Venice is Here to Win: How a Private AI Company Plans to Take On OpenAI and Anthropic

**Jon** (0:00)
Ultimately, Venice wants to be this mass market consumer app. And that means that most people don't have to care or know about the crypto aspect of the company. I actually think it's one of the things that makes Venice so strong in the market, is that we can go to the average user, and most of our users are actually not crypto people. We were attracting users from outside of the crypto sphere for the most part, and most of them don't care about the token. Some of them even actively dislike crypto and dislike tokens and don't want anything to do with it, but they don't care as long as the product itself is good and they can use it.
But what's cool is that all of them are contributing downstream to this token economy, regardless.

**David** (0:43)
I'm here with Jon, the head of strategy of Venice, and also Jesse, the CTO at Venice. Jon, Jesse, welcome to the show. Thanks for having us.

**Jon** (0:50)
Thank you for having us.

**David** (0:52)
Pretty excited for this one. I got a ton of questions about what you guys are up to and all the nuances that I think a lot of people really want about Venice, because Venice has definitely caught the attention of a lot of crypto investors, and I think is also starting to poke at some external investors as well.
So let's just get into it, and maybe we'll start with the banger question. Why is private AI important?

**Jesse** (1:15)
Yeah, absolutely. It's a great question, and I think it's a pretty simple answer. You realize if you've ever put anything into an AI model that you wouldn't want published, why privacy is important.
I think we founded Venice on this principle that it's somewhat dystopian, that a small handful of tech companies are building databases of everybody's most intimate thoughts, and really that there needed to be an alternative, and we wanted to be that alternative and to build it.

**David** (1:41)
What would happen or what is the fear of this dystopian future if we don't have private AI? Maybe you could paint a picture of just what we know from the arc of public companies in Silicon Valley, or just whatever fear might be of what happens when anthropic opening AI just get a little too big, a little too powerful, and a little bit too accessible to some of our data. What's the fear here?

**Jesse** (2:06)
Yeah, I think it's not necessarily either of these companies are bad or evil. I think they're great companies. They built phenomenal models.
The concern here is that as AI has become more capable, that people are putting more and more intimate details of their lives into these models. And so, like myself personally, I'm using agents for health reasons. And so my agent now has access to incredible amounts of health data on me. And when you think about where that data is stored, if it's stored in a central location, like on ChatGPD's infrastructure, there's a world in which rogue employees, there's a world in which hackers, there's a world in which the government, through means of subpoena, can begin to access that data, whether intentionally or unintentionally on the provider's realm. So the reality is like we just need some alternative that allows individuals to have private data.

**David** (3:01)
So it sounds like they're really the big deal.
The thing that you guys are focusing on is like, AI as a product is fantastic. One of the greatest products humans have ever created. And one of the unfortunate byproducts of that is it's going to create the world's greatest honeypot of data ever. And that's something that you guys want to solve.

**Jon** (3:21)
Yeah, I don't think a lot of people will even realize, especially the average person using like ChatGPT, etc. Just how much is getting hoovered up about them. You know, people already worry about things like their social media presence and their privacy of like bad information they show online. And it's just a small subset of like all the things that people are putting into AI without thinking about it. And if you generally like ask someone, would you be okay if everything you've ever put into AI was published publicly? Almost everybody would pause and be like, actually, that's a good point.
So that generally drives home the like the need for privacy. And it's also the classic like, it's not about whether you have something to hide or not. You know, this is always the classic case for privacy. It's you want a place where you can think and not have to worry about constantly being observed.

**David** (4:13)