Most of the innovations needed for LLMs came from people at Google.
replyA fair amount of ML/AI innovations came out of the market in general. Neural networks are a useful tool to solve a variety of problems... LLMs specifically were a more recent interesting market to develop but I've yet to see anything that could give a market player a real competitive advantage. It feels like we just invented a new hammer and now that we know how to build it it isn't that hard to build one yourself. The all purpose hammers are, of course, unreasonable to build - but those don't seem to be that useful. I don't really need Claude to be able to generate sonnets when I'm programming so I think specialization is the place we'll see genuine markets form.
reply> came from people at Google
replyWho had to leave to build anything.
So VC-funded.
replyThe company was VC-funded as a search engine but by the time they made significant investments in AI (DeepMind etc) they'd been a publicly held company earning multiple billions a year from advertising for a decade.
replyGoogle is a VC. Their side projects are VC projects.
replyGoogle bought DeepMind and their other major AI acquisitions. Public companies make corporate venture investments for very different reasons than LP-backed VCs. They do early-stage investments to search for emerging players they can buy as soon as possible or to gain market intelligence on trends. They do later stage investments to help grow future vendors or customers and sometimes to foster ecosystems that form their competitive moat.
replyBut if they think it's important to their core business, corporations don't want to invest, they want to buy. Source: I used to be involved in corporate venture investing at a top 10 valley tech leader.
If your definition of VC is "Literally anything that requires a long term investment of money" then sure, but I think most people mean something different than that.
reply[citation needed]
replyHistorically speaking a lot of inventions have come about without things like VC investment. Either way, there’s probably little point in debating it, just because VC funded companies control the market now doesn’t mean they should indefinitely.