Chi-Hua Chien saw Facebook coming; now he says the real AI winners won’t be selling AI

Chi-Hua Chien has spent more than two decades as a venture capitalist, but he thinks like a cultural anthropologist. As a co-founder of Goodwater Capital, a firm focused exclusively on consumer and prosumer technology, he has built a portfolio spanning entertainment, healthcare, fintech, and live experiences — with investments in companies like MIDI Health, Fever, and Monzo. He was also, as a 27-year-old associate at Accel, the person who initially found a six-person company launched from Harvard called The Facebook. That ability to read human behavior at scale informs everything from his view that Americans will never trust a single app with both their social lives and their finances, to his belief that the gap between the most advanced AI model and what you can run on your phone — once as wide as two years — will shrink to three months within the next year. These days, he is also willing to say out loud what many in venture capital are only thinking: that the commoditization of the model layer is already underway, and that the biggest winners of the AI era won’t be the companies selling AI at all. We talked last week; this interview has been edited for length and clarity. More founders and investors have been publicly sharing their grievances about VCs lately. …