousand plus engineers doing a lot. So every month we're hopefully producing a lot of good new products that our customers are consuming. But like at a high level in all of our major areas, you know, our, our mission is to get intelligence onto a billion machines. So you kind of deconstruct that, like, how do you do that? Obviously, the obvious ones that people always think about us are cars and trucks because that's consumers, they understand that. But similarly, we've had announcements in defense and where we are, we're working with, you know, shipmakers to put intelligence on the actual ships. Huntington Wells in that specific example.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  Or we're working with Heidelberg Materials to put intelligence in queries and in ports and in mines. So we continue. So each of the, we had a bunch of announcements, I won't, you know, bore the audience with them. Uh, but you can go through all those verticals and we're just continuing to push intelligence into each of those verticals. And uh, our, our like macro hypothesis, which is you can take a model and put it on many machines. And it can perform really well. I think continues to hold. Why we believe that's really important is it's very expensive to train and deploy these models. And these are our models and we're not like, you know, repurposing other folks. So collecting data, training, pre-training.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  We're talking big numbers in the way everybody talks big numbers. But what's different about us is we wanna also uh reconcile that with customer revenue. So we're always trying to balance that, which is, you know, different about us than other companies. There's a version where you're just like, hey, we're gonna spend a lot of money on this and we'll figure out how to make money in the future. We try to create some balance there.

• 7:22Molly O'Shea?

  Isn't it right? You barely touched any of your funding.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're still in that phase, which is great. Yeah, yeah. Which is great. We're super happy about, I'm, I'm, I'm less, it's less about like the ego of saying that. I think it's more about we have a lot of resources to put towards any opportunity that we think is worth deploying a billion dollars for, or deploying multiple billion dollars for. And so, uh, yeah, and I think we have some big announcements uh coming in the next like, like the biggest announcements in the company's histories. Yeah, yeah. So I can't say, in, in my notes, they, they said, whatever you do, don't talk about X, Y, and Z. Because internally, it's something we've been working on for, for a long time. A couple, couple of things we're working on, product side and the customer side.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  Uh, but you know, I, that's the way I always think about our company. We're a thousand engineers, we have some resources. Our mission is to put, you know, make, put intelligence on, on a billion machines. So how do we do that in the most effective way possible, within the context of everything happening in the summit and everything happening in the competitive world, everything happening with our customers? Yeah, but I think one thing that is worth saying is like, I think everybody who makes physical machines, whether it's defense companies or construction companies or automotive companies, they're not like, uh, their, their head isn't in the sand about AI. They recognize they need to put intelligence on these machines. And so that's really works well for us. Yeah.

• 8:47Molly O'Shea?

  I don't know how you're gonna go bigger than the last Physical Intelligence Day. You had Marc Andreessen there, you had so many big announcements. So we're gonna have to sneak into this one somehow.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think, I think, I mean, I'm believing that I'm pitching my own book here, which is like, I think the physical world and AI going into that is, I think when we look back, I think that's gonna be the bigger story, as in look back 25 years from now. I think we'll look back, it's kind of like if you look at the early days of the internet, there were companies that really focused on getting websites up, static websites up. And so when you look back over the last 25, 30 years of the internet, you really think about Amazon, you really think about Apple. You know, so I think like those broader themes of like phones getting in everybody's pockets and delivery becoming ubiquitous, those macro themes I think will be the big ones, rather than like a specific model launching and then the government saying no. And like, all's gonna be forgotten.

• 9:42Speaker 02

  So I think, and that's where my like mind is always at.

• 9:46Molly O'Shea?

  On that note, I have to ask you, what is your hottest take right now?

• 9:50Speaker 02

  Uh, I think, um, oh man, the hottest take. I think the, the, the cost structure that we're currently seeing from, whether it's from how much we spend on model training and development to employees to, we're, we're at that phase of the bubble where it's like, you know, eh, you know, like the, all the opulence in the companies is what people talk about rather than the products. And so I think, I think there's gonna be a little bit of a pullback. Maybe that's not a hot take, but I think it's coming. And a lot of times when people talk about this concept of, of boom and bust, the view is the bust is always takes longer than you think it is. But I think the cycles move a lot faster.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  So if you're, if, if there was really a bust in 21, it's like, oh, well, you typically have a longer time horizon where you have a buildup and maybe that pullback happens. It's not necessarily a hot take, but it's like, I think about it. I think about like, so I'm just, yeah, I, I were talking about books. I read, you know, a lot and I just finished this book called, um, uh, The Rise and Fall of LTCM. The book title is When Genius Failed, but that's really, LTCM was this hedge fund in the late 90s that was a bunch of these, you know, savants, geniuses. And, uh, they

• 11:09Speaker 02

  They kind of do what what's happening now with compute, uh, which is like they just use leverage. And uh, they found themselves in a really bad position and suddenly this untouchable firm. So lauded in in New York, uh, in Wall Street collapses and collapses very, very uh, like, you know, kind of dramatically and like, maybe because I read right before I go to sleep, like it's in the back of my mind. It's like, could there be an LTCM situation in our business? Where you have something that's so elite and hopeful and then suddenly like some things don't work and it stumbles and it has, it has real repercussions.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  In the LTCM case, that was because the broader global markets in Russia is it's uh, and in Asia, started behaving in ways that nobody thought would happen and it compounded. So like, is there something that happens more peripherally in the AI business? And then it has a domino effect into our business is like, that's what I kind of think about a little bit. So, but I'm like, you know, I'm in the, you know, only the paranoid survive. So I'm like, you ask me this question at any point in the last 10 years, I'd always be like, where is the hidden risk? Like, that's like, one thing I'd I'd really like implore founders to do.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  Is like, you always want to be thinking about hidden risk in your company, in your leadership team, in your technical strategy, in the market at large, uh, and how you play that.

• 12:39Molly O'Shea?

  I was gonna ask you about the books.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 12:41Molly O'Shea?

  So what else are you reading right now?

