The Information's TITV Replit CEO's Contrarian AI Bet, Elastic's Search Moat & Musk's OpenAI Suit | Aug 29, 2025
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Sep 2, 2025 
Amjad Masad, CEO of Replit, shares insights on the financial margins of AI, discussing its high costs and the impact on coding agents. Ash Kulkarni, CEO of Elastic, delves into the future of AI search and the competitive landscape. The conversation also touches on the legal clash between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, exploring Musk's evolving motivations in the AI arena, from philanthropy to potential self-interest. Together, they navigate the complexities shaping AI development and market dynamics.
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Inference-Time Scaling Is The New Frontier
- Amjad highlights 'inference-time scaling' as the new axis of intelligence, via looping models more at test time.
- He suggests this, not pretraining size, will drive future capability scaling and costs.
Use PLG To Seed Enterprise Wins
- Pursue a product-led growth model: subsidize free users to create champions that drive enterprise adoption.
- Convert those champions into high-margin enterprise contracts to dominate unit economics.
Application Data Can Improve Models — But Training Is Costly
- Replit proved its user data can improve models by fine-tuning an open-source coding model with Replit code and achieving strong results.
- Yet Amjad warns training at scale is uneconomical for most application companies today.