Kate Clark

And there's a startup I focused on in my story called Flapping Airplanes, which wants to build new AI models with less data.

We raised over $100 million to do that.

I think the idea for investors is if one of these companies really does figure out a more efficient way or just a better way of building AI systems, that they will have a trillion-dollar opportunity on their hands.

These are a lot of the same people who have put billions of dollars into open AI and Anthropic and who are absolutely convinced that those companies will be worth a trillion dollars or more.

in the near future.

So they think that if they bet on a bunch of these little companies that also want to disrupt the AI space, that they will see massive payday at some point, even if that is a decade down the line.

All of this just points back to how much excitement there still is for AI development, even though there has been more skepticism in the market.

There is more talk of a bubble.

That has not stopped investment from climbing, even into these extremely risky businesses like the Neolabs.

And what kinds of challenges do Neolabs face?

I think that the big one is retaining the star talent that they have recruited or even keeping on some of the co-founders of these companies.

We've already seen several examples of big shot researchers who founded these Neolabs actually leaving pretty quickly to go back to OpenAI or to go to Meta because they were offered, in some cases, $100, $200, $300 million packages to leave.

And if they can't keep their talent, they don't have anything.

That was WSJ reporter Kate Clark.