Underwriting Superintelligence: Backing Agents you can Sue — Rune Kvist, AIUC

Swyx (0:03)

Okay, we're in the studio with Rune from AIUC, AI Underwriting Company with our trustee co-host Vibhu. Welcome.

Rune Kvist (0:09)

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Swyx (0:11)

What are you announcing today?

Rune Kvist (0:12)

We have raised $40 million by Ribbit Capital and First Harmonic.

Swyx (0:16)

You first came to my attention when Nat and Dan invested in you guys. Is the story like pretty much the same? Are you today what you thought you were back then?

Rune Kvist (0:26)

When we raised our seed round, we had a hypothesis that at some point, risk was going to hold down adoption.

At that point in time, that felt kind of hypothetical. And I think that is now over. Clearly, the moment is now. With Mythos and with Fable, it's pretty obvious that literally the binding constraint on adoption is risk. And so for us, it feels like this is a natural continuation of the same hypothesis. But where previously there was speculation, now it feels like fact.

Swyx (0:54)

And let's get the list of the customers that you are highlighting as part of your Series A.

Rune Kvist (0:58)

Totally. Yeah, so we are now working with folks like Cursor, Harvey, Lovable, ElevenLabs.

Swyx (1:05)

Yeah, amazing. Congrats.

Rune Kvist (1:06)

Thank you.

Swyx (1:07)

So you were famously one of the first hired and adopting for GTM and product. I'm just kind of curious, what was your path into AI? Just recap.

Rune Kvist (1:19)

Late 2021, I sold a company, my first company, a tech company.

I had a bit of time to think about what was next. I came across a scaling loss paper, and that just struck me like lightning. I was just like, this is a big idea. In short, the scaling loss paper just says, the bigger the model, the smarter the model.

Swyx (1:38)

This is the Kaplan one, not the Chinchilla one.

Rune Kvist (1:40)

Exactly, the Kaplan one. The important thing that clicked for me there was, oh, now capital will understand this. If you put in more money, you get more money out and so that will kick off a hype cycle. You'll get a sense of predictable returns, which is in fact was played out.

I just packed my bags. I've never been to San Francisco. I just packed my bags straight out here to find the people who have written it.

At the time, they had just started a small lab called Anthropic. There was like 40 people at the time or so. Drank a bunch of coffee until I eventually got introduced to Dario. At the time, they were wrestling with some of these questions of like, should we deploy our models? Should we make revenue? How should we engage with the rest of the world? They had just broken off from OpenAI.

It's been publicly reported that they were concerned with how they were dealing with deployment. So they were wrestling with some of those questions. At this point, this is early fog of war, early 2022 The sexiest program at the time was like Jasper. There's nothing out there. So where is value going to accrue? What are going to be the different parts of the stack? We're all open questions.

Swyx (2:48)

I want to highlight to people, you ask these questions because you have a PPE background. I actually was in Singapore in one of the sort of feeder programs for prepping people for PPE. So I had a tutor. We learned philosophy and politics and economics. But I think you're kind of like machine learning people who read the Neural Skilling Laws paper would not necessarily draw the same conclusions that you did. Whereas any capitalist would read that and go, holy shit.

Who tipped you on to that paper? Because it's not a paper that you normally read, right? Like in your circles.

Rune Kvist (3:26)

Yeah. I think I'd actually, ever since AlphaGo had had some appreciation that AI was a big deal.

But it kind of felt, it raised all these kind of interesting philosophical questions. But it's kind of not clear from afar where exactly that would go.

But it was obvious enough that it was like, this is going to be a big thing if we find the kind of right mechanism to kind of get the techno-capital machine to work on this. But it was just not clear. And so I think it was some way in which like that became obvious. And also it wasn't as obvious at the time than it is now, right? It was just like, wow, this is so interesting. But I still felt coming from kind of a philosophy and economics background, it felt like if this turns out to be true, you're going to be wrestling with all of the big questions in society. Everything you've learned about politics gets thrown out of the window. Everything you've learned about economics at least gets challenged. And so what felt interesting was to be at that frontier that has just ramifications across everything. So that's why I thought it sorted out.