The Generalist - What to Watch in AI
👋 Tiny but impactful: If this email showed up in your “Promotions” tab, please pull it over to “Primary.” It takes ~1 second and helps ensure The Generalist doesn’t get stuck in the email dungeon. Friends, Another week, another leap forward in the world of artificial intelligence. After launching GPT-4 earlier this month, OpenAI released plugins on Thursday. Users can now interact with Instacart, Expedia, OpenTable, and several other platforms, all from within the ChatGPT interface. You can, quite literally, order your groceries, book a table at a restaurant, or plan your next vacation with AI assistance. It’s the kind of upgrade that might sound small, but that, I suspect, will end up being significant: ChatGPT now directly touches the internet and its many-dimensioned array of apps and services. Suddenly, the realm of possible actions has increased exponentially. As the AI revolution continues apace, it’s becoming increasingly tricky to know where to look. Which new product should you use at your company? Which innovation should you start playing with? Which startup may someday change the fabric of our lives? To try and answer these questions, I’m excited to share another edition of “What to Watch in AI.” We’ve asked investors from Sequoia, Thrive, Bessemer, Lux, Dimension, and Footwork to share the companies and trends they find most promising. This time we’ve added founders to the mix: you’ll hear which peer businesses the leaders of Synthesia, Enveda, Valence, and Athenian are most excited about. To discover ten companies at the vanguard of AI, jump in. A quick request: If you liked this piece, consider giving it a ❤️ at the top of the email! It helps us know what’s resonating, and supports our growth. Thank you! Brought to you by A.TeamThe world’s best product builders are not for hire. The most important resource in an advanced economy is talent. But great talent is hard to find. Increasingly, the world’s top product builders are no longer looking for full-time jobs. If you want to build great things without increasing full-time headcount, use A.Team. The company’s platform has brought together some of the world’s most talented engineers, designers, and product managers as cohesive teams. Post a summary of your business's most pressing problem and get matched with an exceptional team in days. Once your team is deployed, the A.Team platform makes it easy to manage contracts, payment, and scale resources up or down. As Mario wrote of A.Team: “The company has created a platform powerful enough to solve the difficult problems McKinsey advises on but is equipped to build solutions. It makes the best of Silicon Valley – the energy, experimentation, iteration, and invention – accessible to the rest of the corporate world.” To start building transformative products with your dream team, sign up here. What to Watch in AIActionable insightsIf you only have a few minutes to spare, here’s what investors, operators, and founders should know about the most exciting AI startups.
The artificial intelligence renaissance has officially hit warp speed. It has not even been five months since our last edition of this series, yet the space has radically shifted. Back in the quaint days of mid-November, ChatGPT had yet to launch, let alone GPT-4. Bing was still a brainless search laggard, and to all within the Grand Googleplex, the word “Bard” provoked no fever dreams or night terrors. Increasingly, this is how our world seems to work: in fits and starts, in spurts of mind-torching acceleration and gorgeous contraptions, in obsolescences that occur over a long lunch break. Our “What to Watch” series attempts to stay on top of technology’s rapidly advancing sectors. While no one can hope to know every innovation in AI (this is an energetic organism, moving in a hundred directions at once), we hope that this surfaces compelling companies and trends before the broader market has noticed. To do that, we’ve asked some of AI’s most impressive investors and founders to select the companies and trends they’re monitoring closely. (In a fun coincidence, one investor independently picked a contributing founder’s company.) These are their picks. Note: Long-time readers will know we intentionally don’t preclude investors from mentioning companies they’ve backed. The benefits of increased knowledge and “skin in the game” outweigh the risk of facile book-talking. Across contributors, we do our utmost to select for expertise, originality, and thoughtfulness. Harvey: Your legal assistantThere is enormous innovation at multiple layers of the AI stack. For example, various people are building interesting new bespoke models for coding (Magic), image generation, and core multimodal language (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others). Similarly, there is an explosion of tooling companies, from Langchain to Llama-index to Chroma. Some companies are hybrid across these boundaries (like ChatGPT from OpenAI), while others are building standalone applications. Common characteristics of applications that are seeing fast adoption include:
Like GitHub’s Copilot, Harvey possesses all three characteristics. But rather than assisting with code generation, Harvey focuses on the legal world. Harvey helps lawyers perform tasks in due diligence, litigation, research, and compliance. It is off to a good start: the firm has already landed deals with behemoths like PwC and Allen & Overy. Amidst a sea of AI startups, Harvey stands out for a few key reasons:
The legal and compliance world is a great example of one that will be remade with AI – for everything from litigation to drafting insurance claims to filing with the courts on behalf of human clients. And it won’t stop there. Specialized AI assistants – and applications that can synthesize data and provide answers – have considerable potential in medicine (see: medPaLM), finance, marketing, sales, accounting, and beyond. – Elad Gil, and Vince Hankes, Partner at Thrive Capital PuzzlerAll guesses welcome and clues given to anyone that would like one. Just respond to this email for a hint.
MJFM was first to unscramble last week’s unusual puzzler. Nik R, Upendra S, and Krishna N joined him. All figured out which big tech CEO’s name was hidden in this anagram:
The answer? Uber czar, Dara Khosrowshahi. Well played to all. Until next time, Mario |
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