Investors Pour $27.1B into A.I. Startups, Defying a Downturn

Time to update my company to “Long AI” to get in on this pump [1]. It worked last time, right?

[1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/crypto-euphoria-as-lemonade-m...

Has everyone suddenly forgotten the ability of VC to make money just . . evaporate? The list is long and the dollar number is heartbreaking.

Well, if they have, I suppose they'll be reminded forcefully by today's substantially different rate environment.

I'm not saying "AI" isn't a big deal. It is. It's got all sorts of uses. Is the state of play worth dumping this quantity of brains and dollars? Jury's out on that. But saying it's worth lots of money because people are throwing lots of money is not a winning argument.

archive: https://archive.is/VBmtV

Where's the revenue from this? Anybody can do it; there's no "moat". Most of the applications generate very little revenue per transaction. And progress is being made on doing more LLM training with less GPU work.

Solid-state batteries and solar farms seem more promising.

Web 3.0 failed, lets pour the money in the new black hole ;)

This sounds more like its signaling a downturn not defying it.

I really dislike this sort of headline because it misses a core part of the analysis between seed-stage, versus late-stage startups.

NYT says the $27.1B represents ~50% of investments in startups ($56B in total).

But the $27.1B includes $1B for CoreWeave, $1B for Scale AI, and $6B for xAI. Elon Musk's company is an outlier IMHO, and the other two might as well be public companies soon. Certainly late stage enough not to be bellwethers for early stage VC investing.

Remove the $8B above, and AI startups got about 34% of all startup funding. Is that a lot? I don't know, but all of a sudden it sounds more reasonable.

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