AI Leaders Tout Agents & Wave Off Bubble Fears as the Industry Enters a Practical Phase
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There weren’t a lot of worries about a coming AI apocalypse or a market meltdown among the 300-plus founders and investors who gathered in San Francisco Wednesday for our flagship Cerebral Valley AI Summit, whatever the jitters on Wall Street.
Instead, the dominant theme among the the founders who took the stage was the vast potential they’re seeing in agentic AI.
Top investors suggested embracing the AI bubble, counterintuitive as that might seem. “If you think they can still be 5 or 10x bigger, maybe you should still be investing in them right now,” said Elad Gil, the big solo VC, referring to the foundation model companies. Ilya Fushman of Kleiner Perkins was equally sanguine: when the tech cycle is on the rise, “it’s always a bubble,” he said in an on-stage conversation with Gil.
The VCs were of course talking their book. But it wasn’t hard to see where the optimism was coming from. Foundation models were still seen as the market-makers: off the record chatter in the audience questioned whether OpenAI’s minor ChatGPT update signaled that a new version of Gemini could be imminent. News broke today that Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab is seeking a new round of funding at a valuation of $50 billion.
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A few quick highlights:
Mike Krieger, the Instagram co-founder who’s now running product at Anthropic, offered a thoughtful take on how the red-hot foundation model company thinks about its relationships with application providers — a big topic for the agentic era.
Replit’s Amjad Masad detailed how “vibe coding” is about much more than enabling anyone to build software. The tools can, in effect, allow businesses to build agents on the fly, and are producing huge value for customers.
Box founder Aaron Levie, whose cloud content-management company is the kind of SaaS firm that supposedly faces a mortal threat from AI, said that on the contrary, agents can help customers unlock
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