My personal thoughts (will be posting a bit later today Australia time, pls challenge any thoughts!!) 🙂What do the OpenAI Developer day releases mean for VC investing?It's pretty insane.Three months ago now we released our original thesis on AI Agents. We knew there was a lot of whitespaces to play into, what I didn't expect was how fast OpenAI would play into this.Yesterday, we saw the release of GPT Store (GPT marketplace), Custom GPTs, native API assistants, GPT-4 Turbo, fine-tuning, "seeding" & multi-model improvements and the copyright shield.Key updated thoughts and curiosities 👇Agent deployment and B2C apps will be the disrupted earliest. The new Custom GPTs directly competes with incumbents, essentially democratizing the build of agents/GPTs. Defensibility could be found by those with deep product or UX foci and IP in integrations / tooling. Dust's recent developments are a testament to this.It will be extremely hard for startups with a marketplace play as a "wedge" to play going forward  given the distribution advantage OpenAI has (competing with GPT Store). These players must think of new ways to differentiate other than being "first movers".Aligned to our initial thesis, B2B startups solving hair on fire problems, with strong distribution advantage and customer stickiness will be able to continue to compete (and hopefully build proprietary "data moats" with time).The tide is rising and AgentOps will be a hot, with white space to play into the infrastructure on this. This includes multi-agent protocols, data traceability (copyright AI is still a framework), agent UI/UX etc. Players like LlamaIndex, LainChain (OpenGPT) are making fast moves here.We will see an influx of new agent apps and gradual consolidation. Differentiation, defensibility and distribution strategy will continue to be key questions for builders in the field.Updated and colour coded thesis map below.

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Kevin Zhu

6 days ago

Back to thishttps://a16z.com/cloud-lessons-for-the-ai-era

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Andreessen Horowitz

The Race to Capture Value: Cloud Lessons for the AI Era | Andreessen Horowitz

When a platform shift reshapes the technology landscape, who wins? We unpack the market dynamics between startups and incumbents from the SaaS and cloud era that are likely to play out in the AI era.

Written by

Peter Lauten and David George

Est. reading time

11 minutes

Aug 10th

https://a16z.com/cloud-lessons-for-the-ai-era

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