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The Newcomer Podcast hits the road!

We’re recording this episode on the ground from two different tech conferences, the flashy new HumanX summit in Las Vegas and the now-veteran status South By Southwest in Austin.

We cover how the attendees diverge, with more consumer-tech making a showing at SXSW and the new guard of AI business leaders heading over to HumanX (with a few exceptions).

At both summits, though, coding assistants are far and beyond the breakout use case of generative AI applications.

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We dig into the tricky politics of Trump-sympathetic tech leaders who are getting privately more and more frustrated about Trump’s tariffs. Crypto booster Balaji Srinivasan wrote an extensive newsletter on X about how tariffs were bad for US businesses. Business leaders and CEOs grumbled at the Yale CEO Caucus that they were losing patience with the president’s chaos. Pavel Asparouhov, the brother of Founders Fund’s Delian Asparouhov, joked on X about becoming “woke” again to stop the downturn, summing up everyone’s frustrations.

Next up, we talk about Anthropic’s major revenue growth and how Claude itself is one of the strongest coding assistants on the market, notching it up in the model maker race. We close with, yes — another coding assistant — Anysphere, the makers of Cursor, and its rumored funding round at a $10 billion valuation.

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Timestamps

• 01:02 - HumanX vs. South By Southwest

• 04:55 - AI is Overhyped

• 09:49 - Founder Response to the Trump Tariffs

• 14:24 - New Media and AI

• 20:18 - Anthropic’s Rise and Revenue Growth

• 22:06 - Anysphere’s Rumored $10 Billion Valuation

Check Out The Full Episode

Waymo’s milestone — surpassing Lyft’s ride numbers in San Francisco — takes center stage in our first podcast of the new year.

Still, it’s not obvious that this translates into guaranteed scale across the country. We consider the operational headaches that come with scaling driverless fleets. One way forward for Waymo could be further collaborations with legacy rideshare giants like Uber.

We also break down Whatnot’s latest round of funding and debate whether a potential TikTok ban could give the live shopping startup a competitive advantage.

Give it a listen.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction

01:35 Waymo's Progress and Challenges

10:21 Whatnot's big fundraise

Episode produced by Christopher Gates

The ServiceTitan IPO has been an unexpected bright spot as 2024 comes to a close.

On this year’s final episode of the Newcomer Podcast, we discuss what other startups might follow in ServiceTitan’s footsteps next year. Eric defends the controversial ratchet provision in its last funding round. And we dig into Alphabet’s big week.

We focus on startups on this show, but this week was a good reminder that the big tech firms like Alphabet and Meta can still turn out impressive moonshot technology from their research labs.

We’re bullish on a couple emerging venture capital firms — Laude Ventures and Dimension — who just closed big new funds. The megafunds may be sucking up the majority of LP dollars, but firms with a clear thesis and a standout team of high performers can still shine in this market.

Give it a listen.

Chapters:

00:00 — Reflections ahead of the new year

05:02 — ServiceTitan’s IPO and Market Sentiment

10:00 — Alphabet’s Wins and the AI landscape

15:08 — The State of Quantum Computing

19:58 — Emerging Venture Capital Trends and Final Thoughts

Episode produced by Christopher Gates

After a brief hiatus, the Newcomer podcast is back!

Madeline Renbarger has rejoined me as my co-host to help break down all of the news across venture capital and startups.

This week, we’re kicking off with a massive $693 million chip deal and Google’s huge quantum computing breakthroughs, in news that feels like flashes of Silicon Valley returning to its “silicon” roots. Still, some of this tech feels a bit too early to be exciting for a venture-backable model.

We also dig into the personnel shake-ups across the major multi-stage funds, including Brian Singerman’s step back from Founders Fund last week. Lightspeed also saw partners exit as part of a consumer investing reshuffle. And just this morning after recording, Lux Capital’s Bilal Zuberi announced on X that he was leaving to “embark on a new chapter.”

We’re excited for you to listen.

