Comment by crowcroft
1 year ago
The new VC playbook could be.
1. Find an unhappy senior AI exec from who's published a few papers who's published a few papers. 2. Start a new org around them and hire a few key people with crazy salaries (which you can offer cause the time horizon for the company isn't that long). 3. Train a few models, release some good looking benchmarks (bonus points if big tech lend you their GPUs as part of some 'accelerator deal'). 4. Maybe find PMF and become incredibly rich. 4. If that fails, sign a massive but undisclosed licensing deal for your tech with big tech and give them your staff.
Seems like a good way to take big bets in AI, while hedging most of the risk.
In the CNN boom days after alexnet the playbook was: take your research lab, slap a c crop and new logo on it, keep doing your research and get acquired by FANG for high 8 figures.
Only difference in this cycle is that you can't do real LLM research in academia these days so all of the top researchers are already at FANG.
This isn't #4, there's no acquisition happening.
This playbook won't work within a year as M&A market cools and everyone wakes up to the real truth - that no one has any edge in LLM / AI infra development