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A few months ago, we were amazed at how AI Bacchanal tempted venture capitalists to move from pre-earning companies to pre-production companies like Ilya Sutskever’s safe emergency.
Ah, how innocent it was back then. . . The new hottest seems to be pre-planned companies. From Mainft on Friday evening, there is the following emphasis on Alphaville:
Mira Murati, former Chief Technology Officer of Openai, has raised $2 billion for a new artificial intelligence startup.
The deal, which recently closed, was one of the largest “seed” or early funding rounds in Silicon Valley history, according to multiple people familiar with the deal.
San Francisco-based Thinking Machinery Lab has not declared it is working on and instead uses Murati’s name and reputation to attract investors, said those familiar with fundraising.
. . . Due to its very secret nature, multiple investors approached the many funds Murati pitched to take over the deal. One of these people added that they did not provide information on the Murati pitch with any product or financial planning information.
Another said it appears to be working on “artificial general information,” a hypothetical point of computers having similar or superior levels of intelligence as humans. However, they added that at this point, the group is still “strategy.”
Well, at least $2 billion should get oversight rights to Andreessen Horowitz, convict partners and other VCs. right?
The agreement gives Murati a board vote equally composed of all other board votes. In other words, Murati would have a level of control beyond even the tight grips equipped by a Super Tee Shar-owned founder like Mark Zuckerberg.
oh.
When investors want to fork over $2 billion and bake at zero control to founders who have not disclosed their product, finance or business strategy, they don’t even know which stage of the cycle.
However, this is a world where Meta is willing to make a $14 billion acquisition of a well-connected AI CEO, with uncertain technical capabilities and a small, NVIDIA-dependent, highly leveraged cloud computing company valued at $88 billion (17x revenue), so Murakami Thinking Machine might prove a wise bet.
Pitchbook’s latest Venture Capital Monitor report showed how AI startups consume more than 70% of all venture dollars deployed in North America. Pitchbook’s database shows that 454 AI-related companies have already been established this year. And when the VCs are drunk, who can blame them. The V definitely represents the vibe of recent times.
However, you should give Murati props for the strange company name. “Thinking Machine” is what author Frank Herbert called an AI-powered robot in his dune universe. They ultimately had to rise up to humans and be defeated in Butler’s jihad, leading to the universe-wide commandment that “you will not make machines in the portrait of the human mind.”
Perhaps Murati’s secret plan is to absorb as much VC money as possible to avoid actually entering AGI development?
