<aside> <img src="/icons/info-alternate_gray.svg" alt="/icons/info-alternate_gray.svg" width="40px" /> I don’t see this as a highly adversarial situation. More eyeballs on the area the better in the early days and good work from one helps everyone. In the mid-term it probably turns a bit more adversarial when we complete for developer adoption. And towards the end it certainly will be adversarial.
There is a strong possibility of partnerships and mergers with many of these projects.
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| Have line of contact to founders | Friendly terms with founders | Have met in person |
|---|---|---|
| ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
They are working on completely new training methods (PCN) that has no backward pass. I think this is speculative and won’t work. They are clearly legit ML people though, and in general this is the kind of research that is actually research, so have to give them credit for that.
Pitch slides. Also stating they want to scale PCN to 1B params.
| Have line of contact to founders | Friendly terms with founders | Have met in person |
|---|---|---|
| ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
This is the earliest and biggest fish. They raised $43M from A16Z crypto mid 2023, but have been relatively quiet since then. It is worth reading their lightpaper.
Ben Feilding (Founder) seems extremely smart to me. He correctly saw this years before anyone else did. I do not know how. I know him, and he’s given me lots of helpful early advice around the raising. Despite the fact that we will likely be competing I think both of us want to maintain a good relationship here.
There are rumours that GenSyn is in trouble. I haven’t been able to pin down exactly why. They have diluted significantly this may be part of it. The also committed to the biggest vision which was to build the entire thing from scratch, that's also pretty hard.
Met Jeff in Sep. Either he is playing dumb or he’s not on it. I, and many others feel there is no progress going on there.
The more I talk to Ben the more I think he has a fundamentally different world model to me; he thinks base models will be ‘commoditized’ and competition will be around personalization, UX,
August: Jeff is CSO at GenSyn.
