They're investing in the team, which I think is smarter than investing in an idea. Those people built llama at meta and flamingo/chinchilla at deepmind.
Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7127938
> $400M for a company I've never heard before is quite surprising
> If the article is correct, they bought the team.
"When I was an intern, in one of the training presentations, a senior banker told us to distinguish between the process and the results. He said that we should focus on the process, which we can control, rather than the result, which is subject to luck. And here at Goldman, he said, we don’t punish people for losing money for the right reason. I have always loved asking questions, so I asked him, was anyone ever punished for making money for the wrong reason?"
Just like that old Dropbox comment that people love to bring up, you can make a gazillion dollars off a bad bet, and you can lose following a good strategy, that's the case everywhere probabilities are involved. Outcomes don't determine if the original evaluation was sound or not.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/katiejennings/2023/06/12/lawsui...
I think Hippocratic is interesting because their leadership is business focused and not very technical, while a lot of other new foundational model cos are led by technical people. I’m curious how this shakes out.
It's a web blog. Not a "Forbes piece"
An example of a company that did that is all the Google X products - smart people not many great outcomes and a ton of capital.
Competent product/sales person, and engineering person seems missing for this to succeed. Especially if they used to rely on the eng infrastructure of giants.
They seem smart folks so probably can cover the software engineering gap, especially with $100m to outsource some of the hard problems to some cloud infra.
But I'd be more confident if they had started with a co-founder that's more product/sales oriented.
Do you mean Nokia's phones?