Are LLMs Hitting a Wall? VC Shifts Focus
Newcomer: Sequoia, Khosla, Reid Hoffman, Meta, OpenAI..
H1 24 AI Review & Market Outlook
With Eric Newcomer
Listen → Spotify, YouTube, Apple
In this episode, Sourcery sits down with
, founder of . Eric shares insights from the New York Cerebral Valley Summit, where VCs, Founders and Industry Executives explored:Move beyond foundation models to applications
Rise of AI in established businesses from Goldman Sachs to law firms
Future of creativity in a generative AI world
Will all of our jobs be replaced!? (ie CEO of Intercom)
Covering the evolution of the AI industry, there has been a significant shift in focus from building foundational AI models to developing applications (RunwayML, Writer.ai, etc.) leveraging existing models. Eric highlights the emergence of AI-powered applications in various fields, including music creation (Suno), coding assistance (Codeium), synthetic data generation, AI Agents, and customer support.
And of course, we discuss his observations on the VC ‘downturn,’ M&A market constraints, the challenges facing emerging managers, as well as thoughts on the importance of innovation and the need for companies to demonstrate viable exit strategies.
Top Cerebral Valley Panels
Fall ‘23 SF Cerebral Valley Recap: Databricks, GTM Hustle, AI Players to Watch, Open Source Debate (Vinod + Reid Hoffman) [Sourcery]
AI at Goldman and the Enterprise: Marco Argenti (CIO at Goldman Sachs)
AI Where the Data Is Already: Sridhar Ramaswamy (CEO, Snowflake)
The State of Generative AI: Vince Hankes, Sarah Guo, & Shardul Shah
The Future of Creators in the Age of AI: Scott Belsky (Adobe)
The Geopolitical Stakes for LLMs: Josh Wolfe & Teresa Carlson
**Android Moment of Open Source AI: Jonathan Frankle, Ali Farhadi, Laurens van der Maaten & Jon Turow
Hands down the best conversation, Jonathan Frankle is one to watch
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AI Companies mentioned:
Inflection: We are an AI studio creating a personal AI for everyone
Microsoft pays Inflection $650 mln in licensing deal while poaching top talents, source says [Reuters]
Adept: Adept is an enterprise AI tool that enhances productivity by managing manual, repetitive workflows across the tools your teams use daily.
Amazon beefs up AI development, hiring execs from startup Adept and licensing its technology [CNBC]
XAI: An AI company with the mission of advancing scientific discovery and gaining a deeper understanding of our universe. Our first product is Grok.
Poolside AI: We're building the world's most capable AI for software development & the applications to unlock the potential of developers.
Intercom: The New Age of Support — Improve the customer service experience for customers, support teams, and support leaders.
Anthropic: Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.
Harvey: The Trusted Legal AI Platform. Augment your workflows using domain specific models trained by and for professional service providers.
Lambda: The AI developer cloud, On-demand NVIDIA GPU instances & clusters for AI training & inference
Modal: The serverless platform for AI teams. Run generative AI models, large-scale batch jobs, job queues, and much more. Bring your own code — we run the infrastructure.
Databricks: The Databricks Platform is the world's first data intelligence platform powered by generative AI. Infuse AI into every facet of your business.
MongoDB: A developer data platform for developers to do their best work
DataDog: We are building the monitoring and security platform for developers, IT operations teams and business users in the cloud age.
Snowflake: The AI Data Cloud — Your Solution for Data Warehousing, Data Lakes, Data Engineering, Data Science, and More.
VC Funds
Timestamps:
(00:00) Introduction and Evolution of the Cerebral Valley Summit
(00:44) Takeaways from the New York Summit: Shifting Towards Building Applications
(02:28) LLMs Find PMF?
(04:10) OpenAI's Transition from Enterprise to Consumer Product
(05:21) Other Themes: Creativity, Open Source, and Established Businesses
(07:44) Debate on Open Source and the Pragmatic Cycle of AI
(11:23) Themes from Breakout Groups: AI Agents and Open Source
(13:44) State of the Tech Markets and Predictions for the Future
(13:40) Sponsor: Archer
(17:07) Expectations for Q2 and Disillusionment with Foundation Models
(18:29) Breakout Group Discussion on AI Agents
(19:19) The Need for Tangible Outcomes in AI Applications
(20:07) The Risk of Overinvestment in Infrastructure without Emerging Applications
(22:12) Areas of Focus for Newcomer: Robotics, Life Sciences, and Law
(24:02) Investment Opportunities and Challenges for Startups
(26:01) Future Investment Focus: Robotics, Life Sciences, and Industries like Law and Consulting
(26:07) The Challenge Faced by Law Firms
(26:42) Emerging Companies to Watch Out For
(28:15) Potential Speakers for Future Conferences
(35:30) The State of Venture Capital
(44:20) The Future of Journalism
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