Eiso Kant, CTO @Poolside: Raising $600M To Compete in the Race for AGI | E1211

Eiso Kant is the Co-Founder and CTO of Poolside, 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. ----------------------------------------------- Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (00:53) What is Poolside? (04:42) Capturing Iterative Thinking in Uncharted Data (08:58) The Biggest Bottleneck in AI Progress: Compute, Data, or Models? (12:49) The Value of Synthetic Data (15:45) Scaling Laws in AI (18:21) Projecting Model Costs Over the Next 12-24 Months (22:10) Future of Model Distillation (29:36) Does Cash Directly Correlate to Compute Access? (31:35) Eiso’s Perspective on Larry Ellison’s $100B Foundation Model Entry Point (36:50) Eiso’s Outlook on Nvidia's Dominance and the Future of Compute (38:51) Has Innovation Stalled Awaiting Nvidia's Blackwell? (46:06) OpenAI, Anthropic, or X.ai — Which to Buy and Why? (51:00) Comparing Crypto & AI: Decentralization vs. Centralization (55:23) The Decision to Stay Europe-Based (59:01) Work Ethic & Work-Life Balance (01:04:53) Is China 2 Years Behind Than Europe? (01:06:48) Quick-Fire Round ----------------------------------------------- In Today’s Episode with Eiso Kant We Discuss: 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? ----------------------------------------------- Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3j2KMcZTtgTNBKwtZBMHvl?si=85bc9196860e4466 Subscribe on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-twenty-minute-vc-20vc-venture-capital-startup/id958230465 Follow Harry Stebbings on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarryStebbings Follow Eiso Kant on Twitter: https://twitter.com/eisokant Follow 20VC on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/20vchq Follow 20VC on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@20vc_tok Visit our Website: https://www.20vc.com Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://www.thetwentyminutevc.com/contact ----------------------------------------------- #20vc #harrystebbings #eisokant #poolside #ai #software #venturecapital #founder #nvidia #openai #anthropic #meta