• 12:44Speaker 02

  Like literally at this moment, and I always have to keep reading new stuff because if I get an interview, I can't be recycling, uh, recycling books. The non-technical books I'm reading, which are interesting are uh, Society of Captives, which is about the American prison system. And then it's written in the nineteen fifty's, really good book. And also I recommend to founders to read stuff which is outside of our industry to give you like some, you know.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  Like reflection on like, how does this kind of apply here? Uh, I'm, I'm reading the current, the, the, the courage to be disliked, which I think people think is hilarious because nobody thinks that I don't mind being disliked. So it's like, uh, uh, uh, that's a great book. I'm reading, uh, I'm also reading something else and I, I just, uh, it, it, it skips me.

• 13:31Molly O'Shea?

  Genghis Khan?

• 13:32Speaker 02

  I just finished Jack Waterford's Genghis Khan book as well. Also fantastic, uh, Making the Modern World, also fantastic.

• 13:38Molly O'Shea?

  What were your biggest lessons from Genghis Khan?

• 13:40Speaker 02

  That's just a nice, like, uh, popcorn book. The, uh, uh, a better book that I, I just finished and I, I would really recommend, especially if you are in enterprise watching this, like, you're on the consuming side of AI. And, uh, it's a, a book written by, uh, John Delorean, who is, uh, supposed to be the next CEO of General Motors in the seventies, or next president of GM. And he leaves, he created the Delorean, the car that's in Back to the Future. So he wrote this like bombastic book called On a Clear Day That You, You Can See General Motors. But then after he wrote it, he was like, I, this can't be published. Like, it's too, it's too crazy and I'm starting a car company and I can't alienate it. But his co-author basically publishes it anyways through lawsuits and everything.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  It's, it's, but it's a phenomenal book because at the time, General Motors was like at the top of, uh, he, we just get folks walking through here, at the top of, uh, the business world. And it's like right now, like saying like, if somebody wrote a bombastic book about SpaceX or Anthropic or something and saying like, it's all screwed up. Three hundred pages of why it's not good. And the, it's written in the late seventies when GM is doing so well. But the punchline is like, those things actually came to be true. The reason GM actually struggled, it would be another 20 years, were very clear in that book. Uh, so if you're in enterprise, the reason I, I was just, uh, with the leadership at

• 15:07Speaker 02

  one of the big OEMs in Germany, the board, uh, and, and the CEO, all, all the, all the most senior people. And, um, I told them, you should read this, even though it's, it's from the seventies, because I think large organizations have the same almost endemic problems.

• 15:23Speaker 02

  AI or not AI, it's like how leads work together. But anyways, long way of saying on a clear day, you can see General Motors is a good book.

• 15:31Molly O'Shea?

  Sounds like we need a bit of reflection, some personal audits going on there.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly.

• 15:37Molly O'Shea?

  So as we close out, what are you most looking forward to? I, you know, it could be in any timeline. Some people say 12 months is too long. Maybe it's the next weekend. I don't know. What are you most looking forward to?

• 15:49Speaker 02

  I mean, I, I mean, it's like to a hammer, everything's a nail. Like I think self-driving cars is, is really everything. Uh, and you know, you, you're, when I go around Paris, you, you see data collection vehicles. And you're like, it's even coming here. Like, you know, it's just like not sunny day. And so now like every city I go to typically with a trained eye, you can see like, oh, that's, that's a data collection vehicle like that. Those are sensors that are not for self, they're to collect, you know, data to train models. And so, uh, I think that's, that's, that's all I'm, that's all I see all the time. Yeah.

• 16:26Molly O'Shea?

  That's fantastic. Well, Casey, thank you so much.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 16:30Molly O'Shea?

  This episode is brought to you by Brex, my favorite. You become what you spend on, and I refuse to spend my time on work that shouldn't exist. Expense reports, receipt chasing and manual closes. The companies building what's next from Versel, OpenAI, Anthropic, Granola and Deepgram all made the same call. They all run on Brex. Brex is the intelligent finance platform that combines cards, expenses and banking into a single stack with agentic finance built in. AI agents that handle expenses automatically, enforce policy before spend happens and close your books in minutes. That's why sorcery runs on Brex, so I can spend time on building and not busy work.

• 17:15Molly O'Shea?

  It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at brex.com/sorcery. That's B R E X dot com slash S O U R C E R Y. Bye.

• 17:29Molly O'Shea?

  We're here with Dylan Patel of Semi Analysis out here in Paris. Dylan, how are you?

• 17:34Speaker 00

  I'm doing well. Yeah, it's, uh, I mean, Paris is beautiful, but it's hot as. Yeah, I don't know AC. Paris is meant to be enjoyed in spring and fall, not in summer.

• 17:45Molly O'Shea?

  It's not an optimal place for data centers, right?

• 17:48Speaker 00

  Um, I think it's mostly a regulatory thing, but yeah, yeah. Paris is, uh, you know, they have all this spare power. One of the funny things is like, they're like, oh, okay. Let's build a bunch of data centers, but then Spain, Italy, Belgium, uh, the Netherlands and Germany all freaked out because it's like, oh, wait, all this spare power is actually like keeping our grid alive. If you stop using, selling us the spare power and you build data centers, our grids are screwed. Um, and so there's been a lot of pushback from the other EU countries like, don't build data centers in France because we need the nuclear power. It's very interesting.

• 18:23Molly O'Shea?

  So you are a conference surfer. You love conferences. I just listened to your, um, interview with Sequoia on this. You built semi-analysis off of riding the wave of conferences. So I'm very curious, what are the biggest trends that are going on at Raze this year?

• 18:42Speaker 00

  Um, I would say a lot of people here are just trying to figure out what the hell is going on. And I think there's like a wide array of people, like there's a lot of people who are super deep in infra and like, you know, they're making deals here, but then there's a lot of people who are just like, I spent too much money on my token. What do I do? Right? I spent too many tokens. Um, so there's a wide range of sort of people here. Um, I think, I think it's fun. It's fun that way because then you get like such a wide perspective of people and you can walk up to someone and they're like a G and they know a lot of stuff and like a great connection. Then you walk up to someone and you're like, wow, I need to get out of this conversation as soon as possible. Um, like Molly, you know, like.

