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by cornholio 1173 days ago
But I really wonder how many of these founders can convincingly explain in 5 minutes how gradient descent or transformers work. I know that's the first type of question I would ask any founder of an AI company before investing.
3 comments

The typical thinking among businesspeople is that you can always "hire a nerd" for those things. The early YC was a departure from that with PG praising technical prowess in his essays so much. It would seem this mindset has much less sway now.
Do VCs understand that? Do they care? My feeling is that they want to see a projected growth that looks like an exponential, and buzzwords.
The combination of gradient descent and transformers is a weird choice to ask founders about. One is an almost trivial algorithm, whereas the other is a cutting-edge research result.