Why No Company Will Win the AI War: The "Rebel Alliance" Thesis | Nick Grossman
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
We're going to absolutely be living in a multi-agent world, thousands, millions of agents, and that there will be agents that kind of look like people or teammates that you talk to. And then there will also be agents that are just embedded in all of our systems.
And what's going on, guys? Today, we've got a great conversation with Nick Grossman. He's a general partner at Union Square Ventures. And in this conversation, we go deep down the AI rabbit hole. We talk about a thesis that he has called the Rebel Alliance. It's the idea that there's going to be tons of companies and that the AI trend is way, way bigger than you're thinking about. On top of that, we get into some of the nuanced details about what's happening in terms of building this technology, where value is going to accrue. What are the different use cases? Where is the technology going to be valuable? And what are some of the negative trade-offs? All of that and much more in this conversation with Nick Grossman.
All right, Nick, you guys have a great piece that you put out that talks about the Rebel Alliance when it comes to how the AI industry is going to evolve. What exactly is the Rebel Alliance?
So the Rebel Alliance is our view that AI is too big an opportunity to be dominated by one or two or three companies and that it's actually forming into a massive ecosystem. And we're seeing that happen in real time as agents and agentic approaches start to take hold. And that's really two things. It's like agents that interact with consumers as AI doctor agents, AI financial advisor agents, these sort of personified agents are going to be approaching every sector and every use case. And then also under the hood, it's agents as infrastructure agents. What we're seeing now is the agentic stack is forming like the compute stack formed in the prior eras of the web and mobile, where we're not just talking about what are the products that people interact with, but how are every product going to get built.
That's agents under the hood, agents as infrastructure, fleets of agents that are going to get orchestrated in millions of ways. What that says to us is that agents and the agentic AI approach is taking over, And it's going to look more like the fabric of computing and apps than I think the thing that a lot of us are maybe afraid of, which is everything collapsing into one or two apps like a chat GPT or a clock.
Now, if you're talking like Peter Thiel, he'd be like competitions for losers. You know, I want to find a monopoly. He's done a great job of that throughout his career. You're really arguing that like that is not going to be the end state here.
Well, there are real network effects in AI, right, in model training and, you know, quality. And so, you know, so far we've seen compounding advantage going to the big labs. And the big question has been competition. how far will that take us and how much of an advantage will that accrue, especially as they go farther up into the application layer and get access into more data from more places. So that's the worry that it's going to just compound and that there's going to be an unassailable gravity into the big AI companies. But I think what we're seeing is a couple of things. We're seeing real competition among the models. So it's, you know, it's the frontier models from the big labs, but also the leading open source models are really good and they keep getting better and better in lockstep.
And developers are experiencing a lot of choice and are pitting models against one another. And then we're also seeing that like the world is big and wide. And if you think about the advantage is being able to capture data and use that data to improve systems, that data is going to show up in lots and lots of places and a lot of that data value is going to accrue not just to the model layer, but also the application layer and other layers. So it feels like a huge opportunity for a lot of folks to win.
Now, let's talk about a couple of different components. And I was telling you before we started that we've been building Silvio, which is this AICFO.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–3:46
2
What is the 'Rebel Alliance' thesis and why won't one company dominate AI?
3:46–34:44
3
How do general-purpose models vs. specialized workflows coexist in USV's portfolio?
34:44–40:23
4
Why are compute costs driving model routing and multi-model orchestration?
40:23–51:37
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The Pomp Podcast
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