• 19:24Molly O'Shea?

  Stop!

• 19:26Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, God. Okay. Well, anyways, let's cut to the chase. What is your hottest take right now?

• 19:32Speaker 00

  Um, I think a lot of people are trying to build all these optimized solutions for data centers. And they're just looking at like a backward looking view, right? Like what happened at the lab six months ago and what does it look like there? Or what does it look like now? Okay, I'm going to build my three-year infrastructure with that in mind. Um, instead of like flexibility and general purpose, you know, capabilities. And then when they actually end up building that infra, it's going to be, a lot of it may be useless. Or not useless, but like less optimal than something that is more, um... More general purpose or more flexible. It feels like a lot of people are trying to optimize on the current rather than like think about where the workload is heading and then optimizing.

• 20:17Speaker 00

  And that's going to lead to a lot of wasted infra spend. I think most people don't know what they're doing, they're just buying Nvidia stuff. But a lot of people are also just like, they think they know what they're doing and then they're buying and building and optimizing and customizing and then ultimately they're going to waste a bunch of money. So it'll be, it'll be fun to see where things head out and how they plan out and then what people do with all this infra that maybe isn't super useful with where models are in two years.

• 20:42Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, we're going to run through some quick topics, okay? I want your take on all of them. Let's start with co-design. How do you feel?

• 20:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, co-design is the important thing, right? But when you try to do software hardware co-design without knowing where the software is headed, where the models are headed, then you end up with a, in a pit, right? That's sort of the issue. But if you don't do software hardware co-design, you're also going to end up with like infra that is not optimized, so it's tough.

• 21:08Molly O'Shea?

  Open source first closed.

• 21:11Speaker 00

  The theme here is that all, like there's multiple Chinese model labs who are telling all the inference guys, "Hey, yeah, yeah, our next model's not going to be open source, we're going to license it to you." Open is dying quickly, unfortunately.

• 21:25Molly O'Shea?

  What do you, how do you think the costs of memory should trickle down? Should they go to the customer or should players be taking that, that price on themselves?

• 21:37Speaker 00

  I'm a very big fan of trickle-down economics. Out of pocket. So trickle-down, I think, I think they're going to trickle down a lot. I think you've already seen server pricing go up, like B200s, B300s that you're buying now versus last year. The price is significantly higher. We've seen next-generation hardware receive price increases before they've even started production, like there was the quoted price and now the quoted price is higher. So it's definitely going to get passed down. And we see that with cost of tokens, you know, not falling as fast as they were previously because the cost of memory is flowing through.

• 22:17Molly O'Shea?

  How do you feel about token maxing?

• 22:19Speaker 00

  I love token maxing. I think anyone who doesn't token max is gonna get left behind. I think all this token budgeting stuff is loser mentality. If you're token budgeting hardcore, then your people are not gonna learn the new workflows and then they're not gonna reshape your company and make it more efficient and drive a lot more work with fewer people. So ultimately, token budgeting is a fallacy. Now, ROI is important, but ultimately, the only way to get people to change their behavior is you measure them and you force them to do things differently. And token budgeting is like pulling back on them. So I think, you know, there's gotta be some rationality. Don't just waste money on tokens for the laws.

• 23:03Speaker 00

  Don't give bonuses to people based on how many tokens they use or comp. But at the same time, like, don't just clamp down on people wholesale.

• 23:12Molly O'Shea?

  Is it true you fired someone for using Haiku?

• 23:15Speaker 00

  I did not fire... I got mad at someone because their model was set to Haiku. And they didn't even realize it. They were like, "Cloud codes mid, blah, blah, blah." And they still were trying to use a lot of tokens. They spent like $1,000 on Haiku. And I was like, "What the hell? What are you doing?" And they're like, "Oh, my bad. I didn't even realize." They changed to Opus or Fable now.

• 23:36Speaker 00

  And they're so much more productive because they're not just like asking the model to do the same thing over and over and over again.

• 23:41Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, lastly, this is a pressing question. What is your favorite chip right now?

• 23:47Speaker 00

  I've been a real big fan of the Takis Blue Heat.

• 23:52Speaker 00

  It's quite spicy, limey. It's good, it's good, right? I think, you know, the other thing that I have a theory on, and I don't know if this is true or not, but chips in Europe have less seasoning than chips in America and Mexico. And like, there is this like entire thing, right? Where like, developing countries or less cultured countries are less flavoring their food. And the European idea is like, "Oh, you know, our ingredients are high quality." And so I think this extends to chips as well.

• 24:23Molly O'Shea?

  It's just horrible. You need more flavoring.

• 24:26Speaker 00

  More MSG, please.

• 24:29Molly O'Shea?

  Amazing. Thank you so much, Dylan.

• 24:30Speaker 00

  All right. See you. Thank you.

• 24:31Molly O'Shea?

  We have Mark here from Nebius. Mark, how are you doing?

• 24:34Speaker 04

  Fantastic. It's been a great time here at Raze.

• 24:37Molly O'Shea?

  How are the vibes at Raze?

• 24:39Speaker 04

  You know, the energy is real high. You can see it around us right now. Ton of attention, ton of participation. Really impressed at how they pulled a global audience to Paris in the middle of the summer, in the middle of the heat. People are ignoring it. They're showing up and it's been a fantastic experience.

• 24:53Molly O'Shea?

  What are the biggest trends that you're seeing here?

• 24:55Speaker 04

  It's incredible. The discussion shifting from what our AI native is building to when our enterprise is adopting. So it's really incredible to actually have the discussion where we're seeing the bridges being built to see enterprise adoption take place. Lots of discussion about, you know, obviously the CapEx and power and stock prices, which I think at the end of the day is a bit of a distraction because this is a marathon that we're running and actually being able to drive that enterprise adoption, that's the critical next stage for the entire industry.

• 25:29Molly O'Shea?

  Well, I can understand you guys have a lot of fans over there at Nebius and a lot of fans of the stock, too. So I want to ask you, what is your hottest take today?

