Event Recap: AI in VC Panel
🥳 CVP had a great start to the ’23-‘24 academic year. Over 100 students attended our VC in AI panel, where we hosted three leading industry professionals at the intersection of artificial intelligence and venture capital on campus. Our guests were:
- Andriy Mulyar — Co-founder of Nomic.ai
- David Yakobovitch — Global Product Lead at Google
- Rishi Ratan — Partner at Gate Technologies Capital
[Detailed bios can be found below!]
Our speakers shared their personal journeys and engaged in dialogue with students across topics such as the future of Large Language Models (LLMs), the commercial opportunities of AI technologies, and advice for AI founders.
Some highlights from the conversation:
Future Use Cases of LLMs
David and Andriy noted how LLMs, such as ChatGPT and Bard, are currently used primarily for “talking with data,” or using inference to predict and generate textual patterns from existing data. However, they emphasized that the ability of LLMs to generate code has massive implications. Not only do these models help software engineers of all skill levels to write their programs, LLMs are able to translate between natural languages and computer languages will create a more intuitive, and easy-to-use interface between human users (with high-level ideas) and computer terminals (with strict commands and syntax).
Commercial Hype of AI in Entrepreneurship
Rishi commented on the unsustainable business model of AI wrappers. AI wrappers are software created by altering the training data, input prompts, or user interface of existing LLMs for specific use cases. While wrappers may be more convenient in the short term, the rapid evolution of LLMs and the low technological barriers to replicate the product make wrappers less scalable. LLMs can be a tool to generate useful summaries and allow for intuitive prompting, but the business still needs a unique value proposition catered to their customers to succeed.
The real opportunity, Rishi argues, will be infrastructure startups (i.e. the picks and shovels of the gold rush) that will allow more individuals and businesses to utilize artificial intelligence or machine learning to process different types of data. Companies designing cloud infrastructure or custom circuits that are optimized for training and using AI are some examples. Another great instance was Mulyar’s company, Nomic.ai, which is building tools to allow for insights to be drawn from unlabeled, unstructured data, which was previously far more difficult to interpret.
Advice for AI Founders
David and Andriy gave two pieces of advice for aspiring founders. The first is: “never build in a silo”. Technical founders, they note, often build products without understanding the need it’s serving and how it’s being used. In order to build a product that users will want and use, it is crucial to get feedback at every stage from everyone around you, including potential users, customers and investors, but also friends, family, and fellow builders.
The second piece of advice was to “just start building.” Even if the first idea is a simple AI wrapper that “talks to your data”, the learning that comes from creating a product is irreproducible through conversation or research.
Resources for Staying Up-to-Date on AI:
Our guests also shared their favorite sites for news, and updates on emerging companies, tools, and technologies in the AI space. These include:
- AIEdge (Machine Learning Newsletter)
- Producthunt (Websites for the Newest Software and Apps)
- Hackernews (YC Web Forum for Tech Entrepreneurship)
- Arxiv (Repository for Pre-print Academic Papers)
- Papers With Code (Platform for Machine Learning Research Papers)
- Top trending repositories on GitHub
- r/machinelearning (Subreddit)
Be sure to check them out if you’re interested!
Guest Speaker Bios
David Yakobovitch is a Global Product Lead at Google, where he builds data products for Google Ads. He currently serves as an AI Policy Ambassador for Google’s Global Affairs, he is an AI Principles Advisor who stress tests Google’s AI-first software and hardware products, and he is a Generative AI Ambassador for Google Cloud. In the community, David is host of the leading Applied AI and Responsible AI podcast HumAIn. He coordinates community mixers for venture capitalists, founders, and developers through Tech Dinner Series and startup ecosystem growth through investments at DataPower Ventures.
Andriy Mulyar is the Founder & CTO at Nomic AI since May 2022. Founded in 2022, Nomic has released an open-source AI model, GPT4ALL, and a tool called Atlas that allows users to visualize unstructured datasets used to build large language models. Valued at $100 million, Nomic recently raised $17 million in a Series A funding round from investors led by Coatue. Prior to Nomic, Andriy worked as a Ph.D student at NYU Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and as a Machine Learning Engineer at Rad AI.
Rishi Ratan is an investment partner at the Gate Technologies Capital, where he leads the investment team for tactical opportunities and special situations investments in the Enterprise AI, FinTech, and frontier-tech sectors. With more than a decade of experience in the technology industry, Rishi has a unique combination of skills and expertise in product development, design engineering, business strategy, and venture capital. Rishi also manages diversified public and private equities and FoF investments for his family office Odile Capital, where he has made notable investments in some of the most innovative and disruptive companies in the tech sector.
