VC Report: 80% AI Startups Choose Open Source Over Closed Models, NEAR's Strategic Advantage

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

1. 0:00

   Good morning Legion. A short video today on a busy Monday to kick off the week. The Degen Arena is still cooking, and we're timing its release with the J1 races to make sure that the prediction market is live for all racing teams to benefit from.

2. 0:12

   Expect news from that this week or the next as we finalize launch plans. Also over the weekend. Nice shout out from Cobie on NEAR Intents and how it enables ZEC transfers. The one story I wanted to bring to you all today, and the reason we made a video when originally we were going to wait until tomorrow, is this story supposedly 80% of AI startups applying for VC funding are using open source AI models, likely Chinese.

3. 0:36

   Now why is this relevant for all of us? If you've been following these videos, you know that one of the central macro themes of the current state of AI is the arms race between the gas guzzling frontier models of the West and the lean and mean open source models of the East.

4. 0:51

   We've situated NEAR and it's DCML capacity as a neutral middle ground between these two, where NEAR in the future could function as a place to jailbreak biased open source models, a place to monetize fine tuned models for specific applications, and a place to enable private AI with verification of model quality.

5. 1:10

   If you're following this discussion, you just took a very interesting turn. Is the AI bubble going to pop in the West? Either way, NEAR will have a serious value proposition for the future that NEAR alone is uniquely positioned to satisfy.

6. 1:22

   The real question is, will the market understand this? We'll do this all again real soon.