Jaeden Schafer

I think this is obviously a massive number, but that's almost secondary to what it represents when the industry is really headed in an interesting direction.

I think for me, what it's showing is there is a barrier to entry for building these kind of top line AI models.

And it is this barrier to entry is very high.

We have a lot of amazing companies, I mean, myself included, taking these tools and building cool things with them.

But if you want to be a frontier model company, the stakes and the barrier to entry is insane.

And it kind of honestly makes me feel bad for some of these companies like Mistral AI, which are just smaller and regional areas like France.

And yes, they're raising billions of dollars, but like

Are they able to raise $40 billion?

Are they able to have the entire arsenal of Google behind them?

It's pretty hard to compete in these ways.

I think it's not just about having the most talented research team anymore.

You have to have billions of dollars in compute, in infrastructure, and you need to have the ability to scale your distribution globally at the same time.

So I think a lot of these companies are...

really pulling further and further ahead, like OpenAI, like the top hyperscalers, they're getting way further than anyone else, just because they had the lead at the beginning.

So SoftBank has basically made OpenAI a core pillar of their entire AI investment thesis.

And when you look at the landscape, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, the gap between all of these front labs and everyone else is getting bigger.

So I think for the average person using these tools, it's actually a good thing.

More investment means that more compute is going to make the models better.

But from a competition standpoint, I think it raises a lot of questions about how concentrated this industry is going to get.

Right.