Episode produced by Christopher Gates

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Chapters

00:00 - Intro

01:06 - Tenstorrent’s $693 million Series D

04:44 - Google’s Quantum Computing Breakthrough

06:42 - Lightspeed’s Consumer Investing Re-org

09:24 - Brian Singerman Steps Back and Founders Fund’s Roster

14:08 - Mega-funds in Transition and Tech’s Trump Positioning

20:19 - Conclusion and Future Discussions

I’ve been spending some of the afternoon chatting with OpenAI’s now fully released o1. So far, I don’t know that it feels like the super intelligent ChatGPT 5 that we’ve all fantasized about — but it’s smart and sophisticated. The new model helped me to game out potential stories and talk through problems. And of course it wrote me a poem and told me a couple dad jokes.

It looks like the biggest improvement in the news model may be in math and coding, where OpenAI is highlighting meaningful improvements over o1-preview.

It will take some time to digest the new version of the model and see what it says about the pace of AI advancement.

Before the latest update, Max Child, James Wilsterman, and I got behind our microphones to reflect on the Cerebral Valley AI Summit and give you some of our takeaways.

(Max has already hooked up the advanced voice mode of ChatGPT to his iPhone action button. Good bye Siri, hello ChatGPT.)

Give it a listen.

Brought to you by Brex

Brex knows runway is everything for venture-backed startups, so they built a banking solution that helps them take every dollar further. Unlike traditional banking solutions, Brex has no minimums and gives startups access to 20x the standard FDIC protection via program banks.

Plus, startups can earn industry-leading yield from their first dollar — while being able to access their funds anytime. If you want to make sure your portfolio companies have a place to save, spend, and grow their capital, check out Brex here.

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00:00 — Cerebral Valley AI Summit Overview

02:50 — Key Takeaways from Alexandr Wang's Talk

05:46 — The Wall in AI Foundation Models

08:57 — Dario Amodei’s Perspective on AI Progress

12:13 — Investing in AI: Insights from Martin Casado

15:06 — The Future of AI Agents and Voice Technology

17:56 — The Role of AI in Gaming and User Interaction

20:46 — AI in Enterprise: Trends and Predictions

24:03 — Challenges in Robotics and Home Automation

26:58 — Marissa Mayer on Google's Future in AI

29:51 — Final Thoughts and Future Outlook

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If you get some downtime over the Thanksgiving holiday, catch up on everything that happened at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit last week.

We’ve got videos of all of the talks on stage on our YouTube channel and are sharing my conversation with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei over our podcast feeds.

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Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang

Andreessen Horowitz partner Martin Casado

Lessons from This Year's $14B in Generative AI Enterprise Spending

Read the Report

Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi

Biology Applications of AI

Train, Tune, or Turnkey

How to Train Your Robot

Speak Easy: Voice Applications of AI

Sunshine CEO Marissa Mayer

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei

Emergent Behavior: Live Product Demos

Cerebral Valley is tomorrow! I’ve been listening to old interviews, brainstorming with Claude and ChatGPT, and talking to investors to prep for my conversations with Dario Amodei, Martin Casado, and Alexandr Wang.

We’ll be sharing those conversations here in the newsletter. Expect video highlights on our social media feeds, a detailed rundown of the biggest moments in the newsletter Thursday, and full-length conversations on our YouTube channel.

Subscribe now

To satiate your AI appetites until then, give a listen to the latest edition of the Cerebral Valley Podcast with my friends and co-hosts Max Child and James Wilsterman. You’ve listened to us assess whether startups are underrated or overrated and make our draft picks. Now we’re looking to the future. We asked Claude and ChatGPT o1 to make some predictions about what will happen in artificial intelligence over the next year. And then we took the over or under on those predictions.

Brought to you by Brex

Brex knows runway is everything for venture-backed startups, so they built a banking solution that helps them take every dollar further. Unlike traditional banking solutions, Brex has no minimums and gives startups access to 20x the standard FDIC protection via program banks.

