--- title: Flapping Airplanes and the promise of research-driven AI description: Flapping Airplanes, a new AI lab, launched with $180 million in seed funding to explore less data-intensive approaches to training large models. Sequoia... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/flapping-airplanes-and-the-promise-of-research-driven-ai-2z6oxhljw twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Flapping Airplanes and the promise of research-driven AI | daily.dev og:description: Flapping Airplanes, a new AI lab, launched with $180 million in seed funding to explore less data-intensive approaches to training large models. Sequoia... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/flapping-airplanes-and-the-promise-of-research-driven-ai-2z6oxhljw og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/2z6OxHlJW.png og:image:alt: Flapping Airplanes and the promise of research-driven AI og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Flapping Airplanes and the promise of research-driven AI **[TechCrunch](https://daily.dev/sources/tc)** · 2 min read · 1 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Flapping Airplanes, a new AI lab, launched with $180 million in seed funding to explore less data-intensive approaches to training large models. Sequoia partner David Cahn highlights their research-first paradigm as a departure from the industry's dominant scaling approach, arguing for long-term research breakthroughs (5-10 years) over short-term compute buildouts. This represents a strategic shift from dedicating maximum resources to scaling existing LLMs toward exploring alternative paths to AGI through fundamental research. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Flapping Airplanes on the future of AI: ‘We want to try really radically different things’](https://daily.dev/posts/flapping-airplanes-on-the-future-of-ai-we-want-to-try-really-radically-different-things--zgule5syq) · TechCrunch · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Sequoia Capital is putting $10bn behind AI and ‘reindustrialization’](https://daily.dev/posts/sequoia-capital-is-putting-10bn-behind-ai-and-reindustrialization--e1xeyrnor) · The Next Web · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#ai](https://daily.dev/tags/ai), [#machine-learning](https://daily.dev/tags/machine-learning), [#venture-capital](https://daily.dev/tags/venture-capital), [#llm](https://daily.dev/tags/llm) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/flapping-airplanes-and-the-promise-of-research-driven-ai-2z6oxhljw) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Flapping Airplanes and the promise of research-driven AI","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/flapping-airplanes-and-the-promise-of-research-driven-ai-2z6oxhljw","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/flapping-airplanes-and-the-promise-of-research-driven-ai-2z6oxhljw"},"datePublished":"2026-01-29T15:23:39.428Z","dateModified":"2026-01-29T15:24:01.727Z","description":"Flapping Airplanes, a new AI lab, launched with $180 million in seed funding to explore less data-intensive approaches to training large models. 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