Benchmark partner Jack Altman stated that the most important point in understanding the current cycle of artificial intelligence is that no one really knows what they are talking about. Even very smart and well-informed individuals continuously overturn their judgments, only to reverse them again in three months.

He did not name specific individuals or instances of reversal. Altman founded the HR software company Lattice, later operated Alt Capital, and is now a partner at Benchmark while hosting the interview podcast Uncapped. His brother, Sam Altman, leads OpenAI. He himself wrote in January that as one gets older, they become less confident in a single viewpoint; he has quoted Vinod Khosla's prediction that "80% of economically valuable work will be done by AI within five years" and relayed concerns from Founders Fund about valuations detaching from fundamentals, similar to the unrest seen in 2021. This round of capital expenditure, model capabilities, coding agents, and data center robots are all accelerating simultaneously, and public predictions on "job replacement timelines, whether open source can catch up to closed source, and whether there are barriers at the application layer" have been repeatedly revised, which is the industry context for his judgment rather than a list of cases he provided.

The remarks did not present new data or new investments, which discounts the credibility of the prediction market and memorandums. A reversal every three months means that the narrative of the same group of "insiders" cannot be considered stable.

Mechanically, this is a cognitive discount, not an asset sell-off. The buyers are early funds that want to write uncertainty as options, while the sellers treat a single roadmap as certainty. Funds continue to flow into computing power and applications, but terms will be shorter and milestones more fragmented. The beneficiaries are founders who can rewrite products between reversals, while the pressured parties are LPs who treat last quarter's memorandum as a three-year strategy. Benchmark's tradition is to focus on a few high-quality investments, and this tweet serves as a reminder: the premise of concentrated investment—understanding the cycle—does not hold this time.

In terms of supplementary statements, he only makes judgments without providing names, transforming the authority of the "smart and insider" into samples that can also reverse their statements.

Source: Public information