Most of these are good callouts, but I think it is best for us to look at the evolution of the AI segment in the same manner as "Cloud" developed into a segment in the 2000s and 2010s.
3 is always a result of GTM and distribution - an organization that devotes time and effort into productionizing domain-specific models and selling to their existing customers can outcompete a foundation model company which does not have experience dealing with those personas. I have personally heard of situations where F500 CISOs chose to purchase Wiz's agent over anything OpenAI or Anthropic offered for Cloud Security and Asset Discovery because they have had established relations with Wiz and they have proven their value already. It's the same way that PANW was able to establish itself in the Cloud Security space fairly early because they already established trust with DevOps and Infra teams with on-prem deployments and DCs so those buyers were open to purchasing cloud security bundles from PANW.
1 has happened all the time in the Cloud space. Not every company can invent or monetize every combination in-house because there are only so many employees and so many hours in a week.
2 was always a more of a FTX and EA bubble because EA adherents were over-represented in the initial mindshare for GenAI. Now that EA is largely dead, AI Safety and AGI as in it's traditional definition has disappeared - which is good. Now we can start thinking about "Safety" in the same manner we think about "Cybersecurity".
> They're as excited as they are scared, seeing a one man team build a hugely popular tool that in some ways is more capable than what they've released
I think that adds unnecessary emotion to how platform businesses operate. The reality is, a platform business will always be on the lookout to incorporate avenues to expand TAM, and despite how much engineers may wish, "buy" will always outcompete "build" because time is also a cost.
Most people ik working at these foundation model companies are thinking in terms of becoming an "AWS" type of foundational platform in our industry, and it's best to keep Nikesh Arora's principle of platformization in mind.
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All this shows is that the thesis that most early stage VCs have been operating on for the past 2 years (the Application and Infra layer is the primary layer to concentrate on now) holds. A large number of domain-specific model and app layer startups have been funded over the past 2-3 years in stealth, but will start a publicity blitz over the next 6-8 months.
By the time you see an announcement on TechCrunch or HN, most of us operators were already working on that specific problem for the past 12-16 months. Additionally, HNers use "VC" in very broad and imprecise strokes and fail to recognize what are Growth Equity (eg. the recent Anthropic round) versus Private Equity (eg. Sailpoint's acquisition and then IPO by Thoma Bravo) versus Early Stage VC rounds (largely not announced until several months after the round unless we need to get an O1A for a founder or key employee).