12 Videos from CVAI London: Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, Dylan Field from Figma, Anton Osika from Lovable & More
Listen to our talks from the Cerebral Valley AI Summit in London
We just wrapped our inaugural Cerebral Valley AI Summit in London.
We’re sharing all 12 talks from this week’s summit in the newsletter. You can also watch them on our YouTube channel.
We heard from some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley and European tech, including Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi on stage with Wayve CEO Alex Kendall, Dylan Field from Figma, investors like Index’s Jan Hammer, Accel’s Philippe Botteri, GV’s Tom Hulme, and founders from some of the fastest-growing European AI startups like Granola, Synthesia, Lovable, Poolside, and more.
Bonnie Kruft (Microsoft) and Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face)
Hugging Face CEO Thomas Wolf argued AI as it stands today cannot produce the next Einstein, since it cannot generate truly novel ideas.
Even major models like DeepMind’s AlphaFold, Wolf said, “explore the field of possibilities, but it’s not really inventing a new way to play.” The discoveries that AI will make, he pointed out, will still come from human creativity.
Microsoft Research’s AI for Science partner Bonnie Kruft made the case that even if AI can’t make novel discoveries on its own, its capability to process very large datasets will allow scientists to reach many significant breakthroughs.
A Presentation on the State of AI Research from ICONIQ’s Seth Pierrepont and Vivian Guo
ICONIQ general partner Seth Pierrepont and principal Vivian Guo walked the audience through their survey of over 300 company executives from small startups to $1 billion businesses.
One welcome takeaway for foundation model companies: while OpenAI may have the lead in model usage, most businesses subscribe to three or more foundation models for their workflows.
You can check out the full report linked here.
Jan Hammer (Index Ventures), Philippe Botteri (Accel), and Tom Hulme (GV)
Philippe Botteri of Accel, Jan Hammer of Index Ventures, and Tom Hulme of GV were optimistic about market for AI agents.
Botteri emphasized that some of the biggest breakthroughs at the model layer, from stable diffusion to those from Synthesia and Eleven Labs, are based here: “Europe is generating leaders,” he stated.
Christopher Pedregal (Granola) and Harry Stebbings (20VC)
Christopher Pedregal, CEO of the popular note-taking app Granola, told British VC and podcaster Harry Stebbings that he believes “prompting” as we know it will soon disappear.
Voice input and text output will be a common way to interact with AIs, he predicted, since people can speak faster and with more texture than they can write, but can read more quickly than they can listen.
Victor Riparbelli (Synthesia) and Matt Rouif (Photoroom)
Synthesia founder Victor Riparbelli argued that AI-generated video is still wildly overpriced for any broad applications — around $250 a minute.
On the AI image-generation side, we’re already nearing a point where the technology can radically alter some jobs, according to Matt Rouif, the CEO and co-founder of Photoroom.
Lin Qiao (Fireworks) and Renen Hallak (VAST Data)
Lin Qiao of Fireworks AI said that application companies are always weighing a trade-off between speed, price, and quality when it comes to getting the most out of the foundation models their applications are built on top of.
Renen Hallak of VAST Data said model-builders and enterprise customers alike need tools to be able to store increasingly massive amounts of both structured and unstructured data, and easily interact with it. GPUs are getting “much hungrier for parallel access,” he said, and the data infrastructure will need to keep up.
Bella Liu (Orby) and Eoin Hinchy (Tines)
Bella Liu of Orby and Eoin Hinchy of Tines, both of whom are in the agent business, noted that enterprise customers remain nervous about unsupervised agents running around their IT infrastructure, even as these businesses are thrilled about the productivity potential.
Anton Osika (Lovable)
Anton Osika, co-founder of Lovable, has “building the last piece of software” on his LinkedIn profile, though he conceded on-stage that it was a bit of marketing overstatement to say that his product had solved software forever. Still, he said, “I’m confident we’re going to get to a place where 99% of software is created by a human but with an AI.”
Chase Lochmiller (Crusoe)
Crusoe is in talks to create multiple AI data centers that would consume more energy than the entire data center footprint of Northern Virginia, according to its CEO Chase Lochmiller.
“You’re talking about building all of the data center capacity that we’ve built over the last decades — you’re talking about building all that infrastructure in a single location for a single customer in a short period of time,” Lochmiller said.
Eiso Kant (Poolside)
Eiso Kant, co-founder of Poolside, offered a look at how his company’s proprietary foundation model for software development fit into the current frenzy around AI coding, which has emerged as the most lucrative and important AI application of the moment.
He noted that he was a “huge fan of what’s happening with vibe coding,” which promised to democratize software development. But skilled developers building complex products still need a specialized toolset, and Poolside is betting that it can do better than the general-purpose LLMs.
Dara Khosrowshahi (Uber) and Alex Kendall (Wayve)
In his on-stage comments, Dara Khosrowshahi underscored that Uber’s role in the rise of AVs is to act as the platform that connects the vehicles with drivers, rather than a developer of the technology.
Khosrowshahi says despite Uber’s all-time high stock price, it is getting “zero credit” for being a major player in self-driving cars.
He compared its current valuation of $195 billion with Tesla at over a trillion, despite the fact that Uber is already offering autonomous rides on its app via Waymo, while Tesla is only now testing its robotaxi service in Austin.
“When you're developing new technologies as a company, you have to be willing to invest aggressively for many, many years before the market understands or necessarily gives credit for what you're doing,” Khosrowshahi said.
“I think $190 [billion] will just be a stepping stone for us,” he added.
Dylan Field (Figma)
Dylan Field, founder of the design platform Figma, touted the potential of AI and new Figma tools to make everyone a designer, while at the same time elevating the importance and capacity of the best among them.
Great lineup and thanks for sharing the videos! Enjoyed Dara's interview with Alex and love his candor that he feels Uber is getting 'zero credit' for being a major player in self-driving cars. The big caveat here is that Uber isn't developing any of the tech themselves, and relying on partners like Waymo. If Waymo decided to pull the plug, Uber would be screwed in the short term. But I guess you could also say the same about Tesla since they're getting a ton of credit but aren't close to Waymo's product yet...