• 25:40Speaker 04

  Hottest take today, and boy, that's such a wonderfully generous offer. The hottest take today is incredible opportunity is in front of us. Staying focused on the long term to not only serve today's immediate needs, but how are we going to help to transform industries and how are we going to help to make enterprises successful with AI?

• 26:07Molly O'Shea?

  What is the biggest problem you're seeing with the build out of data centers?

• 26:11Speaker 04

  The biggest problem is the build out of data centers is something that Nebius is not experiencing, which is that a lot of people are focused on single individual projects. Our organization has built a portfolio of opportunities. Today, we have 20 data centers. We're multiplying that into the future. So the biggest challenge that many of our competitors are facing is being single. Threaded, which is strange when you're in a multi-threaded, parallel processing industry and getting stuck with a single project. The challenges are that a lot of things are happening locally with different community challenges, regulatory challenges, power challenges, which everybody faces. Fortunately, at Nebius, we're actually pursuing a broad diversified portfolio approach.

• 26:54Molly O'Shea?

  The beautiful thing about the data centers being created today is they have some of the most advanced technology data centers have ever had. So whether it's from new memory to optics, how are you guys thinking about that?

• 27:06Speaker 04

  All the time looking at the interesting innovation that's taking place. The fact that we can actually build from scratch, from dirt up, and be able to look at each layer of the entire data center stack and be able to consider new methods, new technology, new providers, puts us in a unique position to be able to take advantage of all those advances. So we're always looking at the new and innovative things that are taking place to be able to improve the quality, the capabilities, the reliability of the solutions that we're delivering.

• 27:37Molly O'Shea?

  Amazing. Okay, as we close out, what are you most looking forward to in the next 12 months?

• 27:42Speaker 04

  The next 12 months in AI is an eternity. I mean, I have been at Nebius for 12 months, actually 13 months. And if you look back 13 months ago, it was a completely different company. So the next 13 months is talking about the tens of billions that are being generated in Nebius revenue and the extraordinary traction they were gaining with not only the phenomenal AI natives that we're working with, but also making our way to scale enterprise and big brand adoption. And being able to expand our solution set

• 28:23Speaker 04

  from the model training that people are doing today into the inferencing that we started to offer and into agentic workloads.

• 28:32Molly O'Shea?

  Fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Mark.

• 28:34Speaker 04

  Pleasure. I really enjoyed the conversation.

• 28:37Molly O'Shea?

  We're here with Arvind of Glean. Arvind, how are you doing?

• 28:40Speaker 04

  Doing very well.

• 28:41Molly O'Shea?

  How's Raze treating you?

• 28:43Speaker 04

  This is a fantastic conference. I didn't expect, you know, what I saw here.

• 28:47Molly O'Shea?

  What is the major trend that you're seeing that's going on here today? Have you been able to actually see anything?

• 28:54Speaker 05

  Well, I've not been able to attend most of the talks because there are so many good people at this event, so just like getting to meet them all has taken all of my time. But some trends are clear. Number one, like you know, all the all the new AI companies are here. And the big trend, in my opinion, is open source and how that is fundamentally changing like the full AI stack, you know, and bringing sort of rise to a whole bunch of new companies, you know, that have new opportunities with open source.

• 29:21Molly O'Shea?

  So what's going on at Glean? What's hot right now?

• 29:25Speaker 05

  Well, Glean has actually, we're finding ourselves in the midst of very, very good timing. So when you think about AI, making it work in the enterprise, the two big things are context, like how do you bring, you know, like all these agents that you want to automate the work that humans do, like they need that context, that data, that information, that humans used to do the same work. And that's actually like something that we are really, really good at. So being the leader in context crafts is actually helping create a massive demand for Glean. And then the second big trend in the industry is people keep complaining about like they can't measure the return on investment, where is the business value coming from? And so Glean comes in handy on that front, at least from a bottom line perspective, because

• 30:08Speaker 05

  we do really, really good in terms of helping a customer reduce their token usage in two different ways. One, we can pick the right model, since we work with all the closed domain and open source models, we can pick the right model for the right task, which is cheaper for them, but still gets the work done. And second, with our context craft, we can actually, when a model is trying to do some complex work, it doesn't have to spend like all this time just trying to assemble the raw materials to do that work. You know, with Glean, they get that context in one shot. So we actually make most of your AI workloads much faster and very cheaper.

• 30:43Molly O'Shea?

  What is the biggest challenge that you have been hitting recently?

• 30:48Speaker 05

  Our challenge, I think, from business perspective, it is finally businesses are running into this, you know, that, well, we're going to actually measure our spend on AI. And so that is creating a little bit of friction, you know, now with all these customers having so many different tools, so many different choices, you know, to bet on, it's getting confusing for them to pick, you know, who's the right partner to, you know, to actually start their AI transformation journey on. So that's been always like, you know, the challenge in AI, like, you know, because, you know, like, suddenly, when AI became hot, every software company in the world became an AI company, and it's confusing the buyers. So, you know, clarifying that doubt in them, like, helping them understand the

• 31:28Speaker 05

  landscape, what companies do what work, and why is green relevant, like, you know, in this, in this crowded mix of technology providers, you know, that's always been like, you know, the difficult task for us.

• 31:41Molly O'Shea?

  All right, now I have to ask you a difficult question. What is your hottest take right now?

• 31:46Speaker 05

  Well, I think open source models are going to dominate AI and fencing. You know, you'll see in the next two years, we'll shift to where's almost no open source to where's going to be almost all open source.

• 31:57Molly O'Shea?

  Amazing. Okay. Arvin, thank you so much.

• 32:00Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 32:01Molly O'Shea?

  We're here with New York Stock Exchange's star of the show. How are you doing?

• 32:06Speaker 06

  Well, I'm better now that I'm with you. I mean, but this is kind of incredible, actually. It's my first time in Paris. I'm Laura, by the way. Hi. I run social for the New York Stock Exchange, so I like to think I have the best job in the world. You might have the best job in the world, but luckily, being at the New York Stock Exchange means I get to work with you a lot, so it's kind of a win-win. Yeah, this is kind of incredible, first time in Paris, and I get...

• 32:31Molly O'Shea?

  First time in Paris!

