Vinod Valloppillil

Enterprise + AI. Dir/PM Azure AI. $GOOG (GCP Language & Vision AI), $DBX (features, search, ML), Startups (3 exits), early $MSFT (OS, web).

[Deedy @deedydas]

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.

[Jeff Hollan @jeffhollan]

Excited to announce the new preview for Microsoft Foundry Agents 🎉! You can now build, run, and deploy your agent using any model, any framework, any harness in the cloud 🧑‍💻 - check out the demo below

This is not just any cloud compute environment; it's an agent-optimized platform with:
🖥️ Persistent microVMs - securely scale up and down without losing context
🛠️ Built-in tools (1000+)
👀 Observability and evaluations
👷 Guardrails
🔐 Private networking... and more

[Vinod Valloppillil @vinodv]

@elonmusk For this and many other autonomous services, the equation will be 1/10th the accidents but 10x the liability.

[Vinod Valloppillil @vinodv]

The team's been cooking!

[Mustafa Suleyman @mustafasuleyman]

Three models. Three top-tier results. All shipped within just a few months by the @MicrosoftAI team.
- MAI-Transcribe-1 dropped today, the most accurate transcription model in the world across 25 languages according to FLEURS WER benchmark.
- MAI-Voice-1 sets a new standard for natural speech.
- MAI-Image-2 lands as a top 3 model family on @arena.
We've been building with them - now you can too. All 3 available now on Microsoft Foundry.

[Vinod Valloppillil @vinodv]

@Will_McKelvey I think it's pretty fundamentally a supply-side issue. The # of slots hasn't kept pace with the # of people applying &amp; being subsidized. The result is plummeting admit rates + soaring costs.

[Vinod Valloppillil @vinodv]

Tesla Phase 1 TAM = EV Market
Tesla Phase 2 TAM = Global Taxi Market
Tesla Phase 3 TAM = Global physical labor market

SpaceX Phase 1 TAM = Global launch market
SpaceX Phase 2 TAM = Global telephony market
SpaceX Phase 3 TAM = Global datacenter market

[Aaron Burnett @aaronburnett]

The most under appreciated part of SpaceX is how strong the Starlink position is. People acknowledge its existence but don’t appreciate the math. All three of these assumptions below can be very wrong delaying profitability for years (even into the 2030s) and Starlink continues to throw off a lot of cash. It positions SpaceX as one of the lowest risk bets on AGI.

[Vinod Valloppillil @vinodv]

I'm a podcast addict (usually have one running when I'm in the car, walking, running errands, etc.)

This is one of the few that I've listened to more than once - https://t.co/kbBPXePuHV

[Vinod Valloppillil @vinodv]

We've been cooking in Azure Search & Agentic Knowledge Retrieval. The rapid evolution from "traditional search" to RAG and now Knowledge Retrieval dramatically expands the suite of services your Search stack needs to deliver.

This video is a great overview of our latest release with some awesome visuals -

https://t.co/3KNsOO3fkJ

And, as always, we're just getting started.

[Vinod Valloppillil @vinodv]

@bradneuberg @nabeelqu @tylercowen It will depend on how eagerly their elite (re-)embrace noblesse oblige

[Vinod Valloppillil @vinodv]

@ptsi You gave camcorder a strong, from deep from the heart effort . Excited to see what you do next !

[Vinod Valloppillil @vinodv]

@bradneuberg My bet is perplexity acq. (Or one of the other ai search co's like https://t.co/2nlE2scw0r

[Marvin Baumann @MarvinTBaumann]

The US is a temporary off-shoot of the great European civilization.

It's going back home. Europe will lead the West again.

We invented it, after all.

[Vinod Valloppillil @vinodv]

Elon is the only person on the planet who thinks SpaceX isn't being ambitious enough.

TAM = global launch market + global telecom market (starlink) and now, the global data center market.

[Abhi Tripathi @SpaceAbhi]

Some people (including me at first!) are concerned that SpaceX's AI space data center and reported IPO ambitions may stymie or self-sabotage their Mars plans. This is a legit concern to wonder about. Visionary companies can become suddenly myopic, one eye always on the stock ticker because of shareholders and the vagaries of the market. Here are a few quotes about going public that are attributed to Musk:

“There’s a lot of noise that surrounds a public company and people are constantly commenting on the share price and value.”

