What splits do you have in mind which are so much more often happening than mergers? We just saw Scale merge into FAIR, and not terribly long before that, Character.ai returned to the mothership, while Tesla AI de facto merged into Xai and before that Adept merged into Amazon and Inflection into Microsoft etc, in addition to the de facto ‘merges’ which occur when an AI lab quietly drops out and concedes the frontier (eg Mistral) or where they pivot to opensource as a spoiler or commoditize your complement play. So I see plenty of merging, consistent with the difficult economics of companies racing to AGI. Maybe you’re just paying too much attention to the fun popcorn-worthy human interest stories like ‘ex-OAer launches startup’.
What splits do you have in mind which are so much more often happening than mergers? We just saw Scale merge into FAIR, and not terribly long before that, Character.ai returned to the mothership, while Tesla AI de facto merged into Xai and before that Adept merged into Amazon and Inflection into Microsoft etc, in addition to the de facto ‘merges’ which occur when an AI lab quietly drops out and concedes the frontier (eg Mistral) or where they pivot to opensource as a spoiler or commoditize your complement play. So I see plenty of merging, consistent with the difficult economics of companies racing to AGI. Maybe you’re just paying too much attention to the fun popcorn-worthy human interest stories like ‘ex-OAer launches startup’.