• 32:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, I get the whole hullabaloo. I get it. It's kind of cool.

• 32:36Molly O'Shea?

  Paris is amazing.

• 32:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's pretty amazing. Also, it's hard to beat New York, in my eyes, tried and true, so I understand the lore and the love of the Louvre. How about that?

• 32:48Molly O'Shea?

  Whoa. When I was on my way over here, I was like, you know what? I could commute.

• 32:52Speaker 06

  Straight up. The flight wasn't that bad.

• 32:54Molly O'Shea?

  I came from LA, just slept the whole time. I could probably just commute here.

• 32:58Speaker 06

  Hop, skip, and a jump. Yeah. And we have the match tonight. I'm very excited. It's France-Morocco, so...

• 33:03Molly O'Shea?

  There might be riots. We're gonna see.

• 33:05Speaker 06

  And you will see Molly and I on the pitch. No kidding. We are not going.

• 33:09Molly O'Shea?

  No, that's in the United States.

• 33:11Speaker 06

  Right.

• 33:12Molly O'Shea?

  All right, Laura, so you have been around Raze. You've been seeing all the companies come in and through and around the New York Stock Exchange booth. You've done media yourself. What is something we should all be paying attention to? What is the trend of the day?

• 33:26Speaker 06

  Hottest thing happening here at Raze? I would say folks are going to be saying AI all day. Agentic, cloud, quantum, all of our favorite words. I believe the thing that's making these companies stand out is their access and visibility. It's their partnerships. A lot of those partnerships are happening here. We're seeing it in real time, watching real C-suite founders, entrepreneurs actually meeting in person to close deals. It's actually kind of crazy to see it with my own eyes. You only hear about it, I think, in, you know, closed doors and golf courses and karaoke bars. But I firmly believe that it is about the story you're telling, how well you're telling it, and where you're going to go from there, how it's going to set you apart.

• 34:09Speaker 06

  And that has a lot to do with what we're doing, right? Like, there's a reason why MYSC and NYC Ward are the main media sponsors of Raze. Hello? There's a reason MYSC is one of your sponsors.

• 34:20Molly O'Shea?

  And also, Raze rang the bell.

• 34:22Speaker 06

  Come on, come on! The biggest financial stage, like the epicenter of global finance, there is a storytelling aspect to it that like sets people apart. And if you can stand out and if you can, you know, cut through the noise, I think there's a lot of noise, honestly. And I think if you have a clear message and you have a clear goal with really good people, that's what helps with being in person and stuff is meet the actual, real, good people. Talk about vibe coding, it's all about vibe, you know?

• 34:51Molly O'Shea?

  Vibe meeting.

• 34:52Speaker 06

  Vibe media, our new podcast, Molly and Laura.

• 34:57Molly O'Shea?

  Amazing place to end it, Laura.

• 34:59Speaker 06

  Thank you so much. Thank you so much. See you at the New York Stock Exchange.

• 35:03Molly O'Shea?

  We're here with Apoorv from Altimeter. Apoorv, how are you doing?

• 35:07Speaker 04

  Good, glad to be here.

• 35:08Molly O'Shea?

  How's Raze this year?

• 35:10Speaker 04

  Things have definitely upgraded since last year.

• 35:13Molly O'Shea?

  It's big time, big guests, big speakers, big companies.

• 35:18Speaker 04

  Great, like really good setup, lots of great founders. Really excited to meet a lot of the CIOs. Got to know the CIO of Goldman last night, CIO of Procter & Gamble. And where they are on their AI journey has been the biggest learning for me.

• 35:31Molly O'Shea?

  I've been waiting to ask you this question for quite some time because you've gone viral a lot recently with your Stanford lectures. So, Apoor, what is your hottest take right now?

• 35:42Speaker 04

  Well, today of all days, there's four seasons in AI. They're called OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, and Google. So if you're a CIO, if you're a CEO, if you're about to make a multimillion, billion-dollar decision of which lab to build your intelligence on, plan for the climate, not for the weather. What does that mean? That's multi-model routing, that's evals, that's thinking about post-training custom models. Yeah, that's hottest take. It's four seasons of the year.

• 36:18Molly O'Shea?

  So what's the climate?

• 36:19Speaker 04

  That's a great question. The climate is evergreen, right? So you've got to plan for, if you're about to spend $100 million, you don't want to get stuck in one of the seasons. Sometimes the summer's long, sometimes it's a heat wave, but I think you want an evergreen season. And I think that evergreen season, the climate, looks like you'll have a portion of your workloads going through open source. As Jesse from Decagon wrote very eloquently, a big portion of their volume goes through open source, about 90% now. And then the frontier stuff, discovering new use cases, will always go through the most intelligent models. Coding might stay there for a long time.

• 37:02Speaker 04

  And so, planning for that multi-model world, planning to not get stuck in one regime is the climate.

• 37:09Molly O'Shea?

  For people who have not seen your lectures just yet, highly recommend it. Who have you spoken with? I know you've brought on different guests and you bring them for the students. What was the plan there?

• 37:20Speaker 04

  You know, we had a great lineup. It's a labor of love, and I was really excited to bring back some of those conversations back to school. You know, if you're a student and you're making a big life decision, I wanted to make sure that you saw the whole AI stack, from chips to data centers to models, and ultimately the AI applications. And so we had a great set of speakers across all of the parts of the stack. We had folks from Nvidia and Grok. We had Ali Gotze from Databricks. We had Tuhan from Base Stand. We had Sachin from OpenAI, the folks from Anthropic. So it was a great lineup, and we're very lucky to have them.

• 37:55Molly O'Shea?

  Amazing. Okay. To close out, what are you most looking forward to this year?

• 38:00Speaker 07

  Oh wow, I'm looking to the seasonal changes in the climate this year. Well, you guys saw what happened today. Saul from OpenAI goes live. SpaceX, Michael Truul just launched a model at his OPUS level. You know, it's what a great time to be alive and watch the seasons change.

• 38:16Molly O'Shea?

  Amazing. Anything else? Did we miss anything? Anything you want to share?

• 38:19Speaker 07

  More to come later in the year.

