Jordan Jacobs, an investor in Venture Capital Company Radical Ventures, spent the last few days of his company investor. They wanted to know about Deepseek, a Chinese artificial intelligence app that surpassed the app store on the weekend.
DeepSeek created a stronger AI model with much less money than most AI experts, and overturned many assumptions under the development of rapidly evolving technology. To calm the panic, Jacobs told investors that Radical Ventures had long invested in more efficient AI models, like what DeepSeek was created.
“Let’s focus on companies that are actually building actual business, not the company that is chasing science fiction,” said Jacobs.
NVIDIA, Google, Meta, and other huge high -tech companies have defeated the concept of AI for many years, but the impact has been felt beyond the largest companies and reached the Venture Capital Industry last week. Faced the barrage of question about DeepSeek. By cultivating billions of dollars in AI emerging companies, we are making a big bet on this technology.
For two years, venture capital companies have poured more than $ 155 billion in AI emerging companies between 2023 and 2024, according to Pitch Book, which tracks emerging companies. Two of these AI companies -Openai and humanity have raised $ 24 billion and $ 16 billion with the goal of constructing AI as as smart as humans. Openai’s evaluation has reached $ 157 billion (more than Pfizer and City Group), but Anthropic’s reputation reached $ 20 billion.
What Deepseek did is questioning the financial fever. If an emerging company in China can create an app that is as powerful as Openai’s ChatGpt and Anthropic’s Claude ChatBot with money, why do they need to collect so many cash?
According to Matt Turck, an investor in FirstMark Capital: However, he added that AI companies would ultimately need money and calculate electricity and infrastructure to provide their customers.
Venture capitalists have been discussing the best ways to invest in AI since Openai released Chatgpt in late 2022. Some investors claim to support Chatgpt and other products, which are often called “foundation models” because they can strengthen many applications, including chatbots. , Search engines and image generators are not a good investment because they are expensive to create a system and can easily copy competitors.
MARC Andreessen, an investor in Andreessen Horowitz, called such a system “competition to the bottom” last year. I guess that building a business with this type of AI is like selling rice that anyone can compete.
At Hubbub, which was caused by recent Deepseek, venture capital investors who have not invested in Openai or human -like model companies, have expected races to the bottom or have no money or opportunities. Was used. To share their opinions.
Eric Vishuria, a venture company benchmark investor, said on a social media on Monday and believes that the Foundation model is the “fastest depreciable asset in human history.” Anjney Midha, an investor in Andreessen Horowitz, wrote that DeepSeek stated that the current AI Foundation Model Market Structure is far from stable.
Investors who supported the Foundation Model Company defended the investment. Gavin Baker, an investor in ATREIDES Management, has invested in Elon Musk’s AI Startup X.AI and is restricted by the amount of data accessed by AI companies, so he feels good about betting. Ta. X.AI said he was in a powerful position because he had a unique data source of Social Network X, also owned by Musk.
“I feel very calm for me,” said Baker.
Other high -tech leders have analyzed DeepSeek’s claim that they spend only $ 6 million to create AI models. This is just a part of what other companies spend. Some of the former President Biden’s presidential AI’s presidential ordinance and the California attempts to enact AI to reduce the progress of the industry, and some of the people have sharpened their fingers with regulations. 。
They also lamented exports to powerful AI chips because they were effective in stopping Chinese technology. Some were attacked by so -called AI safety advocates trying to delay the development of AI for potential risks against mankind. Others have evoked patriotism, and Deepseek is a sign that the United States needs to move faster with AI.
Turck stated that it might be a bad news for Deepseek’s largest AI company, but it has become clear for other companies that have just started.
“Panic in the last few days is a dramatic overreaction,” he said in a message.
General Catalyst’s venture capital investor Niko Bonatsos said in an interview that Deepseek has lived a new company. “If you are building something that is touching AI and you are excited, absorbed in the past four days, you have not lived on which planet if you have not been scared or sleeping?” 。
Bonatos spent on the phone on Monday with the founder of a company that enthusiastically built the original “folk” version of DeepSeek’s technology. In other words, I copied and customized it. Deepseek has built a technology using AI tools that can be used by other high -tech companies and published the results of all use, which is a common high -tech industry practice called Open Source.
Many of these emerging companies had already built software on the platform developed by Openai and humanity. He said DeepSeek showed people a new technique for developing AI models, which are more training and maintaining AI models.
“It’s capitalism,” said Bonatos.
Hugging Face’s highest executive officer Clémentdelangue is an emerging company that AI companies can post and cooperate, and on Tuesday, more than 600 DeepSeek models are created on his site. He said he was done.
Investors are looking for more surprises in the next few weeks. AI said, “It’s a dynamic space that happens almost every day,” said Jacobs.
Cade Metz has contributed to the report.
