Karpathy's 10-year AGI timeline seen as pessimistic
Andrej Karpathy stating AGI is 10 years away is now considered a skeptical, long-timeline view by many in the AI community.
Snapshot · The a16z Show
Is AI a Bubble? | Gavin Baker on Data Centers, GPUs, and the AI Economy
Explore episode
Jul 14, 2026
Where this was said
AI Business Models: From Seat Licenses to Outcome-Based Pay
At 29:22 · chapter starts 26:20
David George presses Baker on the harder question beyond obvious use cases like customer support: how does AI actually displace human services at scale, and what business models emerge? Baker's framework is simple — humans are paid for outcomes, AI will increasingly be paid for outcomes too. Customer service is the easy first example: the data is textual, LLMs are strong at text, and the reward signal (happy customer, first call resolution) is easily verifiable with RL. The harder, more interesting question is consumer business models [1] — Gavin Baker "Google never built a marketplace because advertisers systematically overpay, and that inefficiency was Google's profit. AI agents will sque…" 27:05 . Baker's vision: personalized AI agents that know your preferences and actively negotiate on your behalf — booking hotels by soliciting competing offers rather than passively directing you to a website. This eliminates the systematic inefficiency that made Google's advertising model so lucrative: advertisers have always paid more than they should because the customer conversion happened post-click. AI closes that loop, compressing margins but creating more genuine value. He closes with Elon Musk's tweet that 'work will become optional' — a scenario Baker says is not wildly implausible given the technology's trajectory.
The Consumer AI Business Model: From Ads to Outcomes
Google never built a marketplace because advertisers systematically overpay, and that inefficiency was Google's profit. AI agents will squeeze that out, shifting to outcome-based models and affiliate fees. Baker's vision: a personal AI that negotiates hotel prices on your behalf, paid only on results.
Humanoid Robots: The Debate Is Over
The humanoid vs. non-humanoid robot debate is settled. Humanoids can learn from YouTube videos and human demonstrations, and the verification problem — did you put the glass in the dishwasher correctly? — is trivially solved. The robotics race is Tesla versus China, same as electric cars.
Similar snapshots
50 free tools built total
Bhanu and his team built approximately 50 free tools to attract search traffic, each linked back to SiteGPT.
New tool built in under 5 minutes
With AI coding tools like Cursor, Bhanu can now create a new free marketing tool in less than 5 minutes by referencing existing tools.
KD filter < 10 for rankable keywords
Bhanu filters Ahrefs keyword results to show only those with a keyword difficulty below 10, making them realistic ranking targets for any decent website.
Minimum 1,000 monthly search volume
Bhanu sets a minimum search volume of 1,000 monthly searches when selecting keywords to target with free tools.
20 downloads/day at launch
PropGPT averaged 20 downloads per day right after launching on the App Store through influencer marketing.
4 months of rebuilding with no marketing
Eyal and Yali shut down all marketing and spent 4 months completely rebuilding PropGPT from scratch.
Over 40,000 downloads total
PropGPT has accumulated over 40,000 total downloads since launch.
LLM costs only $20/month
PropGPT's large language model (AI) operating costs are just $20 per month, and the cost is continually falling.
Ad monetization for games
Ad-based monetization works well for game apps where users spend extended time in-session, as seen with Grid and Wordle.