• 38:20Molly O'Shea?

  More to come later in the year. Thank you so much, Apoorv.

• 38:22Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 38:23Molly O'Shea?

  We have Nikhil from TurboPuffer. Nikhil, how are you doing?

• 38:27Speaker 07

  So well. Love being here in Paris. A little hot, a little chaotic, but you know, we're telling people to puff.

• 38:34Molly O'Shea?

  So we have to address the rumors you don't sell puffer jackets.

• 38:38Speaker 07

  No, those are internal only. We do have puffer jackets, but only for a select few. Now, if you go to t-puff供supply, we do occasionally drop new merch there, so stay tuned.

• 38:51Molly O'Shea?

  Oh my gosh. Okay, so let's get into it. For people who don't know TurboPuffer, what is it?

• 38:58Speaker 07

  So we are a search engine optimized for AI workloads. So we power retrieval for Cursor, for Notion, for Legora, for Anthropic, some of the biggest names in the business. And what that means is if you think of a product that has a search bar, we want to be the thing powering that search bar. We are the thing powering that search bar in many cases. But for any agentic application, they're searching on your behalf behind the scenes. So you might be asking for a report on sales. The first thing that agent is going to do is search TurboPuffer for everything mentioning sales and get that all into the context window of the model.

• 39:30Molly O'Shea?

  Amazing. Okay. Given that, what are you seeing as the biggest trends here at Raze?

• 39:36Speaker 07

  So much data. I've been talking to folks. We used to think in terms of gigabytes or terabytes. Folks are coming up to me with not just one, but 10 or hundreds of petabytes that they want to search over.

• 39:46Molly O'Shea?

  No way.

• 39:47Speaker 07

  Now, I'm not sure everyone is prepared for the cost of searching over 100 petabytes. There's a bit of a negotiation.

• 39:52Molly O'Shea?

  What is the cost on that?

• 39:54Speaker 07

  So our largest workloads cost tens of millions of dollars to search over right now. And those are web-scale use cases with tens of terabytes. Searching petabytes is going to cost another order of magnitude or two on top of that.

• 40:08Molly O'Shea?

  And what is the architecture behind it?

• 40:10Speaker 07

  So the reason that this is viable at all, the reason folks are able to do vector search over the entire web on TurboPuffer is because we're based on object storage. So that's S3 or Google Cloud Storage, which is rock bottom storage prices, the absolute cheapest storage you can get. The problem is it's really slow. Our innovation is we add all this caching on top of S3 so that you see performance that's almost equivalent to what you get with a system that's not based on object storage. But you get something much closer to the economics of object storage.

• 40:38Molly O'Shea?

  Damn. Okay. Are you ready for the hardest question of the day?

• 40:42Speaker 07

  I'm so ready.

• 40:43Molly O'Shea?

  What is your hottest take right now?

• 40:45Speaker 07

  I think search is still too expensive. And TurboPuffer was founded because we thought search was an order of magnitude too expensive at the time. We've brought it down by an order of magnitude. But it kills us that there are still products out there that are limited in their ambition because search is still too expensive. So we're always looking for ways to bring the cost down even more. If you think about it, if you're spending $5 on TurboPuffer per user, but you're only charging your users $5 a month, the economics just don't work. But if we can bring that cost down by an order of magnitude, so you're only spending 50 cents a user on searches, suddenly you're able to build a product where you couldn't before. Your margins work, you get crazy growth, you explode.

• 41:26Speaker 07

  So that's what we're always looking for. What product isn't currently in the market because search is too expensive?

• 41:31Molly O'Shea?

  Amazing. So what's next?

• 41:33Speaker 07

  More relevance. We started with vector search, we added keyword search, we added rejects. But what people actually care about is, are my searches good? They don't care about, did I get 95% of the results I should have gotten for this vector search? They care about, is my agent performing? Is it completing the task successfully? So our task is, how do we get the best possible search results fed to these agents? So they actually complete the tasks. So we're taking more and more of that in-house. There's a bunch of new techniques like lane interaction, like search agents, that we're going to build into the product so that you as the user, just, you puff harder. You send more queries to TurboPuffer and you can trust that you're getting good results and you don't have to worry as much about the mechanics of search.

• 42:14Molly O'Shea?

  Amazing. Thank you so much, Nikhil.

• 42:16Speaker 07

  Yeah, thank you for having me.

• 42:18Molly O'Shea?

  If you're building what's next in AI, you need to know MongoDB. The database platform developers love and built for the agents you're running. MongoDB stores, searches and reasons over your data in real time with vector search and embeddings from Voyage AI, all in the same system. No separate pipelines, no stitching together 10 different tools. It's why 75% of the Fortune 100 and leading AI native startups run on MongoDB. Build and scale from your first user to billions of vectors. Go to mongodb.com/ai to learn more. That's mongodb.com/ai to learn more. Bye.

• 43:00Molly O'Shea?

  So we are in the middle of chaos here at RAYZ. It is very popular this year and we have Barack from Wonderful AI. So Barack, welcome.

• 43:09Speaker 07

  Hey, Molly. Great to see you. It is absolutely chaotic here in Paris at the RAYZ Summit. I'm Barack. I'm from Wonderful. I'm the Chief Strategy Officer at Wonderful. I'm actually the first institutional investor in the company and then joined because I believe in it so much. We're an enterprise applied AI partner to the world's largest enterprises outside of the US. We're both a platform and a partner to them.

• 43:32Molly O'Shea?

  So what is your hottest take right now?

• 43:35Speaker 07

  I believe geographies will be even bigger than verticals when it comes to AI. When you look at actual labor and labor displacement and what's actually happening in the world and where it's likely to go, countries are way more interesting from an expansion perspective and a focus perspective than verticals. And that you can go horizontal without a vertical specialization with AI as long as you're able to solve the go to market strategy with it.

• 44:00Molly O'Shea?

  Damn, we are back in Uber land grab competition stage.

• 44:04Speaker 07

  That's exactly right. It's like the enterprise applied AI playbook with the Uber go to market strategy. We're in over 30 countries around the world in pretty much the last six months that we've expanded to most of them. So it's quite a wild ride.

