You Can't Not
I had breakfast with another VC today, on the day that Ami Labs announced its $1bn Seed round (no, that's not a typo) to build world models for the next leg of AI.
Ami's founder, Yann LeCun, is the former Chief AI Scientist for Meta and undoubtedly one of the OGs of the entire field. He's been on the record for a while laying out the limitations of large language models and advocating that focus (and capital) should also be permeating into other areas of the field.
Well, here comes the capital.
I asked my breakfast companion - who participated in the round - how they got their heads around the underwriting case for the investment given the ~$4.5bn post-money valuation (it's always 10-20% dilution, no matter the round size...).
The answer was pretty straightforward: "It's AI. It's Yann LeCun. You can't not."
I appreciated the candour and in their position (at what many would call a Tier 1 fund), I can see why "you can't not" participate in the seed round of arguably the most credible AI challenger story in Europe.
But as someone at least trying to stay rational in a world surrounded by irrationality and hype, it also took me by surprise.
The most striking thing about that type of dynamic is that in many ways it's a "free shot" for the investors. If it works out, they look like geniuses with the foresight to believe even when others (like me, in this post) question the rationale - and the carried interest that goes with it. And if it doesn't work, they have a pretty reasonable excuse... "It was AI. It was Yann LeCun. We couldn't not." In other words, why wouldn’t you?
Time will tell who's right and wrong (probably, as ever, nobody will be either and everyone will be both). But it's a sign of the times that some of the smartest people in the game are distilling their investment theses down to something that would fit on a Post-It note.