Azeem Azhar

for an academic paper.

And also I felt the timeframe was a bit awry.

IT projects, any kind of project in a company takes a few years, a couple of years at least to start to pay back.

And even with the best will of the world, because we misspecify these projects,

A large portion of them, 60-70% of them, will fail.

And to ask in six months whether these things are working, well, it just feels like it's way too short of a time period.

It's a bit like getting angry with the pregnant cow elephant because four months into her 15-month gestation period, she hasn't given birth.

I mean, it's just too short a period.

So yes, I read the paper.

I thought, obviously, it was of interest to people in the world, but I don't think it necessarily pours cold water on it.

But I think this is a really important point, which is we don't really have super robust evidence about this.

We don't really know exactly what this is going to mean to companies and their willingness to continue to invest in these types of AI projects.

But the evidence is slowly but surely building up.

I think there's another point with open AI or with any of these AI companies, and that is the disruption premium.

When you're a venture investor and you're investing in an early stage company, you're not really thinking about whether it will beat the NASDAQ.

You're thinking about convexity.

You're thinking about, does this give me

a chance for a really, really exceptional outcome, a Google-style outcome, a Figma-style outcome, a Spotify-style outcome, or indeed an OpenAI-style outcome if you're one of the earlier investors.

That bet is something that, if you look at technology companies at this early stage, is in a way the one that you might be thinking.

It's really interesting historically when you look at stock market returns, and I recommend people read a paper by Besson Binder, Arizona University finance prof, where he looks at stock market returns over 100 years and sort of identifies that they're very much clustered around a few dozen companies.