State of Startups and AI 2025 - Sarah Guo, Conviction

Sarah Goa from the AI-native venture fund Conviction discusses the state of AI, arguing that despite the hype, building valuable AI products is challenging. She covers the rapid advancement in AI capabilities like reasoning and multimodality, the increasingly competitive model market, and provides a playbook for building successful applications, using "Cursor for X" as a framework. The key takeaway is that defensibility in AI comes from superior execution and deep workflow integration, not just the underlying model.