20VC: Open Models vs Frontier Models: Who Actually Wins? | The $100,000 Token Budget Every Engineer Will Need | Why Forward-Deployed Engineers Are the Future of Enterprise AI with Clay Bavor, Co-Founder of Sierra

We have not yet appreciated the unbounded demand for call it frontier levels of intelligence. Part of the driver of the difference is probably the willingness of Chinese companies to do scale distillation of the frontier models. If you can't build frontier models yourself, okay, maybe the next best approach is to distill them and offer them up. Every one of our rounds, we actually guided to and took a lower price than than we could have. Some of our most effective employees at the entire company are 22 or 23 years old and have been completely AI pilled.

We completely changed their engineering interview process. When Pat Grady at Sequoia and Neil Mater at Green Oates tell you someone is special, well, it kind of means something. Clay Bavort, joining me in the hot seat, co-founder of Sierra, one of the fastest growing AI companies in the world. Sierra has raised more than one and a half billion, they work with some of the biggest companies in the world and they're valued at almost $16 billion and they work with 40% of the Fortune 50.

But before Sierra, Clay spent an incredible 18 years at Google, where he worked on some pretty cool projects. Google Labs, naming one, Google Workspace, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Photos. Jesus, is there anything Clay didn't work on at Google? On top of that, he's just an awesome dude. Luckily we had a chance to do it in person in London.

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