20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

The Twenty Minute VC

Finance, Venturecapital, Tech News, News, Siliconvalley, Technology, Investing, Startups, Business

4.4 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 7 October 2024

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Eiso Kant is the Co-Founder and CTO of Poolside.ai, building next-generation AI for software engineering. Just last week, Poolside announced their $500M Series B valuing the company at $3BN. Prior to Poolside, Eiso founded Athenian, a data-enabled engineering platform. Before that, he built source{d} - the world’s first company dedicated to applying AI to code and software.

1. Raising $600M to Compete in the AGI Race:

What is Poolside? How does Poolside differentiate from other general-purpose LLMs?
How much of Poolside’s latest raise will be spent on compute?
How does Eiso feel about large corporates being a large part of startup LLM provider’s funding rounds?
Why did Poolside choose to only accept investment from Nvidia?
Is $600M really enough to compete with the mega war chests of other LLMs?

2. The Big Questions in AI:

Will scaling laws continue? Have we reached a stage of diminishing returns in model performance for LLMs?
What is the biggest barrier to the continued improvement in model performance; data, algorithms or compute?
To what extent will Nvidia’s Blackwell chip create a step function improvement in performance?
What will OpenAI’s GPT5 need to have to be a gamechanger once again?

3. Compute, Chips and Cash:

Does Eiso agree with Larry Ellison; “you need $100BN to play the foundation model game”? What does Eiso believe is the minimum entry price?
Will we see the continuing monopoly of Nvidia? How does Eiso expect the compute landscape to evolve?
Why are Amazon and Google best placed when it comes to reducing cost through their own chip manufacturing?
Does Eiso agree with David Cahn @ Sequoia, “you will never train a frontier model on the same data centre twice”?
Can the speed of data centre establishment and development keep up with the speed of foundation model development?

4. WTF Happens to The Model Layer: OpenAI and Anthropic…

Does Eiso agree we are seeing foundation models become commoditised?
What would Eiso do if he were Sam Altman today?
Is $6.6BN really enough for OpenAI to compete against Google, Meta etc…?
OpenAI at $150BN, Anthropic at $40BN and X.ai at $24BN. Which would Eiso choose to buy and why?

Transcript

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0:00.0	who has earned the right to be in the race to AGI. We're going to look back on this moment
0:04.7	10 years from now, just like we would look back to the moment of mobile internet and realize
0:10.0	that that was the moment where the table got set. You do not want to look back on that moment
0:14.1	and not have given it everything you've got because it's a race. And the latest $500 million round
0:19.1	translates to us being able to be an entrant into the race.
0:23.3	We don't get the luxury of stumbling on the capabilities race or to go to market race.
0:27.6	This is 20VC with me, Harry Stabbings, and there could not be a better time for this episode.
0:31.7	Just last week, Pooleside announced their Series B, a $500 million round, valuing the company at $3 billion.
0:40.0	Today, we're joined by their co-founder and CEO, Isocant.
0:43.6	This is an incredible episode on the future of LLMs, the race for AGI, how the chip and
0:49.6	compute layer evolves, and so much more.
0:52.2	But before we dive in, this episode is presented by Brex,
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	...

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