Satya expects more startups building narrower, vertical-specific models. Only a few big players have the dollars to build general-purpose models; ambitious teams will fine-tune or build more narrow versions that work well in a particular use case — and AI has made the time to product and time to market drop by an insane amount.
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As a CTO, Satya sees the world going toward the latter of two trends — specific models over one general-purpose model — because only a few big players have the dollars to build general-purpose models. Startups and teams ambitious enough to solve for a particular vertical will fork, fine-tune or build narrower versions that work well in a specific use case. He cites one example: a VC batchmate building a text-to-speech model whose selling point is being more emotive, trained on podcast data and real conversations so the speech has emotions. He's seeing a lot more startups in this space building for narrower use cases, and notes that with AI "the time to product and time to market has dropped by an insane amount," so you can test ideas quickly and get feedback from customers.