I think Blank's story is about a guy who missed a $20B market shift in defense VC, not a guy who failed to adopt AI.

He's not saying "add AI to your product" or "use AI or die" but more that AI has shifted institutional assumptions about tech stacks, defensibility and fundability. The bottleneck moved up the stack from engineering to judgment, insight and design.

Chris lost because he was heads down building while $20B in defense VC was flowing into his exact problem space and he didn't build the boat to capture that wave.