Elad Gil That there are winners in the AI ​​markets – which are still wide open

AI was one of the least predictable technology breakthroughs he had ever seen, Solo VC investor Elad Gil said on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt.

Generation is at the cap table for almost every successful company of the past decade, including many of today’s leading AI companies.

However, he believes that over the past year, some AI markets appear to have been almost completely sewn up by market leaders. Beyond these areas, a wide range of AI remains anyone’s game.

“I started investing in generative AI in 2021… At the time, not a lot of people were paying that much attention to it,” Gill said. But he saw the huge jump in capabilities between GPT 2, which launched in 2019, and GPT 3, which launched in 2021. “The step between 2 and 3 was so large that if you extrapolated the laws of scaling, or the curve, you could really assume that this would be very significant,” he said.

This convinced him to start supporting early-stage startups to build products powered by large language models. His bets included both established model makers like OpenAI and Mistral, as well as application companies like Perplexity, Harvey, Acter.ai, Decagon, and Abridge. However, throughout 2024 and most of 2025, the capabilities of the foundational models jumped with each release, turning AI on its head every few months.

“I used to say at the time that AI was the one market where the more I learned, the less I knew about it,” he said. “Normally, the more you learn about something, the better you know it, the easier you can predict the future, etc. But AI was just nebulous. There is a lot of uncertainty. I think there are still markets like that in AI.”

However, he now also sees markets with clear winners. The most obvious example is the foundational models themselves. Although there are hundreds of models, and although some countries such as South Korea are still working on developing sovereign models with local companies, leaders have emerged. “Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, maybe xAI, maybe Meta, maybe Mistral — it’s like a bunch of winners,” the winners predicted.

Following models, AI-assisted programming is believed to have runaway winners making it difficult for new entrants to catch up. Not only have established model makers moved on (Anthropic with Claude Code, OpenAI with Codex) but startup leaders like Anysphere’s Cursor and Cognition’s Devin (which acquired Windsurf) will be hard to beat. There are well-funded startups like Magic (which Gill described as a potential “loner”) or Ballside that she is pursuing.

He sees medical transcription as being under siege, with Abridge considered the front runner and a handful of others like Ambiance “important”.

He cites customer support — an early target of both traditional AI and the new crop of AI startups — as market leaders that are hard to catch, like Decagon in his portfolio. (It raised $131 million at a $1.5 billion valuation in June.) OpenAI CEO Brett Taylor’s startup Sierra is competing in this space. This is also an area where established companies — Salesforce, Hubspot, and many others — are adding AI offerings.

So which markets seem wide open? Financial instruments (fintech), accounting, AI security, and “other markets that we know are by default very interesting. But we don’t know who will do it,” says Gill.

Ironically, rapid growth is not the sign that a company was going to be a huge success that once was. “CEOs at every big company are saying to their teams, ‘Hey, we have an edict. We need to figure out our AI strategy,'” Gill said. “These giant companies are willing to try things they wouldn’t have tried two years ago, and it’s only because of AI.”

So, new AI markets can generate a lot of revenue from big-name corporate clients quickly, “but that doesn’t mean they’ll stick around,” Gill points out.

Only after the market goes through its experimental boom cycle can startups and investors know whether these revenues will remain and grow. “There’s a wrong signal, and then there’s things that just work,” Gill said. He describes AI legal startup Harvey as one of the market leaders that “just works.” It raised three mega-rounds in 2025, jumping from a valuation of $3 billion to $5 billion to $8 billion, in just a few months.