Jim Burtoft

Most AI investing happens downstream of the frontier: a capability emerges, a category gets named, and capital rushes in. But by the time a category earns a clean box on a market map, the best builders have usually been living in the messy version for months. Agents. Reasoning. RL environments. World models. AI for Science. Recursive self-improvement. I call this frontier proximity: the ability to see what is becoming possible before it becomes consensus. My frontier proximity ladder: L0 Wrapper: uses today’s models. L1 Reactor: reacts fast to releases, but roadmap is downstream. L2 Anticipator: builds for where capabilities are going. L3 Native: depends on a non-obvious frontier bet. L4 Shaper: helps move the frontier itself. The point is not that every company needs to train models. Apps can have high frontier proximity if they understand what models will make possible next. Infra can have high frontier proximity if it knows what future agents, multimodal systems, robotics stacks, or scientific workflows will need. That is why we’re launching MoE Capital. MoE stands for Mixture of Experts. The idea is simple: build an AI fund around people closest to the frontier: frontier researchers, technical founders, AI-native builders, and seasoned operators. We don’t want to be another AI fund with a newsletter-level understanding of the frontier. We want to build the AI fund closest to the frontier. More in The Information: theinformation.com/newslette…