My AI investment thesis is that every AI application startup is likely to be crushed by rapid expansion of the foundational model providers — Yishan

My AI investment thesis is that every AI application startup is likely to be crushed by rapid expansion of the foundational model providers.

App functionality will be added to the foundational models’ offerings, because the big players aren’t slow incumbents (it is wrong to apply the analogy of “fast startup, slow incumbent” here), they are just big.  Far more so than with any other prior new technology, there is a massive and fast-moving wave that obsoletes every new app almost as fast as it can be invented.  There is almost no time to build a company and scale it.

There are two ways AI application startup founders can make money:

– Make a flash-in-the-pan app that generates a ton of cash and bank the cash (my estimate is that you have about 12-18 months cashflow generation)

– Make a good enough app that you get acquired by one of the big players for sufficient equity

The situation is highly unstable – we don’t know if it’s going to crash or go to the moon but both scenarios make it very unlikely that any AI application startup will independently become a generational supercompany (baseline odds are low to begin with).

The best odds are finding an application niche in a highly specialized field with extremely unique and specific data barriers, ideally ones relating to real atoms (hardware or world-related) data and not software/finance.

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