Insights from Benchmark’s Conversation with Miles Grimshaw on the Artificial Intelligence Race

Venture firm Benchmark’s most recent addition, Miles Grimshaw, led a seed round in LangChain, a SaaS development firm that helps developers use large language models, which includes OpenAI’s model. This is in contrast to Grimshaw’s previous firm, Thrive Capital, which invested in a recent $300 million funding round for OpenAI. In an interview, Grimshaw revealed that Benchmark has five equal general partners and invests in one to two deals yearly. Despite the lure of investing in foundational model companies such as OpenAI, Benchmark has not found sufficient reason to commit funds. Instead, it focuses on the developer layer above the models and aims to be the first and most impactful partner to founders. While Grimshaw recognizes the potential of generative AI, he advised against participating in investments when model depreciation rates undermine ROI, as was seen in GPT-2 and GPT-3 models developed by OpenAI.