Plus, startups can earn industry-leading yield from their first dollar — while being able to access their funds anytime. If you want to make sure your portfolio companies have a place to save, spend, and grow their capital, check out Brex here.

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Chapters

• 00:00 — Introduction to AI Predictions

• 02:48 — Exploring Predictions for AI in 2025

• 06:06 — AI Regulation in Healthcare

• 08:53 — Self-Driving Cars and Tesla's Future

• 12:04 — AI in News Media

• 14:55 — AI-Generated Films and Entertainment

• 17:53 — Anthropic’s Predictions and AI Co-Processors

• 20:59 — AI in Pharmaceutical Development

• 24:13 — International AI Treaties and Regulations

• 26:47 — Comparing AI Models: ChatGPT vs. Claude

• 30:06 — Future of AI and Human Systems

• 32:46 — Conclusion and Reflections on AI Predictions

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This is probably my favorite episode of the year. We just updated our picks for our artificial intelligence startup fantasy draft. That means dropping startups whose star is fading and making new pickups.

Last year, Max Child, James Wilsterman, and I drafted the most promising generative AI startups that had raised $100 million or more. In this latest episode, we make some hard choices: cutting loose startups who have lost our favor, cashing in on early acquisitions, and pickup up some new startups. In the process, we weigh in on the buzziest AI startups.

Brought to you by Brex

Brex knows runway is everything for venture-backed startups, so they built a banking solution that helps them take every dollar further. Unlike traditional banking solutions, Brex has no minimums and gives startups access to 20x the standard FDIC protection via program banks.

Plus, startups can earn industry-leading yield from their first dollar — while being able to access their funds anytime. If you want to make sure your portfolio companies have a place to save, spend, and grow their capital, check out Brex here.

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Catching You Up on Last Year’s Picks

To catch you up: here’s how last year’s draft went down. It started off with me taking on a $75 billion handicap for the right to pick first and draft OpenAI. We proceeded from there in a snake draft with Max picking second and James picking third. Here were the five companies we each drafted last year.

Last year’s picks

Eric

1. OpenAI

2. Inflection

3. Character.AI

4. Glean

5. Mistral AI

Max

1. Databricks

2. Pinecone

3. Cohere

4. Modular

5. Imbue

James

1. Hugging Face

2. Anthropic

3. AI21 Labs

4. Replit

5. Adept

Altogether on this week’s episode we collectively dropped three companies, exited three, and picked up twelve new startups.

I don’t want to spoil our picks so you’ll have to listen to the episode to find out what happened. (As a reminder, the goal here is to accumulate the most total value by November 1, 2028. We aren’t worried about the return on our investment just the final end state valuation.)

We’d love for you to weigh in in the comments with your own seven startup picks and give us your feedback on what you think of our draft decisions.

Give it a listen.

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We’re back with a couple episodes of the Cerebral Valley Podcast leading up to our summit on November 20.

I’m joined by my Cerebral Valley AI Summit co-hosts Max Child and James Wilsterman.

On this episode, we started by talking about the thing on everyone’s minds — the election of Donald Trump and what it means for artificial intelligence.

Then, at the 28 minute mark we debate whether Anthropic, Suno, Perplexity, Midjourney, and a bunch of other AI companies live up to the hype in a game of “overrated, underrated, or properly rated.”

Episode produced by Christopher Gates

Timestamps: 

• 00:00 — Initial reactions to the results

• 06:16 — Energy policy under Trump

• 09:25 — Will tariffs replace the CHIPS Act?

• 12:23 — Regulation and AI policy in a new era

• 21:52 — Black swans in AI and policy

• 27:54 — Overrated, underrated, or properly rated? AI’s hype meter

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The Cerebral Valley AI Summit on November 20 in SF

We’ll be hosting an elite group of AI startup founders, investors, and other senior executives on November 20 in San Francisco.

Spots are extremely limited, but we always hold back a few spots for founders who are late to get the memo that they should join us.

Apply

We’re in the home stretch. Silicon Valley’s political nightmare could hopefully soon be over. In the latest episode of the Newcomer podcast, we dig into all of the tech industry’s burning political takes.

