its not part of the conversation because the influence here is tangential at best (1) and your sense of how much vc money is on the table at any given time is not good (2).

1a. most seed/A stage investing is acyclical because it is not really about timing for exits, people just always need dry powder

1b. tech advancement is definitely acyclical - alexnet, transformers, and gpt were all just done by very small teams without a lot of funding. gpt2->3 was funded by microsoft, not vc

2a. (i have advance knowledge of this bc i've previewed the keynote slides for ai.engineer) free vc money slowed in 2022-2023 but has not at all dried up and in fact reaccelerated in a very dramatic way. up 70% this yr

2b. "vc" is a tenous term when all biglabs are >>10b valuation and raising from softbank or sovereign wealth. its no longer vc, its about reallocating capital from publics to privates because the only good ai co's are private