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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.

Jump in

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What to Watch in AI

Actionable insights

If you only have a few minutes to spare, here’s what investors, operators, and founders should know about the most exciting AI startups. 

• Predict the future. We all enjoy playing Nostradamus every once in a while. But what if you could forecast the future with a good chance of being right? One contributor suggests AI is making this increasingly possible thanks to companies like Kumo. The predictive intelligence platform allows users to “query the future,” forecasting how customers may react to new products or business changes.

• The augmented expert. Marketers already leverage large language models (LLMs) to create copy, blog posts, and more. But how can we ensure AI’s power reaches the domains of law and medicine? Two submissions highlight companies making inroads, helping doctors and lawyers operate more efficiently and effectively. 

• Cloud studios. Once upon a time, if you wanted to capture 3D footage, you needed bespoke, expensive hardware. Recent innovations mean that’s no longer the case. With nothing more than a smartphone, users can now capture photorealistic 3D imagery that can be used for gaming assets, e-commerce product shots, or creative projects. Increasingly, the power of a megastudio is accessible from anywhere. 

• The power of product savvy. Simply leveraging AI is not enough; you must also wrap the technology in a compelling product. One company highlighted for this ability is Sana, an enterprise knowledge management platform. According to one contributor, Sana leverages AI subtly but effectively, demonstrating how it can be woven into a cohesive product. 

• Science speaks. The world is full of vernaculars humans have not been able to decipher. That includes the “languages” of life sciences like biology and chemistry. Companies like Enveda translate the scientific realm's vocabulary, grammar, and semantics – and allow humans to “speak back” by developing novel chemistries.

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 assistant

There 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:

1. Focusing on what’s new. Apps that leverage the unique advantages of LLMs or other models often see strong uptake. Builders are asking themselves: What can this technology uniquely do that prior tech can not?

2. Reducing drudgery. Applications that replace repetitive human labor or core workflows with light machine intelligence are compelling. Reducing or eliminating painful manual work holds obvious attraction. 

3. Augmenting the human. Full automation may not be possible in many instances. As a result, some applications have taken a “human in the loop” approach, focusing on augmenting user capability rather than taking it over completely. Humans are used to correct hallucinations or provide a qualitative view on accuracy or wording.

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:

1. The right team. Harvey’s founders understand the problem from both a use case and technology perspective. Co-founder Winston Weinberg practiced antitrust litigation at O’Melveny, while CEO Gabriel Pereyra worked as a research scientist at Deepmind.

2. A thoughtful approach. Harvey has taken a differentiated approach to assessing what legal teams need. Weinberg and Pereyra focused on a few key early problems in due diligence, seeing strong customer feedback. With iteration, they’ve achieved deep user engagement.

3. Speed and focus. After choosing their problem set, Harvey’s founders have built rapidly to serve a specific customer need and use case. Harvey engaged tightly with specific customers like Allen & Overy to ensure it was building against real customer pain. This uncovered more use cases to deepen their workflows.

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

Keep reading

Puzzler

​All guesses welcome and clues given to anyone that would like one. Just respond to this email for a hint. 

An old king dies, leaving behind two princes. Rather than the eldest prince taking over the throne, the king’s will orders that a horse race will be held to determine his successor. However, there’s a twist: whichever prince’s horse goes slowest will become king.

The princes hold a race but eventually abandon it. With both holding their horses back, trying to move as slowly as possible, neither could win.

To try and break their deadlock, the princes visit a wise man who offers some advice. The next day, the princes race again, and this time, both move at full speed. A new king is crowned. What advice did the wise man give them?

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:

AHA HOW ROADS SHIRK

The answer? Uber czar, Dara Khosrowshahi. Well played to all. 

Until next time,

Mario