20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody

Building defensibility in the software layer on top of the models is going to be incredibly difficult. I think over the last two years, everyone has increasingly realized that the model is the product. We have the demand to double overnight. We just don't have the capacity. Like right now, we're spending more on tokens for our internal agents than we are on employee headcount.

I think we're seeing in real time that. Services are getting automated. I could definitely see one of them being a $10 trillion company, maybe even significantly higher. How much does it cost to hire a a high quality AI researcher? Oftentimes it would be in the tens of millions of stock per year.

This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now joining me in the hot seats today, we have Brandon Fudie, co-founder and co-CEO of McCor, one of the fastest growing AI companies valued at over $10 billion today, doing over a billion dollars in revenue. Now, Brandon's done quite a few shows before, and so my question was, how do I get answers that he's never given before? How do I push and ask questions that no one's ever pushed him to ask before?

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