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2023 Elad Gil predictions

www.curiousdk.com

2023 Elad Gil predictions

startup macro, LLMs, defense-tech

DK
Jan 6, 2023
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2023 Elad Gil predictions

www.curiousdk.com

Macro on startups

  • “Startups are an act of desperation” - desperation went out of the ecosystem over the last few years with people being very status/money focused. now people are building for other reasons including impact/products/career acceleration

  • 2022 was the warm-up to bad times… 2023 is the bad times - we’ll see mid-late stage, layoffs, blow-ups, down-rounds, shutdowns

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ChatGPT demonstrates potential of LLM, but still early

  • chatGPT is a key moment demonstrating the potential of LLM models

  • who develops/commercializes this? maybe OpenAI, Google or someone new

  • competition creates the need to reexamine assumptions about safety and reputation risks

  • virtual sssistants (like adept.ai) understand language and take action

On AI models

  • AI open vs closed - the massive models today largely closed (e.g. Chinchilla, GPT-3.5) while the image-gen models more open (Stable Diffusion)

  • image models are easier from a cost/quality-expectation-threshold

  • higher threshold of quality required on language-gen than image gen

  • 2x2: image vs. language, big vs. small model

Costs to train LLM models today

  • costs to train a GPT-4 competitor from scratch might be tens of millions to low hundreds of millions of dollars today depending on baselines starting from

  • capital scale will hit billions shortly, limited window of time for startups to enter LLMs

  • does the industry structure look more like the cloud world with multiple competitors or more like semiconductor world where just TSMC won?

Space and Defense

  • SpaceX Starlink

  • Anduril becomes the default defense-tech startup

  • defense tech

    1. rise of drones

    2. rise of machine learning/machine vision

    3. cybersecurity

  • why defense tech hasn’t worked well before

    1. no “why now”

    2. defense tech starts with a point product as a subcontractor

    3. need a lot of capital

    4. business model of cost-plus versus - Anduril sells gross margin model

    5. execution speed of deal-closing

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2023 Elad Gil predictions

www.curiousdk.com
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