Superintelligence, Bubbles And Big Bets: AI Investing in 2024 | Matt Turck & Aman Kabeer, FirstMark
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What major AI funding rounds and infrastructure investments defined 2024?
Hi, I'm Matt Turk from Firstmark, and today we have a very special episode of The Matt Podcast where my Firstmark colleague Aman Kabir and I talk about what we see in the AI market from a venture capital investor perspective at the end of 2024. We talk about our favorite AI news stories. Meta, Google, and Amazon are on track to invest $200 billion in AI infrastructure. Elon said we were like two years away from AGI. And what we see in terms of valuations and dealmaking in the space, that's the year of big evaluations, big numbers, big announcement, big expenditure. We discuss some of the most important questions to think about in 2024 in AI. Are we in a capital B bubble? Is GBD5 going to be much better than GBD4?
Is it the death of SaaS? And most importantly, we talk about what we are most excited about as venture investors in the space. The market has started crystallizing around a handful of early winners. That space continues to be fascinating to watch from our perspective as venture investors.
Excited to hopefully be a part of it.
Please enjoy this conversation with Zeman and I. We are back. Indeed we are. So for anyone that listens to the Mad Podcast on a regular basis, you will know that the usual format is that we interview great founders, researchers, or analysts in the data and AI space. But occasionally we serve as talking heads. We did this last time back in March in connection with the release of the 2024 Mad Landscape. And the world loved it.
Yeah.
Anyway, fun doing it. So as we are crazily enough towards the end of 2024, a few weeks before the end of the year, we thought it'd be fun to check in again. And so what we're going to do today is a little bit of an overview of what's happening in AI today, seen from a VC perspective. the news stories that really caught our attention, some of the things that we see in the market from a valuation or deal-making perspective, some of the big questions that one should probably think about towards the end of 2024, and where we're at and what we're excited about as venture investors. Let's get into it. Sounds like a plan. All right. So, you know, maybe just to start with, it continues to be crazy in the world of AI.
It's really interesting, isn't it? We are almost two years into the ChatGPT era. ChatGPT came out on November 30th. 2022, so we're almost at the two year anniversary. And, you know, often you see those hype cycles sort of slow down after a bit, run out of steam. And here, you know, it's totally another case. In fact, it seems to be accelerating. So everything is big this year. That's the year of like big evaluations, big numbers, big announcement, big expenditure. We just had the biggest venture capital round of all time with OpenAI, which raised $6.6 billion at $157 billion post-money valuation.
There's also kind of the biggest seed round ever, right, that we saw, Safe Superintelligence, helmed by former OpenAI chief scientist and co-founder Ilya Sutskovor, raising roughly a billion dollars in cash at a $5 billion valuation, pre-basically anything. So pre-product, inception round type of deal. And, you know, we also had the biggest acquihire of all time. So for those of you who don't know, $2.7 billion acquihire by Google of the Character AI founders who, funny enough, were already at Google before they went to start Character AI. So it's just a
re-acquihire. Yeah,
exactly.
Boomerang acquihire. Yes, yes. And all those numbers are being thrown around. We're clearly in this phase of huge investment in AI infrastructure. The three top companies, Meta, Google, and Amazon, are on track to invest $200 billion in AI infrastructure this year. Favorite things over the last few weeks is Masayoshi Son, the CEO of SoftBank, mentioning just a few days ago that Inezi estimated to reach superintelligence. That was going to be a cumulative... CapEx, capital expenditure budget of $9 trillion, which, you know, in typical Masa fashion, he said, was actually probably a pretty small number.
Yeah, everything is big with Masa. So this is right in his wheelhouse.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What major AI funding rounds and infrastructure investments defined 2024?
0:00–6:57
2
How is AI’s massive energy and water consumption reshaping the nuclear power conversation?
6:57–13:49
3
Why are AI valuations soaring and what does the NVIDIA price‑earnings ratio tell us?
13:49–22:40
4
Are we currently in an AI bubble or is the market still justified?
22:40–30:45
5
What evidence exists for real AI demand versus speculative capital spending?
30:45–37:29
6
Which consumer‑focused AI applications are emerging as the next “native” businesses?
37:29–45:38
7
How is generative AI changing SaaS business models and will SaaS die?
45:38–54:31
8
What are the biggest opportunities for AI‑driven enterprise apps and autonomous agents?
54:31–1:09:31
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from The MAD Podcast with Matt Turck
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