There was Josh Wolfe’s endorsement waffling. Jeff Bezos’ editorial intervention. And the general sense that everyone is losing their minds leading up to what should be Trump’s last run at the presidency.

Later in the episode, we break down General Catalyst’s massive fundraise haul and its transition into a “company.” We also discuss Stripe’s billion-dollar acquisition of Bridge.

Episode produced by Christopher Gates

Timestamps: 

00:00 — Intro

04:13 — The VC political divide

09:27 — The Washington Post’s editorial debacle

12:25 — General Catalyst raises $8B

15:38 — Stripe acquires Bridge

Note for our listeners: We’ll be back with a couple episodes of the Cerebral Valley Podcast starting next week, so stay tuned.

Newcomer turns four this week. On the podcast, Madeline talked with me about how it all began.

When I made the decision to start Newcomer, the venture capital industry was in the beginnings of a record-breaking bull run. A lot has changed since then, for both venture and the media industry, but I’m excited about our growth at Newcomer and wanted to share a bit more about what’s next.

Description

Eric and Madeline discuss Newcomer’s revenue milestones, the growth of Newcomer over the past four years, and what’s next for the publication. They also focus on the downturn in the venture industry and how this will affect first-time fund managers.

Produced by Christopher Gates

Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

02:08 — Newcomer’s 4 Year Anniversary

08:22 — Building out a media company in 2024 and what’s next

15:46 — The venture downturn vs. new emerging funds

22:02 — X-energy's $500 million raise

22:42 — $100 million for Path Robotics

I stuck my neck out last week and laid out the case for why I think investors should be more bearish on OpenAI at a $157 billion valuation. Then, Tesla made headlines showing off its work on self-driving and its new humanoid robots.

On the latest episode of the Newcomer podcast, Jon McNeill, the co-founder of DVx Ventures, joined me to dissect my OpenAI argument and puzzle over Tesla’s demos.

I’ve known McNeill since he was the chief operating officer at Lyft. Before that he was one of Elon Musk’s top lieutenants at Tesla.

Give it a listen.

Description

In this episode, Eric Newcomer is joined by guest host Jon McNeill, a seasoned executive with experience at Lyft and Tesla who is now leading DVx Ventures. They discuss the bear case for OpenAI. The OpenAI discussion then leads into a closer look at the contrast between founder and manager modes before concluding with a discussion on Tesla’s advancements, or lack thereof, in self-driving technology. 

Produced by Christopher Gates

Chapters: 

00:00 — Introduction

03:27 — Bear case for OpenAI

13:07 — Founder mode

17:20 — Tesla promises, but SpaceX delivers

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Description: 

In this episode of the Newcomer Podcast, Eric Newcomer and Madeline Renbarger discuss two major funding rounds, the ongoing downturn in VC funding, and the growing imbalance between public relations professionals and reporters. Eric and Madeline highlight Poolside’s $500M round and Impulse Space’s $150M raise, while pointing out that even the AI mega rounds cant hide the downturn in VC funding.

Produced by Christopher Gates

Audio Chapters: 

00:00:18 — Poolside’s $500M round 

00:02:24 — Impulse Space’s $150M raise

00:05:17 — Downturn in VC

00:11:03 — The imbalance between PR and journalism

We’re back this week with another episode of the Newcomer podcast.

It’s hard not to talk about OpenAI’s latest funding round.

The details aren’t set, but Sam Altman’s role as the company’s strongman has been further reinforced by the gobs of capital he can raise from the likes of SoftBank, even while his former lieutenants continue to leave.

Madeline and I dig into how this deal will shape up, and if it could play out similarly to Uber where it all works out in the end for investors, regardless of internal company strife.

Outside of the biggest story of the week, there’s still lots of drama to cover. We dive into business implications of Gavin Newsom’s veto of SB 1047, a buzzy YC startup’s audacious social media strategy, and what Marc Andreessen’s thoughts on psychedelics reflect about the attitudes to drug use in the tech community.

