Comment by tinco

This might be true on a very long timescale, but that's not really relevant for VC's. Literally every single VC I've talked to raised the question if our moat is not just having better prompts, it's usually the first question. If a VC really invested in a company whose moat got evaporated by O1, that's on the VC. Everyone saw technology like O1 coming from a mile away.

For the slightly more complex stuff, sure at some point some general AI will probably be able to do it. But with two big caveats, the first being: when? and the second being: for how much?.

In theory every deep and wide enough neural network should be able to be trained to do object detection in images, yet no one is doing that. Technologies specifically designed to process images, like CNN's, reign supreme. Likewise for architectures of LLM's.

At some point your specialization might become obsolete, but that point might be a decade or more from now. Until then, specializations will have large economic and performance advantages making the advancements in AI today available to the industry of tomorrow.

I think it's the role of the VC to determine not if there's an AI breakthrough behind a startups technology, but if there's a market disruption and if that market disruption can be leveraged to establish a dominant company. Similar to how Google leveraged a small and easily replicable algorithmic advantage into becoming one of the most valuable companies on earth.