HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah says it's less scary to build an AI startup now than in 2023, as long as you stay off the Yellow Brick Road the frontier labs are following: "The frontier model companies have invested hundreds of billions of dollars building, doing the pre-training. And so their whole business effectively now is taking the capex that they've spent and the money they're continuing to spend and saying, 'How do we sell inference? How do we sell tokens? How do we monetize the thing that we've built?'" "There are SaaS companies and startups that know their particular domain, know their market, have some distribution, or have something that allows them to sell tokens and be a reseller of inference." "Think of AI as infrastructure in the same way we thought of AWS and cloud infrastructure 15 years ago... I think it's less scary now to build in and around the AI arena than it was in 2023." "We have open source. We have lots of great commercial products. So as long as you stay off the Yellow Brick Road, it is completely possible now that you're not gonna get margined out, because you have options." @dharmesh