Evidence receipt / evaluation
Published · transcript-backedShawn Wang: evaluation
23 Apr 2026 Latent Space AIE Europe Debrief + Agent Labs Thesis: Unsupervised Learning x Latent Space Crossover Special (2026)
“Uh, so I think like basically what we’re talking about is the vertical versus horizontal, uh, debate in, in AI startups.”
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Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Shawn Wang
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- evaluation
- Recorded
- 23 Apr 2026
- Publisher
- Latent Space
Transcript context
…Yeah. It’s always, you know, I’ve always been struck by how that is. Much more challenging for infrastructure companies and application companies. Like obviously I think, yeah. You know, on the application side you’ve seen, you know, Brett Taylor from Sierra Max, from Lara. Like, they’re like, look, we build, you know, what’s ahead of the models and we’re willing to throw everything out every three months, you know, as the models get better and better. Exactly. Yeah. But the thing you at least have there is you have. Uh, you have an end customer, right? That’s like decently sticky. Um, you know, they will mostly stick, you know, they’ll, they’ll give you a shot at least of, of building these things. What I’ve always found more challenging, uh, at, at the kind of like, you know, reinvent yourself every three months of the infrastructure layer, it’s like, you know, developers are definitely a, a pickier audience maybe than an accounting firm or, uh, you know, a bank. Yeah. And so it’s definitely a, a, a more challenging position to be in to, to have to constantly reinvent yourself. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and like when they turn, it’s like. Very complete. Like, they’ll leave to like the, the hot new thing, uh, because there’s like no defensibility, I guess. Like e even, even if you are a database, like, uh, people can migrate workloads off databases. Like it’s, it’s a, it’s a known thing. Uh, so I think like basically what we’re talking about is the vertical versus horizontal, uh, debate in, in AI startups. And uh, the way I think about it also is just that like when you are. Um, Lara, when you are a bridge, like you are the outsource AI team, right? You, you are, your job is to apply whatever state ofthe art AI methods. Yeah. Like this translation layer between model capabilities and your…
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