This is absurd for a number of reasons. Probably the biggest being that $10m need not be the only investment. Sam of... Y-Combinator is suggesting that startups

This is absurd for a number of reasons. Probably the biggest being that $10m need not be the only investment. Sam of... Y-Combinator is suggesting that startups do not get more funding after $10m? That $10m is insufficient to demonstrate capability that would then motivate more rounds of funding? Honestly, I want to see more $10m startups. Stop this mega millions level funding into AI/ML and give out more small sums. Let people explore new ideas and scale. Give $10m to people doing non-LLM based stuff. Hell, give $10 to the Mamba team. Give it to the Ziming Liu (KAN). To Bruno Gavranović. To people doing Bayesian stuff. To a ton others. Let these people attempt to scale. If you really want to disrupt OpenAI the best way is to find something better than LLMs. You aren't going to beat the entrenched players at their game, but we know for certain that there's more efficient means of generating powerful learning systems. There's a whole community of "GPU Poor" people, which is just another name for "can't get their ideas through review because reviewers are too lazy to evaluate methods and just respond with 'not novel, needs more experiments.'" There's a metric ton of "unpublished" (still on arxiv) works that are more compute efficient and these people aren't just hungry, they're hungry and want to fight because they've been treated unfairly (I speak from experience).