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An OpenAI researcher turned venture capitalist says investors are 3 to 5 years behind the latest AI studies

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There is a yearslong lag in the AI hype cycle, according to one former AI researcher turned venture capitalist.

Jenny Xiao, who cofounded Leonis Capital in 2021 after a stint at OpenAI, said the current investment excitement around AI is far behind the actual research.

“There is a massive disconnect between what researchers are seeing and what investors are seeing,” Xiao said on the Fortune Magazine podcast this week.

What’s being discussed at the biggest AI conferences is as much as 3 to 5 years behind what researchers are thinking about, Xiao said.

“We are so behind the technical frontier, and that’s the gap I really want to bridge,” she added.

Xiao, who dropped out of a Ph.D. program in economics and AI to take a researcher role at OpenAI, founded Leonis Capital to bridge the worlds of venture capital and deep academic AI research.

“With AI, there needs to be a new generation of founders. There needs to be a new generation of VCs,” she said.

It’s also the first time investors need to be able to provide financial support to both the market and the technology, she added. Unlike SaaS companies, which were built on a “stable tech stack,” AI is moving fast. To keep up, Xiao said investors are going to need to be as technical as the founders.

If she has one piece of advice for investors who haven’t gone deep into the technical side, it’s that they should know “AI progress isn’t linear,” she said.

They should know AI progress happens in “lumps,” she said. So, questions about why AI progress is slowing down or speeding up aren’t the best way to characterize the rate of development.

“It’s neither of those two extremes,” she said. “It’s somewhere in between.”

Leonis Capital did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.




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Americans are living in a ‘career industrial complex.’ Venture capitalist Bill Gurley explains how to break out and find your dream job.

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A top Silicon Valley investor has an antidote for “quiet quitting.”

Bill Gurley is a general partner at venture capitalist firm Benchmark and the author of “Runnin’ Down a Dream, How to Thrive in a Career You Actually Love.” Gurley told Neal Freyman and Toby Howell on the “Morning Brew Daily” podcast that aired on Sunday that it is “horrific” how some people are actively disengaged at work, but the heart of the matter is that people “aren’t ending up in the right place.”

“We developed this mindset where you push kids toward economic safety — doctors, lawyers, jobs where unemployment is low, and salaries are high,” said Gurley. “But we’ve pushed a lot of kids into what I call the ‘career industrial complex.'”

Gurley said that the “career industrial complex” means pushing children toward a “résumé arms race” of standardization and credential accumulation, rather than encouraging curiosity and exploration.

A simple test as to whether you would be successful in your dream job, said Gurley, is whether you would be willing to learn on your own time.

“I like to say, you know, if you have three episodes of Breaking Bad left, would you study this instead?” said Gurley. “Like, does it compete with what you do in your free time?”

Gurley added that he once did a survey where he asked 10,000 people if they would choose a different career if given the chance to go back in time, and 60% said yes.

Gurley’s comments came as workplace trends such as “job hugging” and “quiet cracking” emerged in 2025.

While workers feared layoffs and the prospects of landing new roles dimmed for many young professionals.

A Gallup poll done in 2024 found that employee engagement in the US fell to its lowest level in a decade, with only 31% of employees feeling engaged. Additionally, workers under the age of 35 are less engaged compared to other age groups.




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