Tippets #196
Meta bets on Scale, pricing in the AI age, Sam Altman on the singularity and more. Enjoy!
A warm welcome to new readers getting this for the first time, and thank you for letting me be a small part of your week! And a very happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there. As a reminder, I’m Rishi Taparia, Co-founder and General Partner at Garuda Ventures, a pre-seed focused fund that partners with founders as they pull the future into the present. Tippets is a curated set of tidbits and snippets (get it…tippets…) from my reading around the web.
From Me This Week:
AI in Action
Last week I had the privilege of moderating a discussion with a dozen founders from our Garuda Ventures portfolio about how they're using AI within their organizations. What started as a simple question - "What's your most daily used AI tool?" - turned into a fascinating 60-minute deep dive into the practical realities of building AI-native companies in…
Tippets from Around the Web:
Scale AI confirms ‘significant’ investment from Meta, says CEO Alexandr Wang is leaving
Mark Zuckerberg is going all in on superintelligence, and building his team through “investing”. Meta just invested $14.3 billion into Scale AI for a 49% stake in the company. Employees and investors get paid out and Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang is joining Meta to lead AI initiatives with Jason Droege will take over as interim CEO. While Scale will remain an independent company (for how long is TBD given a lot of big customers are on their way out), the deal highlights both how core data infrastructure has become to the AI race, and how hard it is to get traditional acquisitions done.
(2-minute read - Tech Crunch)
A new framework for AI agent pricing
One of the hardest parts of building in AI right now isn’t the tech, it’s the pricing. Everyone’s talking about agents, but few know how to charge for them. Do you price per user, per action, per workflow, per outcome? What even counts as value when the agent is doing a dozen microtasks invisibly in the background?
Manny Medina, founder of Outreach, has distilled insights from over 60 AI companies into four practical pricing models: per agent, action, workflow, and outcome. It’s not a one-size-fits-all answer, but a strategic map for navigating a chaotic landscape.
(8-minute read - Growth Unhinged)
The Gentle Singularity
In this essay by Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO outlines how we are approaching a threshold moment where intelligence and energy may soon become abundant, and the rise of digital superintelligence holds the promise of extraordinary progress. It’s a well-written and (expectedly) optimistic piece that frames the AI discussion into not what AI will change, but how ready we are to change with it, and what we choose to build when intelligence is no longer the constraint.
Generally speaking, the ability for one person to get much more done in 2030 than they could in 2020 will be a striking change, and one many people will figure out how to benefit from.
Very quickly we go from being amazed that AI can generate a beautifully-written paragraph to wondering when it can generate a beautifully-written novel; or from being amazed that it can make live-saving medical diagnoses to wondering when it can develop the cures; or from being amazed it can create a small computer program to wondering when it can create an entire new company. This is how the singularity goes: wonders become routine, and then table stakes.
(7-minute read - Sam Altman)
What “Working” Means in the Era of AI Apps
Good data on startup revenue growth and acceleration from our friends at a16z:
Startups are working faster than ever, and both businesses and consumers are demonstrating high willingness to pay for new products. After combing through the data, we believe there’s never been a better time to build an application-layer software company.
Quote I'm thinking about: “We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.” – Buckminster Fuller
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Please share what you’re reading! If you have insight on anything mentioned above or have any interesting links/papers/books that you think would be worth sharing in future issues of Tippets, please reach out! Click here, reply to this email, or DM me on Twitter at @taps.