AI Leaders Tout Agents & Wave Off Bubble Fears as the Industry Enters a Practical Phase
Techno-optimism reigned at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit even as business models remain in flux & AGI fades from the conversation
There weren’t a lot of worries about a coming AI apocalypse or a market meltdown among the 300-plus founders and investors who gathered in San Francisco Wednesday for our flagship Cerebral Valley AI Summit, whatever the jitters on Wall Street.
Instead, the dominant theme among the the founders who took the stage was the vast potential they’re seeing in agentic AI.
Top investors suggested embracing the AI bubble, counterintuitive as that might seem. “If you think they can still be 5 or 10x bigger, maybe you should still be investing in them right now,” said Elad Gil, the big solo VC, referring to the foundation model companies. Ilya Fushman of Kleiner Perkins was equally sanguine: when the tech cycle is on the rise, “it’s always a bubble,” he said in an on-stage conversation with Gil.
The VCs were of course talking their book. But it wasn’t hard to see where the optimism was coming from. Foundation models were still seen as the market-makers: off the record chatter in the audience questioned wither OpenAI’s minor ChatGPT update signaled that a new version of Gemini could be imminent. News broke today that Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab is seeking a new round of funding at a valuation of $50 billion.
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A few quick highlights:
Mike Krieger, the Instagram co-founder who’s now running product at Anthropic, offered a thoughtful take on how the red-hot foundation model company thinks about its relationships with application providers — a big topic for the agentic era.
Replit’s Amjad Masad detailed how “vibe coding” is about much more than enabling anyone to build software. The tools can, in effect, allow businesses to build agents on the fly, and are producing huge value for customers.
Box founder Aaron Levie, whose cloud content-management company is the kind of SaaS firm that supposedly faces a mortal threat from AI, said that on the contrary, agents can help customers unlock the vast power of SaaS software that most of them barely touch.
Parag Agrawal, the former CEO of Twitter, is among those building infrastructure for the coming agent army: his startup Parallel Web Systems, which is building a web API tailored for agents, announced a new $100 million funding round led by Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures in his on-stage appearance.
Andy Konwinski, who made his name as a co-founder of both Databricks and Perplexity and last year launched the venture fund Laude, offered some blunt views on how the US was in danger of losing the AI race to China, due to disinvestment in academic research.
All the good vibes notwithstanding, it was clear from the on-stage discussions that there’s still a ton of work to do in making agents reliable enough for critical business functions, and capable enough to work with other agents in executing complex tasks. Only when that happens will enterprise customers go from experimentation to shelling out the big bucks.
There was also little consensus on some big questions, namely what the dominant AI interfaces of the future will look like, and where open-source LLMs will fit into the infrastructure stack.
We took the temperature on the AI hype with a pre-event survey. Despite many of our guests’ onstage bullishness about the speed of AI improvements, in private some were more cautious. In answer to a question on what OpenAI’s revenue for 2026 will look like (it’s currently projected at $20 billion for 2025), respondents predicted that the AI giant would only increase sales by $10 billion — a lot in almost any context other than the current AI moment. You can see the full survey results here.
We were delighted to have San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie join us to talk about how the AI capital is on the rise, critics like Marc Benioff notwithstanding. Even city hall officials have embraced it for their day-to-day work, Lurie said. We didn’t need much convincing ourselves: we’re already looking forward to our next event in the center of the AI universe.
The Cerebral Valley AI Summit is cohosted by Newcomer and Volley.
Special thanks to our sponsors IREN, Oracle, Nvidia, Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, Fluidstack, Crusoe, Nebius, Wilson Sonsini, SamsungNEXT, Brex, Alexa Fund, MongoDB, Deloitte, Rackhouse Venture Capital, HumanX, Sapphire Ventures, Stripe, and Dell Technologies Capital.
Newcomer subscribers can scroll down to get the full breakdown of our on-stage content from yesterday.
Learning to Love the Bubble
