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.