Elad Gil on which AI markets have winners -- and which are still wide open | TechCrunch

"I started investing in generative AI in 2021 ... at the time, not very many people were paying that much attention to it,"

"The step between 2 and 3 was so large that if you just extrapolated out the scaling laws, or the curve, then you could really assume that this was going to be incredibly important,"

"I used to say at the time that AI was the one market where the more I learn, the less I know. Usually, the more you learn about something, the better you know it, the easier you can predict the future, etc. But AI was just hazy. There's just too much uncertainty. And I think there's still markets like that in AI,"

A major capability leap between GPT-2 (2019) and GPT-3 (2021) triggered early investment in generative AI. Investors supported both foundational model makers (OpenAI, Mistral) and downstream application companies (Perplexity, Harvey, Character.ai, Decagon, Abridge). Subsequent model releases in 2024–2025 produced repeated, large capability jumps that frequently reshaped the landscape. The field has been unusually unpredictable, with increased knowledge often revealing greater uncertainty. Despite broad uncertainty, some segments—particularly foundational models—are showing concentration and clear leaders, while a wide range of other AI markets remains open and competitive.

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