We’re in a unique moment for AI companies building their own foundation model.
First, there is a whole generation of industry veterans who made their name at major tech companies and are now going solo. You also have legendary researchers with immense experience but ambiguous commercial aspirations. There’s a clear chance that at least some of these new labs will become OpenAI-sized behemoths, but there’s also room for them to putter around doing interesting research without worrying too much about commercialization.
The end result? It’s getting hard to tell who is actually trying to make money.
To make things simpler, I’m proposing a kind of sliding scale for any company making a foundation model. It’s a five-level scale where it doesn’t matter if you’re actually making money – only if you’re trying to. The idea here is to measure ambition, not success.
Think of it in these terms:
Level 5: We are already making millions of dollars every day, thank you very much.
Level 4: We have a detailed multi-stage plan to become the richest human beings on Earth.
Level 3: We have many promising product ideas, which will be revealed in the fullness of time.
Level 2: We have the outlines of a concept of a plan.
Level 1: True wealth is when you love yourself.
The big names are all at Level 5: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and so on. The scale gets more interesting with the new generation of labs launching now, with big dreams but ambitions that can be harder to read.
Crucially, the people involved in these labs can generally choose whatever level they want. There’s so much money in AI right now that no one is going to interrogate them for a business plan. Even if the lab is just a research project, investors will count themselves happy to be involved. If you aren’t particularly motivated to become a billionaire, you might well live a happier life at Level 2 than at Level 5.
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The problems arise because it isn’t always clear where an AI lab lands on the scale — and a lot of the AI industry’s current drama comes from that confusion. Much of the …