“As a public company, we are subject to wild swings in our stock price that can be a major distraction for everyone working at Tesla…"

“I wish we could be private with Tesla. It actually makes us less efficient to be a public company"

That being said, there is a solid counter argument, grounded in science fiction, that posits that humans probably can't settle other planets without AGI or at least advanced AI agents. Even the National Academies report released yesterday that recommended a science strategy for the human exploration of Mars, emphasized human and AI Agent pairing. Sophisticated AI inference on the edge (Mars) where round trip communications could take up to 40 mins might be essential to establishing a human presence there. Think of how much construction and civil engineering projects will be needed to scale civilization there.

So if you want to see humans settle Mars in your lifetime, and scale their during the lifetime of your heirs, have some faith. This twist of fate might be the right one. 🤷‍♂️

[Vinod Valloppillil @vinodv]

@HarmeetKDhillon Please publish stats + excerpts of the false data you've dug up. It needs to be super duper public to restore trust

[Vinod Valloppillil @vinodv]

@l3amm Congrats team!

[Vinod Valloppillil @vinodv]

We've been cooking --
https://t.co/nXKBeU4TnP

[Vinod Valloppillil @vinodv]

It's cuz GDP/biz is a team sport (like basketball) rather than an individual one (like chess).

Sure it works better with brilliant individuals, but you also need social capital, the right miz of rule adherence and rule-breaking, room/freedom to try new stuff, ability to drive a team, etc

[Vinod Valloppillil @vinodv]

2 counter arguments

- with AI, the traditional boundaries between apps shrink even more

- one of the things that drove app distinctions was ux + app logic. With AI + agents, both can be figured out at runtime, on the fly

[Eren Bali @erenbali]

I understand why many smart people feel this way but I’m not worried about this scenario one bit. In the heydays Google and Facebook there were similar predictions. Google was going to swallow the Internet, FB apps were going to replace everything etc. They weren’t the slow incumbents we think of them today. They were scary. I wasn’t around in Microsoft’s heydays but I bet it was similar.

One company to rule them all never works out. Especially in the application layer where every design decision is a trade off. That’s why even in the same category, you can have many successful companies based on minor differences. There isn’t one way to find restaurants, learn things, connect socially, organize an event or shop online. You can always find weaknesses of an existing service and build something better for certain customers.

If anything, the foundational model companies have much weaker moats than Google, FB and MS had. No models have a monopoly on anything. Distribution and capital is way more accessible for startups than it was 10-20 years ago.

OpenAI and Anthropic have some momentum right now. But when they’ve to compete in 10+ categories, you’ll be competing with a PM there, not their founders. These organizations also have significant cultural weaknesses you can leverage. Their coveted researchers want to solve math problems, not hear complaints from soccer moms in Ohio or compliance teams of regional hospitals.

So I’ll say game is on. You can’t win if you don’t play.

[Vinod Valloppillil @vinodv]

@HarryStebbings The TAM expansion case is... Customer support is the entry use case with known quantifiable spend and efficiency gain. The expansion use cases are sales and marketing as agents take over traditional SEO, brand, outreach and more.

[Vinod Valloppillil @vinodv]

Grokipedia is fascinating on several levels

a) Grokipedia gets around Wikipedia's infamous "edit wars" / "source wars" / "editor mafia" by making "truth seeking AI" the primary writer. And if you haven't been following closely, then yes, Deep Research-style AI is now good enough to critically investigate a topic via 1000s of articles and construct a wikipedia style report...

b) Grokipedia went from idea to shipping product in ~6 weeks? It's built on an internal tool but the idea to externally publish content was casually tossed around by Elon and David Sachs, live, at a conference in early September! Few companies, if any, can even evaluate, much less ship (!!!) something this bold and novel this fast (across both Google and Microsoft, I've had some peripheral involvement with work that I'd call "adjacent" to grokipedia over the years). Once again, Elon (et al) really force us to reconsider what's possible with our precious, limited, time and energy.

c) it really gives you a sense of just how "shaped" wikipedia has become. The simple test is to take a controversial topic -- the Covid era Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) for ex - and compare the 2 sites' writeups head to head -

https://t.co/6klVGXE5Qm
https://t.co/AaX4WKyJ7L

It's cheap and easy to argue that grokipedia is just regurgitating its author's preferred bias instead of anonymous wikipedia editor's. But it also only takes an ounce of effort to take a look for yourself and see if that's really true. At the minimum, it's great to have both perspectives and hopefully in time, the competition will nudge both parties towards truth. And grokipedia, of course is still just a v0.1.