The dominant AI foundation model creators have likely already been established
Brendan Foody · Mercor CEO & Co-Founder, Brendan Foody: How They Grew from $1M to $500M in 17 Months · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Sep 15, 2025 · at 41:34
Brendan Foody is the co-founder and CEO of Mercor, an AI talent platform. He reflects on whether new startups can emerge to compete with established AI foundation model companies.
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“I think the largest model creators have already been yeah, already exist, but I'm not a hundred percent sure about that. Like, I definitely have, you know, some error bars about it. My expectation for why The largest model builders exist is just obviously the extraordinary capex in terms of both data and compute investments that go into that, as well as, you know, building out all the teams of researchers that has quickly become phenomenally expensive. But at the same time, I think that there, you know, may be other breakthroughs that help to enable more model progress and those could play a role coming from startups.”
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