We’re also on the hunt for more internal fund documents that we can share with our readers, so send us your tips and scoops. We’re at eric@newcomer.co and madeline@newcomer.co.

We hope you enjoy this episode as much as we did making it.

Description:

In this episode of the Newcomer Podcast, hosts Eric Newcomer and Madeline Renbarger delve into the world of venture capital deals, starting with Ujet’s $76M Series D for its AI-powered call center software. Next up is the drama surrounding PearAI, whose growth-hacker tweet set the tech world buzzing. From there, they navigate through OpenAI’s own “Game of Thrones,” exploring internal power plays and high-stakes exits, before turning to California’s latest AI regulatory battles. To wrap things up, they call for some balance in Silicon Valley’s escalating discourse around drugs and psychedelics.

Chapters:

00:22 Ujet

01:40 PearAI

05:49 Open AI

11:45 AI Regulation

16:34 Drugs + SV

Dead Cat, our tech media criticism podcast with Tom Dotan and Katie Benner, had a niche following among tech reporters, public relations people, and other insiders who wanted to hear the story behind the story. But then Tom went to the Wall Street Journal and the podcast came to a sudden end.

When the mood strikes I’ll co-host the Cerebral Valley podcast with Max Child and James Wilsterman but we usually record those episodes leading up to Cerebral Valley. There’s only so much to say about just artificial intelligence year-round.

Last year, I tried hosting the Newcomer podcast solo. But I felt like I was handing over the microphone to my guests half the time. Episodes varied wildly from show to show. I missed having co-hosts.

I’m excited to bring back the Newcomer podcast with Madeline Renbarger — the other reporter here at Newcomer — joining as my co-host. We’re working with Christopher Gates, who was the founding producer of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast. So he has the tech news know-how to make sure we’re talking about the key stories of the week.

We plan to deliver a weekly, tight 20-minute show, covering the top stories in startups and venture capital. We aren’t going to email out every episode here in the newsletter so make sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast feed. (Here’s Apple and Spotify.) We’ll publish the occasional audio interview when the mood strikes.

We had a lot of fun recording this episode and we’re excited to reintroduce a regular podcast into our repertoire here at Newcomer. We think this podcast will be a time efficient and enjoyable way to stay on top of the key things happening in Silicon Valley startups each week.

Episode 1: AI + Robots, YC Preview, and Why the Cool Kids Keep Picking on Tech

In this week’s episode of the Newcomer Podcast, hosts Eric Newcomer and Madeline Renbarger discuss three top venture capital deals, including World Labs and delivery startup Flink. They also wade into Y Combinator’s upcoming Demo Day, highlighting trends in defense tech and the implications of AI’s power consumption.

The conversation touches on Runway’s licensing deal with Lionsgate and concludes with an examination of John Mulaney’s performance at Dreamforce.

Chapters

• 00:00 World Labs: A New Era in AI Robotics

• 05:10 The Rise and Fall of Delivery Startups

• 09:19 Y Combinator’s Demo Day

• 11:46 Defense Tech

• 20:09 Powering AI: The Nuclear Debate

• 24:24 Runway’s Licensing Deal

• 28:02 John Mulaney’s Roast

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Today we’re highlighting two fireside chats from the Newcomer Banking Summit on March 14.

First up is Mercury CEO Immad Akhund. He talked about how the Silicon Valley Bank crisis sent customers rushing to his digital banking service.

He pitched a world where software — not human bankers — solve most of customers’ problems. Akhund told me, “My experience with relationship banking was I need to send a wire and I literally cannot figure out to do it, please help me. Which to me never felt like a relationship, it felt very transactional and painful — and with Mercury you don’t have to do that.”

Mercury is limited by the fact that it is not a bank — it’s a software company on top of banking partners — at a time when regulators are looking closely at how banks work with fintech partners.

