In a few years, no investors are going to be looking for AI startups

Despite the click-baity title, I mean it. I believe that in 2 years, no investor is going to be explicitly looking to fund AI-powered startups. Given that nearly all the startups we see these days are dressing themselves in AI clothes (powered by machine learning! But the reason I believe that no investor will be funding startups calling themselves AI-powered startups (and no startup CEO will differentiate themselves as an AI-first company like Google) is because investors will assume the startup is using the best available AI techniques to solve the problem they are solving. Not having state-of-the-art AI techniques powering their software would be like not having a relational database in their tech stack in 1980 or not having a rich Windows client in 1987 or not having a Web-based front end in 1995 or not being cloud native in 2004 or not having a mobile app in 2009. In other words, in a small handful of years, software without AI will be unthinkable.