In a Tekedia classnote on AI, I noted three ways to launch an AI startup:
(1) Partner with a company with a large user base. OpenAI’s ChatGPT partnered with Microsoft which has millions of users, with Microsoft providing the feedstock (yes, the data) to advance ChatGPT at scale.
(2) Spend a huge amount of money via promos and advertisements to get data which will improve your AI models as quickly as possible. Chinese ecommerce startup, Temu, uses AI to power shopping in its ecosystem., and it has been spending on adverts to gather data to improve the game.
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(3) Bake AI into existing in-house data. If you are lucky, and you have the data as Google does, you can launch Bard, Gemini, etc once your code is ready.
Yes, if you want to do this, one of these playbooks will do. Amazon has the data and Anthropic has the tech, so Amazon and Anthropic are coming together, in the same way ChatGPT and Microsoft, Twitter and Grok, came together:
“Deepening our commitment to advancing generative AI, today we have an update on the announcement we made to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic for a minority ownership position in the company. Last September, we made an initial investment of $1.25 billion. Today, we made our additional $2.75 billion investment, bringing our total investment in Anthropic to $4 billion”.
The AI era is the tech era in which the upstarts will need the incumbents to make any impact, because the competitive advantage does not just come from algorithms, but from data feedstock.
Amazon concludes $4 billion investment in AI Startup Anthropic, Its Largest Venture Investment
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