Will Vertical AI Disrupt OpenAI, Anthropic, and Grok?

Tell me about what you're most excited about today.

I'm most excited about vertical AI applications. I think the first inning of AI innovation, we've seen broad horizontal platforms, the big LLM labs achieve extraordinary things and they're starting to shift their focus from just providing an LLM to getting into horizontal applications. I think some of the most interesting investments are going to be in vertical AI applications.

And the reason I think vertical is so interesting is twofold. one is more defensible. Uh it's very difficult for those horizontal platforms to get access to all the workflow and data in a vertical application and many of the vertical application incumbents and and uh major customers are very reluctant to give their data to these AI labs.

But the second and maybe the more interesting reason is when you look what drives AI performance, it's context. So general intelligence is interestingly getting commoditized. But when you apply that intelligence to a particular vertical where you've got really rich idiosyncratic context, the performance can go through the roof.

And

I sometimes get upset with my LMS because I ask the LM a question, gives me an answer, two months later I realize that it was the wrong context or I didn't ask the right question. There's a contra there's a counter thesis to what you're saying which is that the horizontal LLMs will disrupt the vertical application of AI. Does it really come down to the proprietary information?

Is there more to it? Why why won't the large LM players disrupt the vertical AI players?

It's a few things I think. First, they've got a lot to do. They got a lot of their plate already to in this sort of commoditization struggle. They're all investing a lot to try to get incremental improvements in their core models better and they can't devote all their attention to trying to win every application category they can.