Sequoia Capital partner Alfred Lin said if his venture firm was evaluating cryptocurrency exchange FTX again for the first time, it would likely make the same decision to invest in the now-bankrupt company.
(Bloomberg) — Sequoia Capital partner Alfred Lin said if his venture firm was evaluating cryptocurrency exchange FTX again for the first time, it would likely make the same decision to invest in the now-bankrupt company.
“I looked at the work we did 15 different ways,” Lin said Thursday at the Bloomberg Technology Summit. “We probably would have made the investment again.”
Sequoia’s business lies in trusting founders and taking calculated risks, he said, and the lesson learned is sometimes the investments won’t deliver.
“It stinks,” he said. Then again, the $115 million investment Sequoia lost on FTX was just 2% to 3% of its global growth fund, he said, adding that the firm was “still very excited about the concepts of crypto.”
On Sequoia’s recent announcement that it was separating its China and India businesses from its US brand, Lin said geopolitics played a role, but was not the primary driver. Sequoia has come under increasing pressure in Washington over its investments in Chinese companies such as ByteDance Ltd.’s popular video app TikTok.
Overall, Lin said, while the current environment has created higher capital costs for founders, it’s still a good time for building resilient startups.
Bloomberg News is hosting its annual US Technology Summit in San Francisco, focused on the industry’s most intriguing topics, from artificial intelligence and the future of transportation to social media and cryptocurrencies. At the event Thursday at SVN West, titled “Tech’s Turning Point,” speakers include OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman, Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky, venture capitalist Reid Hoffman and Airbnb Inc. CEO Brian Chesky.
Watch LIVE here. All times are local in San Francisco.
Fintech Startup Brex Says IPO Is Years Away (4 p.m.)
Henrique Dubugras, co-founder and co-chief executive officer of finance-tech startup Brex, said his company is committed to going public, but it probably won’t happen until the six-year-old startup reaches the 10-year mark.
“We absolutely want to be a publicly traded company,” he said. “We’re definitely not in the category of, ‘We could stay private forever if we could.’”
The company saw a record inflow of deposits when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in March, according to Dubugras. Brex had attempted to set up an emergency loan program prior to the bank being backstopped by the federal government.
Dubugras said many of the new clients stuck with Brex, even after SVB’s situation was resolved. The startup has surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue for its Empower spending-management business, Bloomberg reported in May.
Dubugras said during the summit that profitability is important to the company and that Brex won’t need to raise fresh funding anytime soon.
Wendy Cai-Lee, founder and CEO of commercial-banking startup Piermont Bank, offered a different perspective on going public, noting that “someone can just short your stock and create a ton of volatility to your operations and your survival.”
Artificial Intelligence Will Democratize Hollywood, AI Backers Say (3:40 p.m.)
Despite its reputation as a threat, artificial intelligence has the power to democratize and expand the way that entertainment is created in Hollywood. That’s according to Sarah Guo, founder of venture capital firm Conviction, and Cristóbal Valenzuela, head of Runway AI Inc., a company that builds AI models for content creation.
New AI tools will allow creators from all backgrounds to turn any media into a form that their audience wants, Guo said in a panel at the Bloomberg Technology Summit in San Francisco. Valenzuela compared AI to a new form of camera that will “enable things that weren’t possible before.”
AI may decrease jobs in creation to cut down on some of the “toil,” but Guo believes it won’t eliminate creative jobs from production.
“There’s a human element that people will always want,” Guo said.
Panel Warns That Rush for Generative AI Can’t Ignore Ethics (2 p.m.)
Experts on technology and ethics urged lawmakers and companies developing artificial intelligence to keep a close watch on the potential dangers as the technology continues to move forward.
Firm ethical and regulatory guidelines are needed for generative AI as companies race to add the technology to their products to gain a competitive edge, said Navrina Singh, founder and CEO of Credo AI, which helps companies develop “responsible” AI.
Generative AI is often advertised as the future of work, said Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation, but it’s important to remember “whose future” is at stake when people talk about AI replacing jobs, citing, for example, issues raised in the Hollywood writers’ strike.
Amazon’s Zoox Races to Beat Robotaxi Rivals (1:45 p.m.)
Zoox, the self-driving unit of Amazon.com Inc., is still in the race to win key markets for future robotaxi services, according to Chief Executive Officer Aicha Evans. That’s despite the business having no current commercial or public services.
“I’m not conceding I am behind,” Evans said in an interview at the Bloomberg Technology Summit in San Francisco. Evans said New York City was the ultimate prize, but more testing — along with judicious spending — was required. The business is testing the capabilities of its robotaxi, which has no steering wheel or pedals and features inward-facing seats. That includes seeing how it handles snowy conditions.
