AI资本竞赛：种子轮9亿不够，前沿模型撞上资本墙

9 billion doesn't clear the bar for seed investing in 2026.

Let me tell you one thing I guarantee. If you get 15x on your failures and eventually you'll die a rich man. Welcome back to another week with the trio and hell and video are going fast. Then we move to open AI where CFO Sarah Fry says, "Hey, we're definitely going public this year." And then we discuss a really tough week in the public markets for a lot of the biggest AI names. The VC money ran out on Entropic and Open AAI long ago, which is why no VC owns more than 1 or 2% of either of them.

I think you have to believe we're less than a third of the way through this cycle.

It's all about code. That's the only sales that matter.

Jesus Christ. If 30% of my company leaves to go work for Harvey, I'm dead in the water.

Silicon Valley forgets every 3 years that the average American is not trying to be efficient.

Ready to go. Guys, I am so excited for this. It's so nice to be back. I feel like locked in when I'm in the studio. I have my big table. I have the agenda. And we're going to start with Nvidia. Moving across different layers of the stack. And we're going to start with the model layer where Nvidia is paying $6 billion to license PID's model factory and investing a billion more at a 12 billion pre- money valuation moving 109 engineers over to Neotron to help build it.

Pretty big news, especially on the American open model front. So, there's a lot here. I'd love to hear your guys' thoughts, but man, the one that gave me the feels or that hit me was that letter that was um you know, the the investor letter that was published on X. Thanks leak leaking VC or whomever it was. But basically saying, you know, we we couldn't raise the 2 billion to buy 40,000 GPUs. We couldn't that deal that maybe we talked about half a year ago.

It seemed like they were going to build their own um massive data center. They couldn't get the money um and they wouldn't have compute going into next year. So they had no choice but to fail up for 6 billion plus topping off a billion to 12 billion. But it read it read almost depressing uh and um it's also maybe a reminder that despite Nvidia seemingly funding everyone on planet Earth that you know the the gravy train the VC gravy train can only last so long.

There's only so much funding right from big funds. Maybe Rory sees it differently but it seemed like uh uh tough they couldn't they couldn't raise the two billion in in this environment. not being critical, but it just showed that uh infinite capitalism is infinite as it looks. Even in the age of AI,

the facts are correct. I thought, first of all, I thought it was an excellent letter. I mean, I read it and I reread it and there was some really good phrases in there. One of them I want to pick up and it said, you know, we have found ourselves on the right side of prediction in a market which has scaled exponentially in terms of capital intensity, which is nicely. What they're basically saying is we were right 3 years ago that there was a market for a US open- source model and we've built that model.

We've done everything we said we'd do and the capital intensity for the next turn of the model crank is just as you said way beyond us, right? So nicely phrased, right? And so so a couple of things here you could look at that and go I mean you could look at that and go oh they they did something that they took on a task they weren't able to do with the capital. Oh that's a negative. On the other hand, they made money for themselves and all their shareholders.

And I think the lesson here is, and we talked about last week, in a market that's exploding. Sometimes bets that on a standalone basis really just can't get to a positive DCF. You know, they just couldn't make the math on a standalone basis still have pretty significant value to the acquirer. Because from the perspective of Nvidia, they looked at exactly the same facts and said, "Well, you know, we have capital. It turns out we have access to GPU because we make GPU, right? and you've kind of carried the ball down the field this far.

We'll take it from here and frankly we'll give you a pretty compelling return. I mean I know you're a small poolside shareholder Harry. So all those guys made really good money and the company gets to go stand alone and continue on. So I I I thought the lesson here is you're right Jason in one kind of negative way the lesson is it's almost impossible to compete now at the frontier and by the way that has positive implications for open AI and entropic we should talk about in a second.

So the negative lesson for everyone else is it is almost the the next smartest people who were really going for it just hit the capital wall. So probably all the other people behind them are going to hit the same wall. Right? That's the negative implication. And the positive implication is sometimes trying and moving the ball in a hyperrowth market, you can still get a very compelling acquisition, right? you know, in a different market, if this if you'd run out quote unquote run out of money, if you had reached the next generation where you can no longer finance the company in a time when the capital markets were oppressed or there was some feeling that the overall, you know, overall kind of buoy around equity, sorry, around AI wasn't as strong, you might have had a very different outcome there because your fate was outside your control, right?

But I think in this market, it pays to take risks. It's what we were talking about last week in cursor. And I'm sorry if I'm rambling a little. Even when you have this kind of oh on a DCF MBA basis, it's not quite great. It turns out if you're moving in the right direction and you execute and build a product that's valuable right now, you're getting great exits. And I think there's going to be a ton more. I think I said last week there's going to be a ton more of these kind of exits and we'll be talking about them.

So yeah, I was I was kind of I read that and I thought as an investor if all the time you're saying is sometimes doing things where there is a fair amount of capital raising risk can still pay off in the nut market. In a very different market it wouldn't have but here it did.

I mean the additions that I'd have is like unwaveringly common thing that I see across all investors that I engage with, friends, people we have on the show is like Neolab's just going out of favor and next generation model providers and companies going out of favor too. And I'm not surprised that poolside found it challenging to raise as much as they did. That's universal from everyone that I speak to. Second, founders are gonna make a billion each.

It's a lot. And then third is that for me as an investor, I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, but I get in trouble whatever I say these days, so [ __ ] it. You know, it'll be like a 15x for us as a seed investor. It's pretty great.

Absolutely. Pretty amazing. I think I was very uncrisp a few minutes ago. Ch when you're in the direction of travel, even when you're wrong, you can make a ton of money because you've moved, you know, because you've created something of value to the acquirer. Different market could have been a very different outcome.

Does this really move the needle for Nvidia in their ability to make Neatron truly competitive?

Well, there's two questions within that. One, and I'm sorry. One is does this is this additive to Neatron? Then the second question is does Neatron even neatron even if it is competitive does it move the needle but if you zoom out a level right now there's a whole bunch of Chinese open source models that are getting a lot of the token volume which means they're doing a lot of the compute even if they're not getting a lot of the margin right and if I'm the maker of compute if I can get an open it's awesome for Nvidia if there's a viable US open- source model running on Nvidia chips taking market share away f