The Ledger
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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.”
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.”
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.”
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?”
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.”
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…”
Isford: AI stack challenges mirror early data infrastructure stack problems
“A lot of the same problems we saw with that early data stack, we're now seeing evolved or in parallel right with the AI stack today. So data reliability, like, is the data reliable? The same question people are asking for large language models, right? Or is it…”
Isford: Sakana AI is in many ways Japan's DeepMind
“And now Sakana in many ways is kind of like the deep mind for Japan.”
Isford: NYC captured 20% of AI VC funding, second to SF's 40%
“SF has an amazing density of talent and it's a great hub. But New York is a clear second, and it's growing in momentum. And we're seeing that again in the numbers, right? So as if I had a lion's share of AI venture capital of like 40%, I think it was over the …”
Isford: Improved AI agent architectures will emerge within 12 to 18 months
“I think there'll be better architectures and better data collection ways to make AI agents more productive. And I think we will see that. Out of top research labs and top startups in the coming, you know, 1218 months.”
Isford: Enterprise AI failures mostly stem from implementation issues
“I think it's very easy to buy a shitty product that maybe will not solve your enterprise problem because a lot of the issues are actually on implementation of the technology.”
Isford: Enterprises should treat initial AI implementation as enterprise search
“I would view AI as an enterprise search problem. So where do you have huge repositories of data? Like what are you putting that in your data warehouse if you have one? Or where do you have the most data in your system? Or if you could search that data really q…”
Isford: Lux invested in Hugging Face for its community and transformer unlock
“What really predicated our original investment was this incredible community. Their GitHub repo that took Advantage really of the key moment of the transformer paper unlock, productizing that, and then kind of becoming in many ways like the toll booth of AI in…”
Isford: Majority of Lux Capital's AI portfolio is based in NYC
“Majority of the Lux AI portfolio is here. I think we have a pretty darn good portfolio but that means Hugging Face is headquartered here. Runway is headquartered here. Mosaic ML, which was acquired by Databricks, They, their research team is largely here. Osmo…”
Isford: 57 of 179 relocating Lux portfolio employees moved to NYC
“We've seen like an influx of like, I think it was roughly 179 employees of our Lux portfolio companies Who moved geographies between January, 20, 20. So just before the pandemic and mid April, 20, 24. So a few months ago 57 of those one 79 moved to New York an…”