Responded to the other poster with the same question.
Everyone says 1 out of 100 makes it big but the top 5-10% of a portfolio is still substantial. If we’re only giving the money to companies with revenue the odds of success are likely improved.
Startup investing is trivially easy. You give money to good companies and founders. There’s just a bunch of BS that gets in the way. Like giving massive money to big corps that don’t need it instead of startups that do.
Here are some top AI companies per Crunchbase: OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, CoreWeave, Glean, Perlexity, PlayAI, Cohere, Tempus, Cyera, Replit, Windsurf, Mistral, Anysphere, Scale, Harvey, Thinking Machines Lab, helsing, Cluely, Suno, Clay, Crunchbase (lol), Lubega Geoffery, Caris LIfe Sciences, C3 AI, Runway, LangChain, Rigetti Computing, Cowbell, Laurel, SoundHound, Voxel, Harmonic, Builder, ElevenLabs, Decagon, Spring Health, Lovable.... alright I have a meeting to get to.
OpenAI - DoD invested in them and now I guess you agree with it!
Anthropic - same as above
xAI - same as above
CoreWeave - Doesn't make LLMs
Glean - Doesn't make LLMs (wow this startup investing thing might be harder than for you than you thought!)
Perplexity - Has finetuned LLama models AFAIK. Maybe you think Meta should've gotten the nod from DoD as well?
PlayAI - AFAIK only voices
Cohere - Not sure if they are LLama or otherwise
Cyera - Doesn't make LLMs
Replit - Doesn't make LLMs
Windsurf - Doesn't make LLMs
Mistral - Does make LLMs, you got one! Is French, though.
Anysphere - They make an IDE called Cursor
Scale - Doesn't make LLMs, basically a Meta subsidiary (you really must have wanted Meta to get the nod too!)
Harvey - Legal focus, not general
Thinking Machines - Mira Murati's company, just started 5mos ago, no public products. Definitely don't fit your definition of "has revenue"
helsing - Hadn't heard of them, are German.
Cluely - LOL
Suno - If the DoD gets into music generation this would be a great choice.
Clay - Don't know them, doubt they have LLMs.
Crunchbase - lol is correct
Lubega Geoffery - No idea
Caris LIfe Sciences - Life sciences doesn't sound right!
C3 AI - Scam
Runway - Media generation, not general use
LangChain - Doesn't make LLMs
Rigetti Computing - Dude, come on. They're a quantum computing company
Cowbell - Don't know them, but a google shows they're an insurance company lol
Almost all the rest don't even have anything to do with AI. So all-in-all, nearly a complete failure at suggesting even close to 20 alternatives for the DoD to invest in. Your answer didn't even hit US companies that do have some alternatives: Meta, MSFT, AMZN, SSI maybe?
I understand the sentiment to create healthy market but only a few handful company than can create general use LLM, most of them is just wrapper or small fine tune model for specific use case
I don't for anyone doing serious work. Use the Gemini family, O3 and Claude if you want to gsd. The DoD made the correct call IMO. Kimi K2 is also potentially interesting for non-defense purposes but I haven't spent enough time with it yet.
> My fund will never be $1B but that’s fine :)
It's "trivially easy" for you and 10% of your investments are expected to have "massive breakthroughs". Your strategy of "give money to good companies and founders" should easily enable you to reach $1B AUM!
not that they're great or very remarkable, but they can get the job done, and in a world where anthropic tries to assert dominance by fucking cursor seems relevant to the future to have your own models
Everyone says 1 out of 100 makes it big but the top 5-10% of a portfolio is still substantial. If we’re only giving the money to companies with revenue the odds of success are likely improved.
Startup investing is trivially easy. You give money to good companies and founders. There’s just a bunch of BS that gets in the way. Like giving massive money to big corps that don’t need it instead of startups that do.