Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kamath: Cartesia is the only other player focused on real-time voice
“Right now, the only other player who's focused on real time is Cartesia.”
Opinion
Kamath: JEPA architectures are closer to AGI than state space models
“In our opinion, like those models are actually closer to how we can build AGI than like state space models, which is just a, Play on compute capacity.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kamath: Future AI will decouple infinite memory from small-model compute
“The way we see the future is you will separate memory from intelligence. So the memory will be captured by infinite layers and the intelligence will be captured by finite layers of, you know, intelligence and that small model that has those finite layers that …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kamath: Voice AI will diverge and is definitely not winner-takes-all
“I think the markets will diverge at some point of time. Like so for example, 11 is sort of doubling down on the content space but the real time space, like mimicking how humans do conversations is, it's like a very different problem than mimicking how movies a…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kamath: Smallest AI has enough capital to reach $100M ARR
“Having said that, I still think the capital we have right now is enough to build a hundred million ARR company.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kamath: Nvidia GPUs suffer severe memory bottlenecks during voice inference
“And media chips are generally very bad for voice inference. Like if you have 40 gigabytes of RAM in a NVIDIA GPU, you can generally, if you want to do real time, like a hundred milliseconds, you can use maybe two or four gigabytes of it for our models. And bey…”
Opinion
Kamath: Legal tech startups must target the US market to survive
“If you have to build for the legal market, you have to build from the U S basically, or for the U S at least, right? Every, everywhere else is the market is just too tiny for you to get any money out of that.”
Opinion
Kamath: Indian language AI is an operational dataset problem, not scientific
“Indian languages for me was like just an operational problem to solve getting data sets, et cetera. But it was not a scientific enough problem that helps us answer what's like the next level of AI and that how can small models be the future, et cetera.”
Opinion
Kamath: Only ~20 Indian companies can offer seven-figure enterprise deals
“There are probably 20 companies in India who can give us that kind of a deal size and they would spend an incredible amount of time and effort.”
Opinion
Kamath: ElevenLabs is focused on content creation and dubbing, not real-time
“Like for example, 11 has a lot of focus on content creation and like dubbing. And if you want to build like an Instagram video or like a AI movie 11 would be a great player. We don't focus on content at all. We are focused on the real time space.”
Opinion
Kamath: State space models are not a big leap over transformers
“Our strong belief is like state space models are not like that big a leap over transformers.”
Insight
Kamath: Scaling LLMs has diverged from building human-like AI
“Very similarly, right now in AI, we are doing LLMs, which is a different form of intelligence than human intelligence. So they have something and they are playing the sort of let's make LLMs bigger and bigger and smarter. And that is a market as well. But To b…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kamath: Most coding agent startups will die or face fire sales
“There are a lot of companies that are just trying to build these like very specific coding agents, which apparently will be like better than that's not going to happen. Right. So I feel like there are like, Few winners in that space. And like the others are ju…”
Assertion Contradicted
Kamath: Voice AI inference currently costs 1,000x more than text
“Today, the cost of voice is like a thousand times more than the cost of text. We want to like bring it at par basically.”
Assertion Supported
Kamath: Smallest AI's Pulse speech-to-text operates at 64ms latency
“So we have this amazing voice model that converts voice to text called pulse. It's a speech to text model runs in real time 64 milliseconds latency lot of other features like emotion detection, gender detection, bunch of other things, right?”
Prediction Open · timeframe Mar 2029
Kamath: Audio content platform Kuku FM will IPO very soon
“So Cuckoo is gonna do an IPO very soon.”
Insight
Kamath: Distilled AI models match large model accuracy at a fraction of size
“When you use that pre-training model as a teacher for this small model, and we could go into what teacher means, but it would basically Act at similar accuracies as the larger model at 100 or one 10th of the size.”
Assertion Partly supported
Kamath: Smallest AI built sub-200ms real-time TTS before ElevenLabs
“11 Labs was completely into offline dubbing and things like that. They did not have a real time model, right? So we were one of the first people to build a real time text-to-speech that ran under 200 milliseconds.”
Disclosure
Kamath: Smallest AI reduced 3one4 Capital's $1M check to prevent dilution
“We asked them to reduce the check size. We said, we can't take one at six. It's like too much dilution for us. So we, I think we ended up at like some 500 or six or something.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kamath: Smallest AI signed a seven-figure US telecommunications enterprise deal
“It is converted to a seven figure multi-year multimillion deal. But we will announce it formally sometime like in April or so once we sort of clear a few things, but yeah, it is that like all of those things are in paper right now.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kamath: Smallest AI received an acquisition offer over $150M
“We got in between like an acquisition offer for like one 50 plus million dollars.”
Assertion Supported
Kamath: Cartesia relies on state space models, Smallest AI does not
“But they are heavily dependent on state space models and we don't train state space models.”
Insight
Kamath: AI vendors overprice models to offset GPU auto-scaling costs
“And the biggest issue is today people end up pricing the models extremely expensively because they have to manage the scale up of GP capacity.”
Disclosure
Kamath: Smallest AI generates between $1M and $2M in ARR
“It's between one to two million ARR.”
