9 Videos From CVAI London: Cohere's Aidan Gomez, Index Ventures' Danny Rimer, Recursive's Josh Tobin & More
Watch the on-stage talks from our latest Cerebral Valley AI Summit
We’re fresh off the mid-year Cerebral Valley AI Summit in London.
AI founders, investors, and operators from Europe, the United Kingdom, the US, and beyond came together to hear from industry leaders including Sixth Street chairman and Alphabet board member R. Martin Chavez, Cohere founder Aidan Gomez, Sequoia partner Luciana Lixandru, Luminance CEO Eleanor Lightbody, Index Ventures partner Danny Rimer, Decagon founder Jesse Zhang, and more.
We’re sharing all 9 of the main-stage panels here in the newsletter and on our Newcomer AI Summits YouTube channel.
The Cerebral Valley AI Summit is co-hosted by Newcomer and Weekend co-founders Max Child and James Wilsterman.
Many thanks to our sponsors Nebius, Index Ventures, Higgsfield, and Weekend for making it possible.
Aidan Gomez (Cohere)
In the opening session at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit in London, Aidan Gomez, CEO of Cohere and co-author of the seminal “Attention Is All You Need” paper, said that effectively we’ve already reached AGI.
Gomez also cautioned against the risk of the Western world relying too heavily on American foundation models for their AI capacity.
Luciana Lixandru (Sequoia Capital)
Sequoia Capital partner Luciana Lixandru said she’s found ample opportunities to invest due to European leaders’ realization that they can no longer rely on the good will and protection of the United States of America. Sequoia just co-led a €500 million round in Stark Defense, a startup making kamikaze drones and other weapons.
Arnaud Fournier (OpenAI)
Arnaud Fournier, a Palantir vet, described how his team of forward deployed engineers at OpenAI have been embedding in legacy businesses to teach existing leaders what AI can do to transform their business practices.
One of his more prominent initiatives has been his work with Thrive Holdings to integrate AI into accounting firm rollups.
Eleanor Lightbody (Luminance) and Neil Zeghidour (Gradium)
Eleanor Lightbody, the CEO of legal tech platform Luminance, and voice model developer Gradium’s founder Neil Zeghidour both agreed that earning customers’ trust that your AI tools are accurate and consistent is key to earning top-quality deals.
Once you build that trust and gain a foothold, it them becomes possible to train models off of a company’s internal data.
Alex Mashrabov (Higgsfield) and Grant Lee (Gamma)
Alex Mashrabov, the founder of the video generation company Higgsfield, and Grant Lee, the founder of AI-generated slide maker Gamma, both started out aiming at a “prosumer” market. But they quickly saw the enterprise demand for AI creative tools, and are both pushing heavily into enterprise solutions.
Both are optimistic that a lot of content creation for go-to-market teams can be fully automated in the near future.
Danny Rimer (Index Ventures)
Index Ventures partner Danny Rimer has been investing in companies from the rise of mobile technology, to the sharing economy, and now the AI boom.
He pushed back on the notion that backing multiple AI labs is contradictory. “We’re in the early innings,” he said, and there’s room for more than one winner.
To the founders in the audience, he offered some advice: evaluate hires on capability, taste, and agency.
Jesse Zhang (Decagon)
Decagon founder Jesse Zhang spoke just months after opening his company’s first office in London. Zhang found that contrary to the prevailing wisdom in Silicon Valley, many established business leaders in Europe have been eager to adopt AI customer-support tools rather quickly.
Josh Tobin (Recursive)
Recursive’s Josh Tobin explained why he and his co-founders left big AI labs like OpenAI, Google, and Meta to dive headfirst into researching ways to make AI models learn how to train themselves — a process called “recursive self-improvement.”
Tobin doesn’t think there’s going to be a demand crash for AI compute anytime soon; if anything, he said, it’s only going to get worse.
R. Martin Chavez (Alphabet)
During his time at Goldman Sachs during the 2010s, R. Martin Chavez saw the potential for AI agents when his team was developing “algorithmic trading.” Once he became CIO, Chavez said he set out his terms plainly: staff could either tell computers what to do, partner with those who did, or stand in the way and leave.
To the founders in the room, he shared the advice he first heard from Goldman’s head of sales: “Customers buy a product when they have unbearable pain and you have convinced them that only your software product can put an end to their pain. Everything else is just getting lucky.”