Who Owns the Generative AI Platform? | Andreessen Horowitz

We're starting to see the early stages of a tech stack emerge in generative artificial intelligence (AI) Hundreds of new startups are rushing into the market to develop foundation models, build AI-native apps, and stand up infrastructure/tooling.

Application companies are growing topline revenues very quickly but often struggle with retention, product differentiation, and gross margins.

Top-of-funnel growth has been amazing, but it’s unclear if current customer acquisition strategies will be scalable.

Many apps rely on similar underlying AI models and haven’t discovered obvious network effects, or data/workflows, that are hard for competitors to duplicate.

Margins should improve as competition and efficiency in language models increases.

The promise of generative AI is so great that many model providers have organized as public benefit corporations.

But there’s a reasonable discussion to have around whether most model providers actually want to capture value.

Infrastructure vendors touch everything, and reap the rewards.

Nvidia is perhaps the biggest winner, running the vast majority of AI workloads.