The VCs on this panel would bet on open-source AI over OpenAI and Anthropic, and not because the open models are better. Jenny Fielding says customers care only about price and quality, and that open models are close enough to win. Dave McClure says he would put all of his money into hardware. His startups are already switching, he says, and the CEOs of ElevenLabs, Lovable and Figma have told him they do not trust the frontier labs: they see OpenAI and Anthropic as future competitors, not suppliers. Fielding is betting that price and quality will decide it, and the labs can cut prices. McClure's reason is trust, and a price cut doesn't fix that.
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- 0:00>> Well, there's no rules around open source. You can, you know, the, um,
- 0:03existing models can say they want to slow down. They can change their
- 0:06pricing. The open source guys can do whatever they want, and they're just
- 0:09going to, at the end of the day, consumers don't care. They just care
- 0:12about price and quality, and they're so close to catching up that we're going to
- 0:17go all open source. >> Most applications don't need the latest
- 0:21and greatest features of those latest models. And so when you have and the
- 0:27problem is that the model has to figure out well is this a complex task and I
- 0:30need to actually send it to like this model expensive tokens and so on so
- 0:35forth or can I send it to a lower cost
- 0:38easier you know uh kind of routine. I don't know how they do that because I'm
- 0:43sure that they it's it's a genuine issue for them like not that many people need
- 0:47those kind of latest models. They they need it to compete against themselves
- 0:51but most applications are fairly benign. Okay, Dave, you're you're my cleanup
- 0:55hitter here. I always put you right there in the fourth slot there. Does my
- 0:58uh No, I'm seriously a home run hitter. You have lots of bangers. So, you heard
- 1:02all of our positions. I would go 100% into the hardware stack. I think the
- 1:06frontier models are troubled because I'm basing it on what I see on the field.
- 1:10Visav my startups are all going open source.
- 1:15Do not want to invest in the frontier models anymore. And then I talked to 11
- 1:19Labs. I talked to lovable. Those CEOs indicated to me that they are also
- 1:23following suit Figma as well. They don't trust the Frontier models. They think
- 1:27they're going to be competitors. What do
- 1:28you think closes conversation up for me?
