CVAI London: European Democracies on Alert, Bubble Worries, Anthropic Bullishness, Agents & Compute Shortages
Notes from talks with Cohere's Aidan Gomez, Alphabet's R. Martin Chavez, Recursive's Josh Tobin, Index's Danny Rimer, Sequoia's Luciana Lixandru & More
We just wrapped our mid-year Cerebral Valley AI Summit in London Wednesday. On stage, we heard from top model providers, AI application leaders, investors, and more.
We also anonymously surveyed the artificial intelligence insiders in attendance and you’ll definitely be surprised by what they had to say.
Key Takeaways from CVAI London
EUROPEAN SOVEREIGNTY. Both Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez and Sequoia Capital partner Luciana Lixandru saw opportunity in European leaders’ realization that they can no longer rely on the good will and protection of the United States of America. Gomez, whose company is Canadian, is in the process of merging his foundation model business with a German model provider. He’s living in Britain these days. “We want to build this alliance to help create capability beyond just one democracy,” Gomez said. Meanwhile, Sequoia just co-led a €500 million round in Stark Defense, a startup making kamikaze drones and other weapons. “Unfortunately, there’s nothing like conflict at the doorstep to really wake you up as a government,” Lixandru said. “Also I think governments realize that they’ve been under-investing in defense since before the war.”
MAJORITY WARN OF AI BUBBLE. They just don’t think it will pop this year. Fifty-seven CVAI London attendees filled out an anonymous survey that posed a series of questions about the AI industry today. (We’ll include the full survey results at the bottom of this post for paying Newcomer subscribers.) The majority of our AI insiders thought we were indeed in a bubble, but 51% said “yes bubble, not bursting this year,” compared with 5% who said “yes bubble, yes about to burst.” The remainder said, “no bubble, lots of room to run.”
ANTHROPIC BULLS. Multiple survey responses pointed to Anthropic optimism and OpenAI pessimism among the crowd. When asked what private unicorn they would like to own at today’s valuation, 54% said Anthropic. ElevenLabs was the second most popular answer with 13%. Surprisingly, Safe Superintelligence came in third with 8%. Meanwhile, when asked what company they would most like to short at its present valuation, a plurality of 33% answered OpenAI, with Perplexity next at 25%. Harvey came in third on the short list with 8%.
AGENT UTILITY & FORM FACTORS REMAIN TBD. An off-stage conversation with Stanislas Polu, co-founder of the agent orchestration startup Dust, illuminated some of the contradictions of agents at the moment. The company sees skills — specific, definable abilities — as perhaps the most useful framework for putting models to work. But many users prefer the concept of an agent with an identity and a particular set of skills. The industry is still sorting out whether humans will mostly interact with agents with unique identities and capabilities or with a more fluid, hive-mind-like AI with capabilities that can be turned on and off.
COMPUTE IS STILL HARD TO FIND. Recursive co-founder and CTO Josh Tobin was frank about one challenge his startup faces: finding enough compute. The lab is betting it can go all the way to recursive self-improvement with $650 million in funding co-led by Tom Hulme at GV and Greycroft, but it’s still having to run around the world pitching AI infrastructure providers on why they should let his startup pay for the privilege of using their hardware. “If it’s a bubble, there are no signs that I’ve seen that it’s like bursting right now,” Tobin said. “Basically all GPUs are essentially sold out, pretty much everywhere. People are kind of making reservations 6 to 18 months in advance and even for those it’s a competitive process.” Tobin argued that many AI foundation model companies believe that the compute shortage is only going to get worse. “One of things that’s fueling that dynamic is that there's a lot of people in the industry right now that believe that over the next couple of years the compute crunch is going to get even worse than it is today, and so it’s creating this race dynamic where these companies are buying up everything that they can get their hands on because they believe that the prices are going to go up in the future or availability is going to go down.”
FOUNDERS SHOULD GO DEEP ON EXPERTISE. The big labs may be incredibly well-capitalized and own the underlying model layer, but speakers on stage encouraged earlier-stage founders not to despair. While OpenAI and Anthropic pour gobs of money and research into AI coding tools, Tobin said that this focus is leaving audio, vision, video, and consumer applications genuinely underserved. ElevenLabs landed many plaudits throughout the day as one company which successfully carved out its market for voice models. R. Martin Chavez, the former Goldman Sachs chief information officer-turned vice chairman at Sixth Street, offered up the sage wisdom he got from Goldman’s head of sales: “Customers buy a product when they have unbearable pain and you have convinced them that only your software product can put an end to their pain. Everything else is just getting lucky.”
The Cerebral Valley AI Summit is co-hosted by Newcomer and Weekend co-founders Max Child and James Wilsterman.
Many thanks to our sponsors Nebius, Index Ventures, Higgsfield, and Weekend for making it possible.