We concluded our summit with Jackie Reses — who was a top executive at Square before leaving to buy a bank. Reses is the CEO of Lead Bank, a regional Kansas City bank that still serves local customers but has built an onramp for financial technology companies to connect with the banking system.

“The thing I saw at Square — which I consider to be a very strong, innovative fintech — is that owning a bank and operating a bank is a 10X delta in understanding compliance to working in a tech company,” Reses said. At Square, Reses said, she learned to “appreciate the complexity of what it takes to do this, so that we could learn how to serve our clients better and help them scale — but make sure we never put ourselves in the position to risk the relationship that we have operating with our regulators.”

You can give the episodes a listen or watch them on YouTube.

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Also: The Future of Banking with Rho, Jiko, and Ripple

In case you missed it, we’ve posted another panel with three fintech/banking leaders.

Rho CEO Everett Cook, Jiko CEO Stephane Lintner, and Ripple President Monica Long are all trying to solve shortcomings in the legacy banking system, with different approaches. Check it out to see their takes on the major problems with banking today.

We’ve got two great sessions from the Newcomer Banking Summit for you:

• First up, WestCap Group founder Laurence Tosi and Lux Capital co-founder Peter Hébert. They give an unvarnished account of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank with the benefit of hindsight. “It was like the banking equivalent of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan,” Hébert said. “It was absolute sheer terror.”

• We follow that up with Silicon Valley Bank President Marc Cadieux, who talks about where SVB is today and fields questions about all the new competition his reconstituted bank, now owned by First Citizens, is facing.

I thought Tosi and Hébert’s talk was the spiciest of the day. And Cadieux was the man of the hour. I wanted to know where his head was at one year after the crisis.

You can give the episodes a listen or watch them on YouTube.

Breaking the Bank: BCV’s Matt Harris

If you missed it, yesterday I published a talk from Bain Capital Ventures’ Matt Harris.

In the headline, I made a mortifying error and used the acronym of another VC firm. Harris is Bain Capital Ventures’ fintech guru; he gave a great presentation and I had nightmares last night about my mixup. Apologies!

Here’s that talk:

Today, we have a double episode for you — two conversations from the Cerebral Valley AI Summit.

Reid Hoffman was fresh off a meeting with President Joe Biden when Hoffman and I sat down on stage at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit Nov. 15. On stage, he told us that working to get Biden elected next year is one of his top priorities.

Then, I sat down with the ever-feisty Vinod Khosla. The investor called for a TikTok ban and more welcoming immigration policies while warning against open-source artificial intelligence projects.

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NVIDIA DGX Cloud on OCI is an AI training-as-a-service platform for customers to train complex AI models like generative AI applications. Included with DGX Cloud, NVIDIA AI Enterprise brings the software layer of the NVIDIA AI platform to OCI.

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Hoffman Plans to Go Big for Biden

Hoffman, fresh off a meeting with President Biden, kicked off the afternoon with a strong endorsement of the President’s record. Hoffman praised Biden for his recent executive order on artificial intelligence.

Reid called himself “a 95%-98% supporter” of the executive order, endorsing provisions on reporting and monitoring, “red team” testing, and voluntary commitments by companies that might eventually be enforced via the Defense Production Act. But he pushed back on the idea that the FTC should be monitoring the AI industry for anti-competitive conduct.

“Startups are not being impeded right now,” he asserted, despite the apparent dominance of OpenAI and the mega-cap tech companies. Reid sits on the board of Microsoft, and offered that he was in fact “first money in” on OpenAI, through his personal foundation, but he’s not concerned about, er, his own companies having too much power. “I don’t think it constrains competition on any level.”

Hoffman is always happy to engage on policy, and I asked him what he thought about Marc Andreessen’s recent “techno-optimist” manifesto, which denigrates the very idea of government oversight. Reid said he was a techno-optimist too, and half-joked that Andreessen “quoted kind of liberally from things I’ve written and said” without any attribution. But Hoffman said that he’s not on board with Andreessen’s approach. “It’s kind of dumb to think that when you have major technologies there can’t be negative side effects,” he said, noting that all his AI projects have safety teams. “Tech can be amazing. Let’s be intentional about building.”

