Mike McCormick: AI Acceleration vs Risks, Funding Global Resilience, AGI scenarios, U.S. vs China

**Mike McCormick** (0:01)
You're now plugged in to The Delphi Podcast.

**Tommy Shaughnessy** (0:06)
Everyone, welcome back to the podcast. I'm Tommy, one of the founding partners of Delphi Ventures. We are leading a lot of AI efforts at Delphi across our fun, direct investments, fun investments. And we came across Mike from introduction from Vishal, close friend of mine who runs mythos.vc, one of the smartest guys I know.

**Mike McCormick** (0:27)
He's great.

**Tommy Shaughnessy** (0:28)
He's awesome.

**Mike McCormick** (0:28)
Big fan.

**Tommy Shaughnessy** (0:30)
And found you, Mike. And you changed my mind on a bunch of things on a call and figured we should do a podcast on AI. So here we are.

**Mike McCormick** (0:36)
Okay, fun. Let's get into it.

**Tommy Shaughnessy** (0:38)
So tell me a little bit, tell us a little bit about Mike McCormick.

**Mike McCormick** (0:41)
Yeah, okay. Let's see. So I went to school in DC thinking I might be a policy person, but got involved in startups and that was way more fun. So I moved to San Francisco, worked on a couple startups in SF around 2011, 2012 And then I got started at ADD. So I founded a VC firm so I could work on a dozen or a couple dozen things at the same time, and ran that fund for two or three years. And then ended up joining a much bigger fund called GPV, based in San Francisco, manages a couple billion dollars now, and was a partner there up until 2022

**Tommy Shaughnessy** (1:19)
So small fund to big fund.

**Mike McCormick** (1:21)
Small fund to big fund. And yeah, big fund is cool because, man, you really get to be in rooms where it happens, right? I mean, my partners had been very senior executives at large tech companies like Oracle, or founded very large companies, or partners at Kleiner Perkins. And so you really kind of get to-

**Tommy Shaughnessy** (1:40)
Movers and shakers doing the big deals.

**Mike McCormick** (1:42)
Totally, yeah. It's like jump on my private jet and let's go talk to the CEO of Walmart, like literally, right? And so it's like, oh, okay, this is just a different, like there's levels, right? And so really cool experience and still love those guys. But in 2022, I had this sort of crossroads, which was either stay at the firm and commit a lot of time and become a senior managing partner of that firm or work on something else. And since like 2016, 2017, I've been thinking about a bunch of big crazy ideas that I sort of couldn't get out of my head. And a big part of that was AI, right? Like reading anything from science fiction to, you know, a bunch of other interesting people online saying interesting things about AI. And I basically came to think like, okay, it is totally possible that we develop AGI or super intelligence or superhuman AI, whatever you want to say, within my lifetime. And if we do that, it's going to be like the biggest thing ever to happen to humanity times 100 Like it really will change the shape of the world.
And man, like what is that going to be like? You know, it felt like most people in Silicon Valley were thinking about AI in terms of like...

**Tommy Shaughnessy** (2:57)
This is 2022 too, it's a different time.

**Mike McCormick** (2:59)
This is like pre-CHI GPT. Yeah, this is pre-CHI GPT for sure, right? So like, you know, mostly Silicon Valley is thinking about this in terms of like better SaaS companies, you know, like more efficient accounting management or whatever, you know, or like healthcare, you know, like, oh, you know, AI is going to really change the game for radiology, or it's really going to change the game for personalized education, which I believe is true. It felt like Silicon Valley was a little less interested in these like big picture, like, whoa, this is going to change the shape of society in a huge way. Like, what does this actually mean? And then that plus COVID happening just kicked me into this mindset of like, wow, like, we all have this really strong status quo bias. Like, we think the future is going to look roughly like the present. We're sort of evolved to think that. But when COVID happened, it was like, whoa, the future and the near future could be like radically different from the present. And I think AI is going to kick that into high gear. So I left the firm. I started doing grant making in areas like AI security, AI safety, biosecurity. And that led me to start Halcyon, which I run now and we can talk about. But yeah, definitely took the road less traveled on that front.