Eiso Kant, CTO @Poolside: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI & Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate?

Eiso Kant is the Co-Founder and CTO of Poolside, building next-generation AI for software engineering. Just last week, Poolside announced their $500M Series B valuing the company at $3BN. Prior to Poolside, Eiso founded Athenian, a data-enabled engineering platform. Before that, he built source{d} - the world’s first company dedicated to applying AI to code and software.

In Today’s Episode with Eiso Kant We Discuss:

1. Raising $600M to Compete in the AGI Race:

• What is Poolside? How does Poolside differentiate from other general-purpose LLMs?

• How much of Poolside’s latest raise will be spent on compute?

• How does Eiso feel about large corporates being a large part of startup LLM provider’s funding rounds? 

• Why did Poolside choose to only accept investment from Nvidia?

• Is $600M really enough to compete with the mega war chests of other LLMs?

2. The Big Questions in AI:

• Will scaling laws continue? Have we reached a stage of diminishing returns in model performance for LLMs?

• What is the biggest barrier to the continued improvement in model performance; data, algorithms or compute?

• To what extent will Nvidia’s Blackwell chip create a step function improvement in performance?

• What will OpenAI’s GPT5 need to have to be a gamechanger once again?

3. Compute, Chips and Cash:

• Does Eiso agree with Larry Ellison; “you need $100BN to play the foundation model game”? What does Eiso believe is the minimum entry price?

• Will we see the continuing monopoly of Nvidia? How does Eiso expect the compute landscape to evolve?

• Why are Amazon and Google best placed when it comes to reducing cost through their own chip manufacturing? 

• Does Eiso agree with David Cahn @ Sequoia, “you will never train a frontier model on the same data centre twice”? 

• Can the speed of data centre establishment and development keep up with the speed of foundation model development?

4. WTF Happens to The Model Layer: OpenAI and Anthropic…

• Does Eiso agree we are seeing foundation models become commoditised?

• What would Eiso do if he were Sam Altman today?

• Is $6.6BN really enough for OpenAI to compete against Google, Meta etc…?

• OpenAI at $150BN, Anthropic at $40BN and X.ai at $24BN. Which would Eiso choose to buy and why?