Moonshot Bets Test Investors’ AI Appetite

Venture capital investors are quite willing to pour money into artificial intelligence startups with largely unproven products. So it’s notable when some investors view a startup as too much of a crazy bet.

That’s a taste of the response my colleagues and I have seen when we started to ask about Liquid AI. The one-year-old startup, spun off from a Massachusetts Institute of Technology research lab, is developing a low-cost alternative to the transformers that power AI models. One leader at Liquid has told a prospective investor it wants to raise $300 million at a $3.7 billion valuation, according to a person with knowledge of the talks.