Elad Gil, a prominent individual investor, said on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt that AI is one of the most unpredictable technology booms he's ever seen.
Gill has been on the cap tables of virtually every hit company of the past decade, including many of today's leading AI companies.
Still, he believes that over the past year, certain AI markets appear to have been largely filled by market leaders. Even beyond these areas, the vast scope of AI still applies to everyone.
“I started investing in generative AI in 2021, and at the time there weren’t that many people paying that much attention to it,” Gill said. However, he has seen a significant jump in functionality 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 were just extrapolating a scaling law or a curve, you could actually assume that this would be very significant,” he said.
So he decided to start helping early-stage startups build products that leverage large-scale language models. His bets included foundational model makers like OpenAI and Mistral, as well as application companies like Perplexity, Harvey, Character.ai, Decagon, and Abridge. But for most of 2024 and 2025, the underlying model's capabilities improved exponentially with each release, upending the AI every few months.
“I used to say back then that AI is the only market that the more you learn, the less you understand. Usually, the more you learn about something, the more you know, the easier it becomes to predict the future, etc. But AI was just blurry. There's too much uncertainty. And I think there's still a market for that for AI,” he said.
But he also sees a market where there are clear winners right now. The most obvious example is the underlying model itself. Leaders are emerging, even though hundreds of models exist and some countries, such as South Korea, are still working on developing sovereign models with domestic companies. “Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, maybe xAI, maybe Meta, maybe Mistral — it's like a handful,” he predicts about the winners.
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After models, he believes AI-assisted coding is a clear winner and it will be difficult for new entrants to catch up. Not only have fundamental model makers entered the space (Anthropic and Claude Code, OpenAI and Codex), but startup leaders like Anysphere's Cursor and Cognition's Devin (who acquired Windsurf) will be hard to beat. And behind them are well-funded startups like Magic (which Gill called a potential outlier) and Poolside.
He sees medical transcription as being cornered, with Abridge the frontrunner and a handful of companies like Ambiance “important.”
He cites customer support, which was an early target of both traditional AI and emerging AI agent startups, to elusive market leaders like his portfolio company Decagon. (It raised $131 million in June at a valuation of $1.5 billion.) OpenAI Chairman Brett Taylor's startup Sierra competes in this space. This is also an area where incumbents like Salesforce, Hubspot, and many others are adding AI services.
So which markets look wide open? Gill says financial tools (fintech), accounting, AI security, and “other markets that we know are very interesting by default. We don't know who's going to do it.”
Ironically, rapid growth doesn't indicate a company's potential to be a blockbuster hit like it once was. “The CEO of any large company is basically telling his team, 'Hey, we have a mandate. We need to develop an AI strategy,'” Gill said. “These giant companies are willing to try things they never would have tried two years ago, and that's all thanks to AI.”
So while new AI markets can quickly generate significant revenue from large enterprise customers, “that doesn't mean they're here to stay,” Gill points out.
It is only after the market goes through its experimental boom cycle that startups and investors can determine whether this return is sustained and grows. “There are false signals and then there are some that are working properly,” Gill said. He cites legal AI startup Harvey as one market leader that is “doing well.” The company raised three large rounds in 2025, jumping from a $3 billion valuation to $5 billion to $8 billion in just a few months.