Startups vs Big AI Labs

Key Takeaways

The only advantage that you will ever have as a startup over a big incumbent, and especially when there's such talented teams out there, is kind of focus and velocity against the thing that you're focused on. If you want to be playing in what is arguably, I think, the biggest category in AI, which is coding, then you need to have the talent as well to do it. But, you know, what do you do if you don't have the billions of dollars to pre-train models? The only way we can win, I think, is by being very focused. So, the way I would describe what does it look like to work on big model within an an incumbent lab is that you are one of like hundreds of evals. So, you're one of many people doing all sorts of evals and spreading yourself in that sense, you get something that's general, but it's spread fairly thin. As a startup, your eval is based on what customers are saying and what they're doing. And so, you kind of work backwards and reverse engineer from what are users asking for to what capabilities you are driving your system. But, the important part, I think, is to be able to tweak every part of the system from the product features to the agent design to the model training in order to build the best overall system.