VC Insights on Investing in Artificial Intelligence with Sarah Guo and Elad Gil of No Priors Podcast

**Nathan Labenz** (0:00)
Turpentine is a network of podcasts, newsletters, and more, covering tech, business, and culture, all from the perspective of industry insiders and experts.
We're the network behind the show you're listening to right now.
At Turpentine, we're building the first media outlet for tech people by tech people. We have a slate of hit shows across a range of topics and industries, from AI with Cognitive Revolution to Econ 102 with Noah Smith. Our other shows drive the conversation in tech with the most interesting thinkers, founders, and investors, like Moment of Zen and my show Upstream. We're looking for industry-leading hosts and shows along with sponsors. If you think that might be you or your company, email me at erik.turpentine.co. That's E-R-I-K at turpentine.co.

**Elad Gil** (0:46)
I started digging around. I tried to find people to build an OpenAI competitor, and I couldn't convince anybody to do it.
Everybody said, well, it's not that interesting of a business, and are these APIs that good, and all this other stuff. And I pitched person after person and nobody was willing to try it.

**Sarah Guo** (1:01)
Within consumer, character is one of the most interesting companies. Replica is one of the most interesting companies. A lot of people don't like this, even though you see a decade or more than a decade for a lot of looking at consumer company metrics, you're like, shit, right? I'm going to pay attention if people are spending hours a day on this service, because it is so rare.

**Elad Gil** (1:21)
There's base models and there's based models with a D, right? What kind of model do you want your kid to interact with?
And what do you want them to learn over time? And how does that get selected? And who adjudicates what that selection process is? Or what's the ethical framework based on your location around the world that should be applied or shouldn't be applied? And so I think there's lots and lots and lots of interesting questions here.

**Nathan Labenz** (1:44)
Hello, and welcome to The Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs, and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence. Each week we'll explore their revolutionary ideas, and together we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host, Erik Torenberg. Before we dive into The Cognitive Revolution, I want to tell you about my new interview show, Upstream. Upstream is where I go deeper with some of the world's most interesting thinkers to map the constellation of ideas that matter. On the first season of Upstream, you'll hear from Mark Andreessen, David Sachs, Balaji, Ezra Klein, Joe Lonsdale, and more. Make sure to subscribe and check out the first episode with A16Z's Mark Andreessen. The link is in the description. Hi everyone, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. After taking a deep dive into prompting, process automation, and jailbreaking over several recent episodes, we're now zooming out of it and talking to some fellow AI scouts. These are people who are not only working overtime to understand everything that's going on in AI, but also creating thought leadership and educational content meant to help others get up to speed as well. Today, our guests are investors Sarah Guo and Elad Gil, co-hosts of the AI-focused No Priors podcast.
Sarah was previously a partner at Greylock and is now the founder of the $100 million AI-focused venture fund, Conviction VC, which she launched last fall. She blogs on her website saragoa.com.
Elad Gil is a notable angel investor with investments that include Airbnb, Coinbase, Figma, Square, Stripe, and many more, including recent AI companies such as Character AI, Harvey AI, and Perplexity AI, whose CEO Arvind Srinivas, you may remember, was a guest on The Cognitive Revolution back in episode 7
He also blogs at blog.eladgil.com.
We spoke about how they are approaching AI investment opportunities right now, how that does or doesn't differ from how they've thought about investing in the past, where in the stack from hardware to applications that they expect to see the most value accrue, what modes of human-AI interaction they're most interested in developing, and plenty, plenty more. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Sarah Guo and Elad Gil. Sarah Guo and Elad Gil, welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.

**Sarah Guo** (4:16)
Thanks for having us.

**Nathan Labenz** (4:18)
Yeah, very excited to have this conversation with you guys. We're in such a moment right now of just the whole world kind of turning attention to AI. And that's something that, you know, I think we're probably four or five months into since the release of Chet GPT.
You guys have each been thinking about AI very seriously and both independently and together, I think, well before that. So I thought we would maybe just start by kind of revisiting a couple of things that you guys had published about six months ago and then ask you to just kind of take us through this period of time where, you know, new models are being released, new tools, new paradigms, just, you know, attention piling in, investment, you know, dollars, I'm sure, piling in from all directions as well. And then we'll take it from there.