Let’s Talk Winners And Losers (With AI)

When we try to articulate the opportunity that exists with AI, one way to do that is to look at the enterprise landscape, and understand that although there’s been so much monolithic corporate dominance in America’s history, things are likely to be different moving forward.

Think about it – we’ve had antitrust laws on the books for decades, with quite a lot of debate about whether they work or not. We’ve also had a number of top U.S. tech stocks that can be fit into an easy short acronym like FAANG, for example.

Is that trend going to continue?

In a recent blog post, I covered some remarks by Steve Pagliuca of Pagsgroup, talking about why we may have a broader field of leaders and winners when it comes to AI innovation.

I returned to that theme in a panel that I hosted in January, where a number of young startup leaders and experts talked about what we’re seeing now and what’s likely in the years to come. (I also mentioned Pagliuca’s remark specifically.)

Here’s more on that.

Voices of Innovation

I interviewed four people – Ori Goshen of AI21 Labs, Rodrigo Liang of SambaNova, where they’re trying to diversify semiconductor vendors, Nitin Mittal of Deloitte, and Ramin Hasani of Liquid AI, a company that’s trying to change the fundamental nature of large language models.

Here’s where I insert the common disclaimer that I have consulted on Liquid AI’s work, and I know a lot about what people are doing in these types of systems at MIT’s CSAIL lab under my colleague Daniela Rus.

With that out of the way, I’d like to go over some of the insights that we got from this panel, and why they matter so much in today’s market context.

Changing the Equation

Early in the segment, Goshen talked about fostering trustworthy AI with efficiency and precision, and mentioned a number of pillars: legal, finance, medical and defense, where these types of governance are going to have a major effect.

Liang talked about that process of bringing diversity to microprocessor hardware strategies, and a power-hungry world in which these setups are going to matter.

“We’re here to bring new chips for the AI computing infrastructure, in a world where otherwise, data centers are primarily dominated by a single semiconductor vendor, and so we like the idea of bringing optionality to customers,” he said. “We do think that we need to find other ways to actually create the capacity that’s needed to power AI21 and other great labs with much, much more efficient semiconductors at a much, much lower cost structure.”

Hasani talked about capable models and foundational non-transformer architectures, and their promise.

“As we scale AI systems, you want to have more control towards the utopia that all of us are basically guided to,” he said. “So before getting there, we set the mission of the company … where we have general-purpose AI that can solve problems beyond human capabilities. ….We can enable those kind of values for clients … and understand the behavior of these systems as we (unlock) enterprise value for clients.”

Firms need to reach this accomplishment point, he suggested, before AGI, ideally.

Mittal talked about agentic AI as a potential “silver bullet” and envisioned humans and machines working together on what he called important pillars under all industries: finance, supply chain, tax, etc.

Digging Into the Numbers

Another thing I asked this group was about the valuations of their respective companies, and why they matter.

Each one gave a number, and most of them clarified that they don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the valuations. It’s the work, they suggest, that’s important. It seems to me that the point was as long as you have runway, you should be working on your core objectives, not worrying about exactly how much your company is worth, so that made a lot of sense.

We also talked a good deal about opportunity, and where it lies.

More Quotes from the Panel

On “Luck”:

“We started the company seven years ago, so it was a great timing, not coincidence, but great timing. And I do feel like, while it’s been seven years, we’re still in the early days, so I’m just feeling lucky about the size of the opportunity, and how much more (there is) to achieve, and how much industry there is here to build. So in that sense, I feel very lucky.” – Ori Goshen

“Every founder has to have some level of positivity, as far as feeling lucky every day that we get to do this in this moment, and also (to) realize that you have to have a level of perseverance. … We had COVID, we had major geopolitical challenges. … some of our banks had major issues … but having that level of resilience that allows you to power through it and stay focused on the mission and drive hard, I think you feel very fortunate, but also just know that unlucky things will happen, things out of control will happen, but you just keep playing through it.” – Rodrigo Liang

“I consider myself a very, extremely lucky person. I mean, the most important portion of it was … the team and the people that I met throughout this journey, phenomenal people. And that’s just being a humbling experience this journey of building this company together with this amazing, high-density quality of talent, and just nice human beings … (it’s) the most humbling experience.” – Ramin Hasani

The Rest of the Conversation

There’s a lot more that you can watch in the video, to see exactly what these folks are reading, what they’re thinking, and what their companies are bringing to the table.

At the end of the day, as I mentioned in closing the panel, we’re grateful to these young minds for sharing with us what they’re doing, and what they’re thinking at a time of great change, an inflection point for industries and markets, but also a real eye-opening moment for society. Our lives will not be the same as AI becomes integrated into our everyday. So this kind of information is very important to have in my opinion. I’ll keep bringing you what I see happening throughout a banner year for AI.