Khosla Wins Cheers from the Cerebral Valley Audience

Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla confirmed that his firm, boosted by an early stake in OpenAI, was about to close on $3 billion in commitments for a new fund. Valuations are high, he said, “but just because valuations are high doesn’t mean it isn’t a good time to invest.”

He’s not buying existential risk, calling it “nonsensical” talk from academics who had nothing better to do. But he’s long on China risk, saying the U.S. is in a “techno-economic war” with China and needs to fight hard. “I would ban TikTok in a nano-second,” he said, unlike his predecessor on stage, Hoffman, who Khosla said he very much admired. Khosla is firmly against open-source AI models as well due to the China risk.

Bio-risk and cyber risk are real concerns too, he noted.

But if China or rogue viruses don’t kill us, Khosla thinks the near-future is very bright: “I do think in 10 years we’ll have free doctors, free tutors, free lawyers” all powered by AI. 

Khosla also gave a grudging endorsement of the Biden Executive Order, saying it was “okay.” 

But like most Silicon Valley moguls, he has no time for antitrust issues. “We have to get people like Khan out of there,” he said, referring to the chair of the FTC (though misstating her name), calling her “crazy, left-wing.”   

Khosla said he’s long believed that AI would force us to “redefine what it is to me human.”

Meantime he himself plans another 25 years of VC investing, and if all goes well, maybe more. 

Give it a listen

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We were delighted to kick off the 2nd Cerebral Valley AI Summit with Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks, and Naveen Rao, co-founder of MosaicML.

Their encounter at our debut event in March led to Ghodsi buying Rao’s company, which had little revenue, for $1.3 billion. At our event on Nov. 15, the two discussed how the deal came together quickly after meeting at the conference dinner.

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NVIDIA DGX Cloud on OCI is an AI training-as-a-service platform for customers to train complex AI models like generative AI applications. Included with DGX Cloud, NVIDIA AI Enterprise brings the software layer of the NVIDIA AI platform to OCI.

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Ghodsi recounted how he started spending some time with Rao and thought, “these guys are pretty good,” and then by chance noticed an employee he respected poking around with MosaicML and offering a strong endorsement. Soon Ghodsi was on the phone with the head of his deals team, who told him “if you want to buy these guys you have to do it this weekend.” Rao said by that point “you kind of know he’s going to pop the question,” and once they worked out the money, the deal was done.

The two executives certainly seemed to be in harmony as they touted the potential benefits from their combination, which in simple terms will bring MosaicML’s expertise in building specialized generative AI models to Databricks’ corporate data platform products, essentially super-charging Databricks for the generative AI era.

They were eager to defend the idea of open-source foundation models that are specific to certain tasks, rejecting the notion that general-purpose models like ChatGPT-4 will eventually swallow everything. (This conversation took place before OpenAI was thrown into chaos by its board of directors.)

Ghodsi said calls to limit open-source models on the grounds that they’ll be too easily exploited by bad actors a “horrible, horrendous” idea that would “put a stop to all innovation.” 

“It’s essential that we have an open-source ecosystem,” he said, noting that even now it’s unclear how a lot of AI models work, and open-source research will be critical to answering those questions.

Rao added that many of the people making predictions about how AI would develop are “full of shit.” On the safety question, he noted that cost alone would stand in the way of any existential risks for a long time, and in the meantime the focus should be on real threats like disinformation and robot safety.

Give it a listen

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My Cerebral Valley co-hosts and I took a stab at answering that question with an artificial intelligence startup draft.

Our startup draft starts at 27:35 after a discussion of some of the biggest themes going into this week’s Cerebral Valley AI Summit.

The draft gave us a chance to dissect some of the most promising startups in artificial intelligence right now.

The goal was to amass five companies with the biggest valuation five years from now. We restricted ourselves to AI startups that had raised more than $100 million.

I encourage you to make your own prediction in the comments.

Give it a listen

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