20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside

Eiso Kant is the Co-Founder and CTO of Poolside.ai, building next-generation AI for software engineering. Just last week, Poolside announced their $500M Series B valuing the company at $3BN. Prior to Poolside, Eiso founded Athenian, a data-enabled engineering platform. Before that, he built source{d} - the world’s first company dedicated to applying AI to code and software. 1. Raising $600M to Compete in the AGI Race: •

What is Poolside? How does Poolside differentiate from other general-purpose LLMs? • •

How much of Poolside’s latest raise will be spent on compute? • •

How does Eiso feel about large corporates being a large part of startup LLM provider’s funding rounds? • •

Why did Poolside choose to only accept investment from Nvidia? • •

Is $600M really enough to compete with the mega war chests of other LLMs? • 2. The Big Questions in AI: •

Will scaling laws continue? Have we reached a stage of diminishing returns in model performance for LLMs? • •

What is the biggest barrier to the continued improvement in model performance; data, algorithms or compute? • •

To what extent will Nvidia’s Blackwell chip create a step function improvement in performance? • •

What will OpenAI’s GPT5 need to have to be a gamechanger once again? • 3. Compute, Chips and Cash: •

Does Eiso agree with Larry Ellison; “you need $100BN to play the foundation model game”? What does Eiso believe is the minimum entry price? • •

Will we see the continuing monopoly of Nvidia? How does Eiso expect the compute landscape to evolve? • •

Why are Amazon and Google best placed when it comes to reducing cost through their own chip manufacturing? • •

Does Eiso agree with David Cahn @ Sequoia, “you will never train a frontier model on the same data centre twice”? • •

Can the speed of data centre establishment and development keep up with the speed of foundation model development? • 4. WTF Happens to The Model Layer: OpenAI and Anthropic… •

Does Eiso agree we are seeing foundation models become commoditised? • •

What would Eiso do if he were Sam Altman today? • •

Is $6.6BN really enough for OpenAI to compete against Google, Meta etc…? • •

OpenAI at $150BN, Anthropic at $40BN and X.ai at $24BN. Which would Eiso choose to buy and why? •