20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside
Eiso Kant, Co-founder and CEO of Poolside.ai, dives into the competitive world of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) funding, sharing insights on their recent $500M raise. He discusses how Poolside differentiates itself from other AI models and the challenges of competing with giants like Nvidia. The conversation touches on scaling laws, the future of model performance, and whether $600M is sufficient to remain relevant in the rapidly evolving AI landscape. Kant also explores the dynamics of AI infrastructure and the emotional journey of entrepreneurs.
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insights INSIGHT
Poolside's AGI Approach
Poolside.ai focuses on building advanced AI for software development to achieve AGI.
They believe coding offers a large, deterministic dataset ideal for training powerful AI models.
insights INSIGHT
Capturing the Coding Process
Current AI models struggle to capture the iterative thinking process in coding.
Poolside uses reinforcement learning and code execution feedback to address this data gap.
insights INSIGHT
Compute Bottleneck
Compute is the biggest bottleneck in AI model progression, not data or algorithms.
Compute is essential for generating synthetic data, which is crucial for improving models.
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How to Drive Disruption and Accelerate Transformation
Josh Linkner
The book emphasizes the importance of reinvention in business strategies, highlighting that companies, communities, and individuals often fail due to a lack of continuous transformation. Josh Linkner identifies six elements in any business ripe for reinvention and provides examples, methods, and step-by-step techniques for creating deliberate, productive disruption. The book also explores the transformation of Detroit as a profound example of large-scale organizational and personal transformation, emphasizing the need to drive change rather than be driven by it.
Eiso Kant is the Co-Founder and CTO of Poolside.ai, building next-generation AI for software engineering. Just last week, Poolside announced their $500M Series B valuing the company at $3BN. Prior to Poolside, Eiso founded Athenian, a data-enabled engineering platform. Before that, he built source{d} - the world’s first company dedicated to applying AI to code and software.
1. Raising $600M to Compete in the AGI Race:
What is Poolside? How does Poolside differentiate from other general-purpose LLMs?
How much of Poolside’s latest raise will be spent on compute?
How does Eiso feel about large corporates being a large part of startup LLM provider’s funding rounds?
Why did Poolside choose to only accept investment from Nvidia?
Is $600M really enough to compete with the mega war chests of other LLMs?
2. The Big Questions in AI:
Will scaling laws continue? Have we reached a stage of diminishing returns in model performance for LLMs?
What is the biggest barrier to the continued improvement in model performance; data, algorithms or compute?
To what extent will Nvidia’s Blackwell chip create a step function improvement in performance?
What will OpenAI’s GPT5 need to have to be a gamechanger once again?
3. Compute, Chips and Cash:
Does Eiso agree with Larry Ellison; “you need $100BN to play the foundation model game”? What does Eiso believe is the minimum entry price?
Will we see the continuing monopoly of Nvidia? How does Eiso expect the compute landscape to evolve?
Why are Amazon and Google best placed when it comes to reducing cost through their own chip manufacturing?
Does Eiso agree with David Cahn @ Sequoia, “you will never train a frontier model on the same data centre twice”?
Can the speed of data centre establishment and development keep up with the speed of foundation model development?
4. WTF Happens to The Model Layer: OpenAI and Anthropic…
Does Eiso agree we are seeing foundation models become commoditised?
What would Eiso do if he were Sam Altman today?
Is $6.6BN really enough for OpenAI to compete against Google, Meta etc…?
OpenAI at $150BN, Anthropic at $40BN and X.ai at $24BN. Which would Eiso choose to buy and why?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch 
