Grace Isford (Partner at Lux Capital) discusses the distribution of AI venture capital funding across major US tech hubs.
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Isford: AI Models Will Become Commoditized Over Time
“Because I do think models in general will become commoditized over time, in particular because of the open source growth and adoption.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Isford: Early-Revenue AI Startups Still Command 100x Multiples
“And so if you're an AI portfolio company you're going to get a better premium. That could change, but we're still seeing, you know, high valuations and high multiples hundred X range for companies that are earlier in revenue.”
Opinion
Isford: 2021-2022 AI investment sectors offer little opportunity today
“The map of how this evolved, particularly in AI today, is moving so quickly that what was a very great place to maybe be investing in twenty-twenty-one, 22, is really not the place where there's a ton of opportunity today.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Isford: Data infra teams, not AI teams, drive enterprise LLM adoption
“A lot of those data leaders are now the same people adopting AI and LLMs, and it's not like an AI team, it's just the data infrastructure tech team, right?”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Isford: Together AI Has the Market's Fastest Inference Tech
“They have the author of Flash Attention, Sri Dao, who is brilliant, as their chief scientist. He is, has a proprietary version of the fastest, like, inference technology on the market that's low cost to serve.”
Insight
Isford: AI agents only succeed at scale when narrowly verticalized
“I think where we have seen it actually working at some sort of scale would probably be coding, customer support, or sales. And generally the ones that have worked better are very verticalized. So they're doing a clear workflow really well. They're not a genera…”