flâneur

The Intelligence Consolidation

tmychow.substack.com · 2,204 words · saved by 1 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: Magic’s 2024 fundraise focused on their 100m token context window Cohere’s Series C focused on enterprise use cases, like RAG and embeddings Mistral’s initial memo focu

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 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…

related reading