She Compares This Moment in AI to the Invention of the Camera | Jade Q. Wang, Artist & Investor

**Jade Wang** (0:00)
I would tell the computer to tell me something hurtful but true, and most of them don't land, and then something lands in, and where you flinch kind of tells you where a poem is hiding. So if you keep digging there, you will find a piece of raw ore that you can fashion into art.

**Amrit Rao** (0:15)
Wow.
That's beautiful. That kind of feels like the beginning of a founder journey, right?

**Jade Wang** (0:20)
Like finding a pain point?

**Amrit Rao** (0:22)
Yeah. Yeah.

**Jade Wang** (0:22)
Kind of. It's similar in shape.

**Amrit Rao** (0:36)
I'm Amrit Rao, General Partner at Village Global. Today's guest is Jade Wang, a Stanford grad who started companies, invested in companies, worked as an early Cloudflare employee, and is now exploring the frontier of art and AI. In this conversation, we'll chart Jade's path from China to the US to getting a Ph.D. in neuroscience, to being an angel investor and founder herself, to backing some incredible companies and making interactive AI poetry, which is truly pushing the limits of what art can do in the age of AI.
Hello, Jade. Welcome to Village Global. Thanks for coming in.

**Jade Wang** (1:22)
Thanks for having me.

**Amrit Rao** (1:24)
Tell us about what it was like showing your parents your art.

**Jade Wang** (1:30)
Yeah, that was, it took so much work to make it happen. I was really glad to be able to sit my mom down in front of a laptop that was interactive. Both of my parents live in Shanghai, and Western Frontier Models are not accessible there.
I had played with the idea of doing a recorded video demo, but then it literally takes the soul out of the art.
I actually had to roll my own GLM 5.2 on Cloudflare, and adapt the work to be interactive. So like, flatten the PDF in- like turn the PDF into a JavaScript file, do all the web searches in advance, operating on the assumption that web searches wouldn't necessarily work, and then- and test it pretty thoroughly, and then use that as the thing that she can interact with.
and one of the things that was kind of surprising to me was the- so my poem, Summer, 1989, which is about- which is basically capturing a literal experience of me and her in a Beijing youth hostel in 1989, and I'm scratching paint ships, and I'm- and there's a student who's stripped some bed sheets off of a bunk and is writing on the floor, and she's asking me- and I'm asking her what- what he's doing, and she tells me that he's practicing calligraphy. And then he- they exchange a glance, and he confirms that he's practicing calligraphy. Like, that's an example of the poem executes in the mind of the- of the reader.

**Amrit Rao** (3:16)
Yeah.

**Jade Wang** (3:17)
Because like, at this point, I have said nothing that can- that can trip a classifier.

**Amrit Rao** (3:23)
Oh.

**Jade Wang** (3:24)
And I have not implemented any classifiers, but like- and it's only when a model has thought about it, and has started outputting stuff that the- that the classifier gets tripped.

**Amrit Rao** (3:36)
Right.

**Jade Wang** (3:37)
So, it doesn't trip any censorship in its raw form. Right. And at first, like when she was reading this, and one of the nice things is having this interactive experience, is it- I can tell it to render the entire experience in Chinese and translate the poem.
and she at first didn't immediately read the poem. I was like, mom, like, did you not read it first? She's like, it's one I've read before, right? I'm like, no, I'm pretty sure it's not. Like, I literally like wrote it in the past several months. She's like, it's not the one you wrote when you were five. And like the blood just drains out of my face. Like, what are you- what are you talking about?

**Amrit Rao** (4:18)
Yeah.

**Jade Wang** (4:19)
She's like, no, like you wrote a poem and your- and your grandfather published it in a Chinese newspaper.

**Amrit Rao** (4:26)
Wow.

**Jade Wang** (4:28)
Isn't this the same one? Like, there's no way, right? Like I-

**Amrit Rao** (4:31)
How would I know, mom? Right.

**Jade Wang** (4:33)
This is the first time I'm hearing about it.

**Amrit Rao** (4:36)
Yeah.

**Jade Wang** (4:37)
Did I write the same one? I have no idea.

**Amrit Rao** (4:41)
That's special.

**Jade Wang** (4:42)
Yeah.

**Amrit Rao** (4:43)
Full circle moment.

**Jade Wang** (4:44)
Did I produce the same poem? Am I the same model that I was? Like the weights have changed, right? Like, but was it based on the same- like, it had to have been based on the same memory.