• 44:18Molly O'Shea?

  So what is the secret to Wonderful?

• 44:20Speaker 07

  It's really the focus and the strategy. I think generally in the AI universe, the opportunity is massive, but one of the hardest things for companies is how to actually differentiate and to break out from the pack. What it requires is a non-consensus insight that you need to actually be right about. And I think for Wonderful, that was really the geographic focus to go generalize, to go horizontal in terms of the use cases that you can actually offer for enterprises, but to actually focus on. Rest of world versus US, that was the non-consensus part. The rest of it around the challenges with applied AI and what you actually need is very similar to the way most of us probably think about it. But it's the playbook that you bring to it and local delivery that was most non-consensus about wonderful.

• 45:01Molly O'Shea?

  What's your favorite country?

• 45:03Speaker 07

  Wow, great question. I live most of the year in Tel Aviv, so I'm biased towards Israel. But to visit and that I've had the pleasure of visiting was Japan.

• 45:12Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 45:12Speaker 07

  Where we opened up an office and I was there about a month ago. Tokyo is just, I mean, Japan in general is like a completely unique world and especially as it relates to the enterprise playbook and how they do business and the respect culture and everything. It's fascinating and I love it.

• 45:30Molly O'Shea?

  Amazing, great place to end. Thank you, Brock.

• 45:32Speaker 07

  Yeah, lovely to meet you, Molly. Bye, everyone.

• 45:34Molly O'Shea?

  We have Max from Legora. Max, how's race for you?

• 45:40Speaker 07

  It's very warm. The electricity went on yesterday. I keep getting pestered by customers, but I think that's a great thing. And it has been a fun time to come to Paris, I think. It's, you know, I've done a few of these in the US, in London, in the Nordics, and it's always a bit of a different flavor, but it's been great.

• 46:00Molly O'Shea?

  So you're based in Europe.

• 46:02Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 46:03Molly O'Shea?

  How is the Europe vibe right now?

• 46:07Speaker 07

  Well, I think the vibe in Europe overall versus companies like Legora is quite different. So I think the general vibe is there's a fear that some of the best frontier models get locked up in the States. And there's a lot of discussion around how do you continue winning in manufacturing and these types of markets that are important. And then you have really fast-growing software companies like Legora, where we adopted a global mindset from day one. And so we don't really view ourselves as only European. I think we view ourselves as very global. And we have been competing at the global stage from day one. And so we still wake up every day thinking about what can we do more, what can we do next, which is really thrilling.

• 46:51Molly O'Shea?

  Did you expect this level of growth?

• 46:54Speaker 07

  I think going into this, I didn't really know what to expect. I think I've had a very unique experience fundraising and working in our market that most startups doesn't have. Typically, you don't raise $600 million in two weeks. But we got some great advice when we were in Y Combinator, which is if you build a great company, it's easy to fundraise. If you build a great product, I think it's easy to work with customers and to deliver value. So, no, I did not expect this, but I think that we are leveling up and we are, you know, meeting the opportunity when it's now being presented to us.

• 47:35Molly O'Shea?

  So, legal AI is one of the fastest-growing categories right now, and it's super competitive. How are you dealing with the token situation?

• 47:45Speaker 07

  So, we were actually the first legal AI company to move into consumption-based pricing, and I think that's really important because it, one, just continues to solidify that we're the product leader and innovator in our space. But secondly, it really aligns the value that we bring with the way that the business model works. So, if you have a flat rate and you say, you know, $200, $300 per user per month, and then they use $2,000 worth of tokens, you have a problem. And so, we've been running at a very positive gross margin for a long time, and this will help us continue to do so. And I think it helps our customers already see where their tokens are being spent and how to think about that long term.

• 48:28Speaker 07

  Because, you know, token consumption have been the business model in coding tools since inception. It's the pricing model of the big labs, and now it's going to be the pricing model in legal, and I expect many of the other companies to follow us into that.

• 48:40Molly O'Shea?

  Damn. Okay. I have a really hard question for you right now. Are you ready?

• 48:45Speaker 07

  Shoot.

• 48:46Molly O'Shea?

  What is your hottest take right now?

• 48:49Speaker 07

  My hottest take is that there is a lot of complaining from European startups rather than just locking in and...

• 49:03Speaker 07

  You know, building for the global stage, I think there's a bit of laziness. There's, you know, it's nice in the summers here to go to Italy or to go to France where we are today. But if you want to build, you know, the biggest companies in the world, you need to look past that and you need to understand that you're competing with the US, you're competing with China. And if you want to win globally, you need to work as hard as they do.

• 49:25Molly O'Shea?

  Sorry, you can't go to Saint-Tropez.

• 49:27Speaker 07

  No, sorry.

• 49:28Molly O'Shea?

  The Great Lock-in is year-round.

• 49:31Speaker 07

  Yes, that's exactly it.

• 49:32Molly O'Shea?

  Amazing, thank you so much, Max.

• 49:34Speaker 07

  Thank you, Molly.

• 49:35Molly O'Shea?

  We have Gil here, CTO of Merge, which we recently did an amazing episode with you guys at the New York Stock Exchange.

• 49:42Speaker 05

  It was great.

• 49:43Molly O'Shea?

  How are you doing, Gil?

• 49:44Speaker 05

  I'm doing great, happy to be here in Paris for the conference.

• 49:46Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, we have one burning question that I know you've been waiting for.

• 49:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 49:51Molly O'Shea?

  What is your hottest take right now in AI?

• 49:54Speaker 05

  I think some people are starting to agree with this. Token maxing, not working. You're getting zero results from using more tokens. It was cool to encourage your employees to use more AI, but I think what we're seeing now is we're not getting more output. The only thing that people are seeing a real connection between, I guess, you know, you know, sort of productivity and usage of AI is how you use AI to bring your cycle times down, get feedback in A to R really quickly.

• 50:17Molly O'Shea?

  I love asking you this question because you are so technical and it is a fun, fear-mongering topic. So what are the biggest concerns people should be watching out for with integrating all these APIs with all of these new AI applications?

