“Optimus Prime” Returns to YC to Invest Tokens for Equity: On the surface, an ecosystem collusion; in reality, a dimensionality-reduction extraction of early-stage venture capital.

AIMPACT News, May 20 (UTC+8): According to Beating monitoring, major large-model players are directly harvesting the most upstream AI ecosystem through resource dumping. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, at the Y Combinator event, announced as the “former head” that he would provide an OpenAI Token quota of $2 million to every YC incubation project in this batch, directly using it to obtain early equity in these startups. This indiscriminate investment is widely seen as a historical replay of Yuri Milner’s universal beneficence investment in 2011, and it has sent shockwaves through the venture capital community. For YC, this partnership means startups no longer need to use the precious $500,000 in cash to pay API bills. The disguised “release” of funds directly boosts team survival rates, letting YC’s early equity realize value with a “win-win” outcome.

But beneath the appearance of mutual benefit, this is essentially OpenAI’s dimensional-reduction “predatory” move against the early-stage venture capital circle. OpenAI is leveraging its computational power hegemony to exchange virtual Tokens with extremely low marginal costs for extremely scarce, high-quality startup equity. When computing power is thoroughly “fiat-ified,” this disguised “Token seigniorage” not only drastically reduces startups’ cash needs from traditional VCs, but also physically blocks the channels through which Anthropic or open-source ecosystems can spread into next-generation software.

(Source: BlockBeats)