If you look at the early stages of Google or Zip2, they were NOT swimming in money. Facebook only attracted serious investments when they already had something that looked promising. Apple started in a bedroom in the parent's house, before being moved to the garage, and so on.
If anything, I think startups from 2005-2020 were more likely to get founding easily than those giants.
But after succeeding, in some cases several times, all of the above found it easier to find investors.
Ilya has a similar track record. He contributed on several breakthroughs such as AlexNet, AlphaGo, seq2seq (that would evolve into transformers after he left Google) before even joining OpenAI.
In fact, Elon see it as one of his key contributions to OpenAI that he managed to recruit Ilya.
That Ilya is able to raise 1B now is hardly surprising. He's probably able to raise way more than that once he's hired a larger team.
If anything, I think startups from 2005-2020 were more likely to get founding easily than those giants.
But after succeeding, in some cases several times, all of the above found it easier to find investors.
Ilya has a similar track record. He contributed on several breakthroughs such as AlexNet, AlphaGo, seq2seq (that would evolve into transformers after he left Google) before even joining OpenAI.
In fact, Elon see it as one of his key contributions to OpenAI that he managed to recruit Ilya.
That Ilya is able to raise 1B now is hardly surprising. He's probably able to raise way more than that once he's hired a larger team.