Look, 6 months is better than 18 but it drives the type of startup you’re likely to get. Anyone trying to move fast just can’t participate. They’re forced to go elsewhere. You can only deal with organisations that can survive and plan for 6 months. What do they do in the meantime? Build? Wait? Especially in AI, the world is moving so fast that you need to make decisions within days, not half a year. How many frontier models and innovations arrive in half a year, while this lot think about the now-outdated proposal?

All you’ll get are sluggish companies designed to suck up the funds. I used to work for such a company. The business model seemed to be whatever would fund hours of researchers time, and travel money for those smart enough to write papers for whatever conference was in a country they hadn’t visited yet. Targeting EU funds was top priority and they could do it by creating some arbitrary “consortium” that generated enough credibility with adjudicators. I hated the waste and the lack of actual goals.