Eric Newcomer, founder of the newsletter “Newcomer” on the startup and venture capital industry, discusses the evolution of the AI market and his experiences hosting the Cerebral Valley Summit in this interview. He notes a shift in focus from building foundational AI models to developing applications leveraging existing models. He highlights the emergence of AI-powered applications in various fields, including music creation, coding assistance, synthetic data generation, and customer support. He also shares his observations on the VC downturn and the challenges facing emerging managers, as well as his thoughts on the importance of innovation and the need for companies to demonstrate viable exit strategies. Newcomer expresses his enthusiasm for continuing to report on the evolving AI landscape and shares his plans for future events and expansions of his company.

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Newcomer: https://www.newcomer.co/

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Companies mentioned:

AI Companies:

OpenAI: https://openai.com/

Inflection: https://inflection.ai/

Adept: https://www.adept.ai/

Suno: https://suno.com/

XAI: https://x.ai/

Runway: https://runwayml.com/

Writer AI https://writerai.netlify.app/

Poolside AI: https://poolside.ai/

Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/company

Harvey: https://www.harvey.ai/

Lambda: https://lambdalabs.com/

Modal: https://modal.com/docs/guide/gpu

Databricks: https://www.databricks.com/

Other Companies:

MongoDB: https://www.mongodb.com/

Data Dog: https://www.datadoghq.com/

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/

Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/

Intercom: https://app.intercom.com/

Goldman Sachs: https://www.goldmansachs.com/

Snowflake: https://signup.snowflake.com/

Thompson Reuters: https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en.html

Madrona Venture Group: https://www.madrona.com/

Sequoia Capital: https://www.sequoiacap.com/

Lux Capital: https://www.luxcapital.com/

Hewlett Foundation: https://hewlett.org/

Yale: https://www.yale.edu/

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TIMESTAMPS:

(00:00) Introduction and Evolution of the Cerebral Valley Summit

(00:44) Takeaways from the New York Summit: Shifting Towards Building Applications

(02:28) LLMs Find PMF?

(04:10) OpenAI's Transition from Enterprise to Consumer Product

(05:21) Other Themes: Creativity, Open Source, and Established Businesses

(07:44) Debate on Open Source and the Pragmatic Cycle of AI

(11:23) Themes from Breakout Groups: AI Agents and Open Source

(13:44) State of the Tech Markets and Predictions for the Future

(13:40) Sponsor: Archer

(17:07) Expectations for Q2 and Disillusionment with Foundation Models

(