The difficulty is that in a VC world, you admit that you will more-or-less permanently need humans in the loop, which kills margins and scalability. At Google/Meta the number of SERP raters and content moderators are only a few tens of thousands, serving a population of billions - and this only after major success. But at Uber or DoorDash, every sale requires a human in the loop from the start. It’s better to be in the first category than the second. As of now AI startups are seen more to be in the first “pure software” category, meaning the margins are expected to be sky high. Of course, the risk here is hardware costs (which will likely come down within the decade for reasonably useful and general models), and humans in the loop (which likely will be a permanent fixture given the hallucinations and opaqueness of the current generation of LLMs).
