The Truth About The AI Bubble

AI Economy Stabilization00:00

AI economy stabilized with model layer companies, application layer companies, and infrastructure layer companies. Everyone is positioned to make a lot of money. There's a relative playbook for building AI-native companies on top of models. Previously, pivoting to startup ideas felt easier because waiting a few months often brought big announcements enabling new ideas. Finding ideas is returning to normal levels of difficulty.

Surprising Trends in 202500:31

Most surprising things seen in 2025. Changing of the guard in preferred LLM at YC during winter '26 batch.

YC Winter '26 Model Preferences01:00

Wrapped up winter '26 selection cycle. Asked founders: tech stack and model of choice. OpenAI was clear winner in previous batches (90+% initially), but declining. In this batch, Anthropic topped OpenAI.

Anthropic's Rise01:32

Anthropic hovered at 20-25% through 2024 and early 2025, then surged in last 3-6 months to over 52%. Reasons: wins in vibe coding tools and coding agents, a large value-creating problem space. Anthropic models perform best, intentionally optimized as northstar per Tom Brown conversation.

Model Personalities and Use Cases02:30

Most use cases not coding, but bleedthrough effect from personal coding familiarity with Claude Opus or Sonnet influences application choice.

Gemini's Climb03:01

Gemini climbed from single-digit (2-3%) last year to 23% in winter '26. Impressed with Gemini 3.0 quality. Model personalities: OpenAI (black cat energy), Anthropic (happy golden retriever), Gemini (in between). One host switched to Gemini as go-to for better reasoning, replaces Google searches via grounding API and Google index for real-time accurate info (better than Perplexity).