Lovable CEO, Anton Osika: The State of Foundation Models, Grok vs OpenAI, and Replit vs Bolt

I think university is not the best place to learn. Doesn't matter what you're studying. I'd invest in Groq, and I would probably short Anthropic. No, I would, I would short OpenAI, let's say.

Why?

I think it's more the slope on the Groq team. They're doing something which I respect a lot, which is to hire missionaries for the data curation part. Morale is super high. OpenAI has gone through all this mess, right?

Do you think there will be a leading model that has not been created yet?

Yes, from China.

Do you worry about China?

I do think there's, like, a 50/50 chance they will have the best model, that we'll be using a Chinese model at some point. Because...

Ready to go? Anton, dude, I'm so excited to be here with you in person. Thank you so much for joining me on the show.

It's great to see you, Ethan. Thanks for coming to Stockholm.

Dude, I, it's great to be in Stockholm. Um, I want to start, you just recently raised a great round, and I want to start with that. We're seeing a lot of money go into this space, and I just wanted to start with, is it a capital arms race, and a case of who has the most money wins? Or is it something else?

Uh, I think it's an arms race to build the best team, and then it's an arms race to build the, the best brand and trust from your users. And, I mean, capital can help. For us, it's not a constraint at, at all. Um, if you're building something like the best foundation model, it, it might be a constraint, just because the compute for training and so on is, is so large. But for, for us, it's all about moving extremely fast and collecting the best talent.

So if we think about talent as the number one there, we've seen Zuck pay NFL-style contracts. I mean, like, mega, mega sums for the best people. How do you think about and analyze that, and how difficult it will be to, uh, get the best talent moving forwards?

Hmm. Uh, I think for, for me, it's actually more difficult than for Zuck to know who, which engineers are going to really thrive, push the culture forward, push the ways that we're working in the products forward. Uh, for Zuck, it's like, there's these 10 people that, uh, know everything about how to train mo- foundation models, and he's more paying for that knowledge than for, like, these people. The talent itself is so good. It's probably, it's pretty good as well.

Totally.

Uh, so it's very different.

Do you think you do not need the same caliber of engineering talent if you're working in the application layer?

Mm, you just need very different, uh... I, I think, like, I w- at first, one of those people Zuck is hiring, they wouldn't p- perform as well as my, as the engineers in my team, doing what we're doing. So it's, it's very different type of talent. Um, and, like, I... If I knew who was, like, the perfect engineers to hire, uh, I could maybe step up our, our, like, our compensation bands, uh, to get exactly those. But, but I don't know who are the best people. So I, um, I need to just, like, figure out, are these really, really good people to work with? Are they moldable? Are they going to work well together in this team? Um, and then... And give, like, the compensation that you give on the top-of-market compensation rates for that.