Happy Sunday and welcome to InsideAI Weekend! I'm Rob May, Founder and CTO at Dianthus. I'm also active in the AI angel community so if you have an early stage deal let me know, I'd love to take a look.
Today I want to talk about human evolution and what it means for applying AI in companies. One of the interesting things about humans have a very long childhood compared to other animals. But that long childhood was an evolutionary compromise. We couldn't birth children with massive brains, so we birth tiny babies and let them spend many many years growing and developing and learning. The benefit is, humans are the smartest animals on the planet. We dominate it.
Here's a question though - as an investor, how would you bet on a cohort of humans? You have to invest in them for 18 years or more before you start to get the payout of human dominance.
I ask because it's similar to how you might have to invest in AI. AI is underapplied in many areas because we don't have a data set, to train a model, to do the AI thing we want to do. As an investor, you might have to fund the acquisition of a data set (which might take time to gather), the labeling of that data, and the initial deployment where the AI model isn't as good as you hoped. I've seen it take 2-5 years for companies trying to do something AI related to actually get it to work. But, when it's on the other side, the AI version of whatever you are building will crush the non-AI stuff.
It's hard to fund and track progress for these AI options when we are so used to SaaS, which is quick to deploy and fast to value.
Some AI investors know then and look for companies that craft business models that come in phases, to help mitigate the problem. Or some I've spoken to reserve more dollars for later than a VC firm would normally do, because they anticipate the company will be slow. It's also the reason so many AI companies do services work for a while, although, that's a place companies often get stuck so you have to be careful.
In a AI world, where customer development can be more difficult, and longer, there are a lot of ideas that go unfunded. But like humans and evolution, the eventual payout should in theory be worth it. Don't fear the long buildup to AI success. Fear missing out on the most defensible, most powerful, and most successful startups - which I believe will be the startups that can have the patience to climb this curve and get to the other side.
Thanks for reading.
@robmay
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