Sarah Guo Bets Big on AI Investments - Let's Data Science

Ah, $101 million here, $5 billion there — soon you're talking real money, as they say. Sarah Guo launched Conviction in 2022, and now her Baseten bet is worth five billion. Well done, Sarah. The rest of us are still trying to figure out if our jobs will survive the next quarterly earnings call, but sure — let's pile more capital into startups that promise to replace junior developers with 'AI agents.' What could possibly go wrong? The usual pattern: splashy launch, frothy valuation, eventual layoffs, quiet pivot to enterprise sales. But not to worry — there's always another $101 million fund around the corner.

Guo is described in the source as having 'a unique perspective on the AI startup ecosystem.' Indeed, her perspective seems to be that throwing money at anything with 'AI' in the name is a sound strategy. Baseten, an AI inference platform, is now valued at $5 billion — a number that makes sense only if you believe that every company on earth will immediately replace all their compute with serverless GPU clusters. And maybe they will. But the track record of VC-backed AI stars like, say, Inflection AI or Stability AI suggests that gravity tends to reassert itself eventually. Still, bet big, the article urges. And so we do.

Meanwhile, regulators are still debating what 'AI' even means, and the rest of us are left to wonder if the economy can survive a decade of misallocated capital. Guo's $101 million is a drop in the bucket compared to the trillion-dollar flows, but it's emblematic: we're betting the farm on startups that haven't yet proven they can turn a profit. But hey, who wants boring old productivity growth when you can have SPAC-like dreams of unicorns? Cheers to the next big thing. May it fail less spectacularly than the last.