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The Intelligence Consolidation

jannikschilling.com · 2,309 words · saved by 2 readers

In many cases, these labs have had shared investors: Sequoia Capital has invested in OpenAI, xAI, SSI, Reflection AI, Magic, Keen Technologies and Harmonic, while Andreessen Horowitz has invested in OpenAI, xAI, SSI, Character AI, Mistral AI, and Anysphere. If you are investing in five or more AI labs, is that because you expect there to be an oligopoly where each oligopolist is a good investment, or do you simply lack conviction on who will win? The former is a popular story, with a leaked 2023 Mistral memo claiming that “an oligopoly is shaping up”. At first glance, this tracks with API usage on OpenRouter: One oligopoly story could be that different frontier AI labs are making different technical trade-offs, resulting in their own niche and specialties, and many of their fundraising announcements echo this sentiment: An industry that parallels this “many roads to Rome” quality is proprietary trading. Not only does it draw from a very similar talent pool as frontier AI labs, but it a

The Intelligence Consolidation Jannik Schilling The Intelligence Consolidation April 9, 2025 This piece is coauthored with Trevor Chow. You can find the original post on his Substack here . Over the past three years, we have seen the rise and fall of dozens of frontier AI labs. In many cases, these labs have had shared investors: Sequoia Capital has invested in OpenAI, xAI, SSI, Reflection AI, Magic, Keen Technologies and Harmonic, while Andreessen Horowitz has invested in OpenAI, xAI, SSI, Character AI, Mistral AI, and Anysphere. If you are investing in five or more AI labs, is that because y

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