• 50:32Speaker 05

  I think mainly it's security. I mean, down market, who cares? You're going to let your own personal data flow. I do it for my personal consumption. But when it comes to businesses, they are just afraid of data flowing out of the system. So integrations are the point where an LLM actually becomes dangerous. Something isolated, like I mentioned this before, but something isolated, an LLM, it might insult you, but it's not going to do much worse than that. But the second that thing can send your data elsewhere, that's where all the problems come in. So I think we're just going to see a lot more governance and locking down before we see AI really opened up to the masses to talk to all your systems.

• 51:05Molly O'Shea?

  I think Alex Karp recently went viral for this rant of AI sovereignty within your organization. You agree?

• 51:12Speaker 05

  I absolutely agree. I, it's just, it's, there's never been a good position in business to hand over, you know, the fate of your company, your future, your development to another company. So I think people are going to want sovereignty, they're going to want Control over their own systems, whether that means, you know, hosting in-house or using third parties. They want the flexibility to switch whenever they want. They do not want to be locked in.

• 51:34Molly O'Shea?

  Amazing. Well, Gil, we will let you go, but what are you most looking forward to at Raze this year?

• 51:39Speaker 05

  Um, honestly, I think what's been so cool, I know this is probably an untraditional answer, but the mix of sort of this really classic French architecture and these statues from the year 1500, mixed with all the AI and the, it just, it's such a cool juxtaposition. I'm loving being here.

• 51:55Molly O'Shea?

  Perfect place to end it. Thank you so much, Gil.

• 51:56Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 51:57Molly O'Shea?

  Ariel, welcome to Sorcery.

• 51:59Speaker 05

  I'm happy to be here.

• 52:01Molly O'Shea?

  We're here at the Illuminati.

• 52:02Speaker 05

  Yes, like the most, I actually have never been in such a bizarre place to do an interview. So that's cool.

• 52:09Molly O'Shea?

  So we're fresh off stage. We were just talking about Navan and how you guys are dominating travel. What is your hottest take right now with travel?

• 52:17Speaker 05

  I think the hottest take is what we talked about, how humans are still so important, both for meeting and being here, but also supporting all of this. It was actually a cool outcome of this, of this interview.

• 52:28Molly O'Shea?

  I mean, it is true. Uh, we were talking about this, but hallucinations, you can't have an AI agent do everything, especially with travel, because it's so, so complex. So how are you at Navan helping solve this?

• 52:41Speaker 05

  It's so, so important. Like think about it, if I'll send you to the wrong flight, I'll tell you that I upgraded your flight and we didn't do it. Like I'll send you to the wrong room. People are so, so emotional when it comes to travel. They care about it. So you cannot have any fuckups. Hallucination is a huge, huge fuckup. We've built our own platform, our own model to prevent that. And we are supporting most of our customers by using our own AI platform that actually does not hallucinate.

• 53:11Molly O'Shea?

  Before you've had a customer come over to you, I would assume, what has been the worst travel story you've ever heard?

• 53:19Speaker 05

  It's actually my travel story. This is the travel story that started Navan. I was one of the first ones to start an offshore operation in Ukraine, in Odessa, Ukraine. And I went there, arrived there in the middle of the night, freezing cold. By the way, I hate the cold, freezing cold. Came to the hotel because of some credit card issue. The hotel canceled my reservation. And they told me to go down the street and find a new hotel. The travel agency didn't pick up. The software didn't work. I walked with my luggage like down the street, one hotel after the other, until I found something. But this was by far my worst travel experience and really what inspired me to start the company.

• 54:00Molly O'Shea?

  So you've been public now for almost a year?

• 54:02Speaker 05

  Almost a year, like nine months, yeah.

• 54:04Molly O'Shea?

  That's pretty incredible. So you guys are also ripping. So what's going on there? What are the latest stats?

• 54:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, we grew last quarter by 50% in terms of usage. We grew our revenue by 40%. We became cash flow positive, became profitable. So our kind of stats are amazing. But the most important thing, we have more and more users using us. We have more than $10 billion of bookings a year now, growing really, really fast. So more people are joining this kind of Navan thing.

• 54:33Molly O'Shea?

  Amazing. Well, thank you so much, Ariel.

• 54:35Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 54:36Molly O'Shea?

  And I think we closed out on stage with Bullish on Humans.

• 54:38Speaker 05

  Yes, and I think that's the most important thing. It's the most important thing to figure out because nothing matters. We can do all of this AI infrastructure, the AI fund stuff, but we need to remember that we're all humans and this needs to stay.

• 54:52Molly O'Shea?

  Perfect. Thank you. CJ, welcome to Sorcery. Great to be here. It's great to be in Paris. Great to be in Paris, that's fun. You're fresh off the stage. You're very popular today, by the way. I keep hearing your name from everyone. Thank you. So what excites you right now? Number one is about customers.

• 55:12Speaker 05

  Focused innovation and making sure we are the foundational layer for all AI applications and agentic applications. So that's number one. Number two, making our customers really successful as they roll out AI and there is clear ROI that they can see and they have a peace of mind when they use us as the data layer. So that's really exciting. And third is just the pace of innovation. We want to move fast for our customers. We do these things called dot local conferences that are very local, hence the name dot local. Next one is in San Francisco. We want to make many announcements there. After that one is in New York, we want to make announcements

• 55:55Speaker 05

  there. Then it's in Mumbai. We want to make announcement there, which are all related to innovation. So the pace of innovation in service of our customers really excites me.

• 56:04Molly O'Shea?

  I have to ask you a very difficult question.

• 56:06Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 56:07Molly O'Shea?

  What is your hottest take in AI right now?

• 56:10Speaker 05

  My simple answer, which I believe to be true is data is the unsung hero and data is back. You cannot create an AI application without a great data layer and your AI application is as good as your data.

• 56:28Molly O'Shea?

  As the kids would say, facts.

• 56:31Speaker 05

  Yes, facts. And it tracks.

• 56:33Molly O'Shea?

  Well, great. So you heard it here. Big data is back. Thank you, CJ.

• 56:39Speaker 05

  Thank you very much.