What VCs Really Think About Personal AI Agents | E2347

Lon Harris (0:00)

Hey, everybody, welcome back to This Week in Startups. We're doing a VC roundtable, and you may notice this guy doesn't usually do the VC roundtables. I know Jason is traveling. He is abroad this week. He is not here, but I'm not doing this by myself. That would be ridiculous. We've got an amazing guest host stepping in. He is a partner at Menlo Ventures. Give it up for Deedy Das, our special moderator of the week. Deedy, thanks so much for being here.

Deedy Das (0:24)

Thank you so much for having me, Lon. This is these are quite big shoes to fill, as you know. I am not the world's greatest moderator, Jason J. Calais, but I will try my best to entertain all the lovely folk on stream here today.

Lon Harris (0:38)

We certainly appreciate your expertise, stepping in as a guest host. That's going to be amazing. We've got an all-star panel for Deedee's big week here. First up, Kanu Gulati. She's a partner at Khosla Ventures. She led investments in Poly AI, Wabi, Sarvam, so many others. Kanu, thanks so much for being here.

Kanu Gulati (0:55)

Very excited to be here.

Lon Harris (0:56)

Awesome. We've got Chris Farmer. He is the founder and CEO of SignalFire Grammarly and Alchemy, among the notable investments I see here in my notes. Chris, awesome to have you. Thanks for having me. Finally, we've got Sheel Mohnot. He's the co-founder and general partner of Better Tomorrow Ventures, Seed Stage Firm. They're investing in Fintech and Vertical AI Startups, and a wonderful returning panelist to the show, one of our favorites, Sheel. Thanks for coming back to the show.

Sheel Mohnot (1:21)

Glad to be here.

Lon Harris (1:22)

Before we go into our big stories, I do want to take just a moment to thank our friends at Plaud. You may notice I am wearing my Plaud NotePin right now. It helps me keep track of everything we talk about on the show. Also just all the conversations happening around the office. Anything that I need to keep in mind, it is constantly listening in, only when I tell it to. I can turn it off if I don't want to share what I'm doing. And then it turns everything into these amazing AI-generated reports and transcripts, whatever you need. You never have to like, oh, what was that person saying? I forgot to do the thing. It's just recorded. It's saved. It's in your notes. It's ready to go. So, you definitely want to check it out at plaud.ai.twist.

And if you use the code TWIST, they're going to give you 10% off of your Plaud NotePin. There was a look at one of those amazing transcripts. So, thank you to our friends at Plaud. And now, finally, we can begin the VC Roundtable. Deedy, where do you want to go first?

Deedy Das (2:15)

I think, you know, the biggest news of today and of, you know, maybe I would reckon maybe the biggest news of many decades, for me, at least, is this unbelievable math result from OpenAI. You know, am I qualified to talk about math? No.

However, you know, there's this meme that goes around which says, hey, did you read the latest Riemann hypothesis result? And everyone's like, yes, I did. Did you? It's like, yes, I did. Did you understand any of it? No, I did not. Did you? No, not really. And but it's cool. And it's a big deal. And this is what I wanted to talk to, you know, the Sheel, Chris, and Kanu about, is we're looking at these math results that, let me just start with some headline stuff. Seven Millennium Prizes prize problems exist. One of them was solved 20 plus years ago. And if you look at this result combined with, say, the Navier–Stokes result that OpenAI published a while ago, along with some other researchers, you're looking at major mathematical progress in four of the six remaining unsolved, biggest unsolved problems in mathematics with AI. And there's many ways we could sort of take this discussion, but maybe I'll just start with Kanu, who's at Khosla and an OpenAI investor.

When you see results like this, how do you think about investing in anything? Or how do you think about startups and innovation? And what continues to have value in a year or two years when we're looking at, hey, the smartest minds of the world can't do what AI can do today?

Kanu Gulati (4:00)

We at Khosla Ventures are very proud early investors in OpenAI, and I'm very excited by all the results. But as a former scientist, it does make me uneasy because it is moving at such a fast pace. There's an amount of, just as the pace of advancements in all of these different sciences is going to continue to be mind boggling. I think in the past, Sam have identified that, hey, people are usually not great at thinking when things compound, and we're already at that inflection point where AI and AI's capability and generalization and being able to solve some of these unseen, unopened math problems is just compounding. So your question is very fair. From an investment point of view, we often think about what can we invest in where the ultimate value is not just flowing into the token generators today. What is the next capability that we can invest in? And I can talk about some of the things that I have been investing in, which I feel could be interesting, but it is a very fair question.