What kind of demos do you think would impress best-in-class recruits/investors to join our team
All the options you mention would be technically impressive (so good for recruiting hackers), but none of them are obviously on the path to building a huge business. You should lean towards the option where you can imagine having a near-monopoly in a huge market.
There's a big danger of getting sucked into some application where better NLP isn't the differentiator. Most interactive agents have small enough domains (getting cable TV installed, parsing S-10s, triaging support emails, ...) that general reasoning isn't critical, and the companies that succeed in this space will be defined by other factors like sales and integration with the customer's IT stack.
I wouldn't worry about IP leakage. I've seen a lot of companies, but none that failed because of IP leakage. They fail for a long list of other reasons: slow execution, bad product-market fit, founder breakups, etc.
All the options you mention would be technically impressive (so good for recruiting hackers), but none of them are obviously on the path to building a huge business. You should lean towards the option where you can imagine having a near-monopoly in a huge market.
There's a big danger of getting sucked into some application where better NLP isn't the differentiator. Most interactive agents have small enough domains (getting cable TV installed, parsing S-10s, triaging support emails, ...) that general reasoning isn't critical, and the companies that succeed in this space will be defined by other factors like sales and integration with the customer's IT stack.
I wouldn't worry about IP leakage. I've seen a lot of companies, but none that failed because of IP leakage. They fail for a long list of other reasons: slow execution, bad product-market fit, founder breakups, etc.