By how much did the speaker say the funding round exceeded Reuters' report?

Precursor VenturesA classic pre-seed and seed stage venture capital firm

The Poker Game of AI Investments #deepseek #ai #tech #venturecapital

5 Mar 2025 · 1 min

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A March 5, 2025 YouTube conversation (Precursor Ventures) about strategic positioning and investment dynamics in large AI model funding rounds. Speakers discuss that participation in big rounds functions like a poker game — firms need capital (“chips”) to stay competitive and fund next-generation models. One speaker claims a recent funding round exceeded Reuters’ reported size by $1.5 billion and raises the question whether some well-funded LLM providers will fail to keep up or raise follow-on capital.

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$1.5 billion

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I never thought anything going on with Deep SEQ or probably any other competitors in this space would dry up any interest in OpenAI, anthropic, et cetera. But it's even more clear to me now that the carrot at the end of the stick of strategic positioning that is one from being part of these rounds is such an important part of this investment mindset. So the funding round is actually even larger than what Reuters reported last month by $1.5 billion. So curious to know where your thoughts are since we have a continuing thread about this on our team and in the podc.
I've long felt like a lot of this big ticket large model stuff is a big poker game and you got to have the chips to stay in the game. And if you don't have the chips, you can't invest in the next generation of your model. And if you can't invest in the next generation of your model, you're not competitive. And I think at some point this year or next year we will find out is there any residual value in a LLM provider who can't keep going? To me it's an evil that at least one or two of the reasonably well funded people will fall behind and won't be able to continue to raise this money.