Zoox operates a limited pilot project where its robotaxi ferries employees between two office buildings over a one-mile stretch in Foster City, California. It also puts the autonomous shuttle through its paces on a private test track, which replicates real-world roads and scenarios. Meanwhile, industry competitors Waymo, owned by Alphabet Inc., and Cruise, backed by General Motors Co., have semi-commercial robotaxi services in multiple cities.
Self-driving technology will help make US roads safer, Evans said. There are about 40,000 human-induced fatalities each year, she said, adding that “the majority of them are due to somebody doing something dumb. That is unacceptable.”
The startup’s valuation has also grown since Amazon acquired it, she said.
Chesky Says Airbnb Aims to Be ‘Ultimate AI Concierge’ (12:10 p.m.)
Airbnb Inc. CEO Brian Chesky said he envisions artificial intelligence to be at the core of the future of the home-sharing travel site, where it will be in the “business of connecting people.”
Airbnb’s opportunity in AI is “built around personalization,” with the help of the large amount of customer data it has collected and reviews left by travelers, Chesky said. “The better we can understand you, the more we can be like the ultimate AI concierge pointing you to places, community homes, experiences and many more things.”
Chesky, who helped start the company by sharing his apartment to make rent in San Francisco, also called for a closer relationship between the city and the tech and business community to address ongoing issues such as homelessness, crime and empty offices. He also had suggestions for revitalization such as rezoning commercial spaces to be residential and creating mixed-use and communal spaces.
“If we have more dialogue and a little less ideology, we’re going to actually start to solve problems,” he said.
San Francisco Mayor Urges Downtown Makeover (11:30 a.m.)
San Francisco Mayor London Breed called on investors to redevelop the city’s struggling downtown core by converting or even demolishing empty buildings to make way for new growth.
“I think we have to start reimagining what the downtown can be,” Breed said. “Let’s look at what’s possible rather than dwelling on the stories of another store closing — there are a lot of people who may not even shop in those places” because of the increase in online shopping.
San Francisco’s troubles are mounting as the tech industry downsizes its operations and retailers flee the city’s downtown area. In a major blow for the city, Westfield announced this month that it’s giving up its San Francisco mall located in one of the main downtown shopping and tourist areas.
Breed highlighted the potential to convert office towers into housing, tear down buildings for construction and encourage new startups to plant their roots.
Stability AI CEO Says Better Data Needed to Train AI Models (10:30 a.m.)
Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque called for countries to have more open data to help improve artificial intelligence models, noting that “garbage” data is contributing to poor results from the technology.
“Let’s build AI so it works for us, not against us,” he said. Stability AI also released a new model for creating AI-generated images on Thursday.
Mostaque said artificial intelligence is the biggest economic phenomenon of our lifetime, but that the industry is still figuring out issues around ethics and securing better data to train AI models.
The massive impact of the technology hasn’t yet been realized, Mostaque said, noting that “this is like Covid before Tom Hanks got it.”
Mostaque said Stability AI isn’t currently fundraising. Bloomberg reported in March that the company was aiming to raise at a $4 billion valuation.
Bloomberg News is hosting its annual US Technology Summit in San Francisco, focused on the industry’s most intriguing topics, from artificial intelligence and the future of transportation to social media and cryptocurrencies. At the event Thursday at SVN West, titled “Tech’s Turning Point,” speakers include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky, venture capitalist Reid Hoffman, San Francisco Mayor London Breed and Airbnb Inc. CEO Brian Chesky.
Watch LIVE here. All times are local in San Francisco.
Qualcomm Says Power of AI Will Transform Smartphones (9:45 a.m.)
Qualcomm Inc. Chief Executive Officer Cristiano Amon said his company has been working on high-performance chips that should soon help power generative artificial intelligence applications on smartphones.
Amon said as soon as next year, some smartphone models powered by Qualcomm chips may have the power to use generative AI applications for photos and images, such as Stable Diffusion’s model.
“We’re just at the very beginning” of understanding generative AI, Amon said in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s Ed Ludlow. “There are going to be so many applications.”
The CEO said generative AI will also be useful in self-driving cars, particularly when a rider gives the automated system complicated directions. AI processors in these cars need to make decisions “in real time,” Amon said, and “that computation needs to happen locally” with powerful chips in the car rather than relying on the computing power of the cloud.
Amazon Spending $100 Million to Help Cloud Clients with AI (9:30 a.m.)
Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud unit is building a program to help customers develop and deploy new kinds of artificial intelligence products as the biggest seller of cloud services tries to match Microsoft and Google in the market for so-called generative AI.
Amazon Web Services is investing $100 million to set up the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center, which will link customers with company experts in AI and machine learning. They’ll help a range of clients in health care, financial services and manufacturing build customized applications using the new technology.
Read More: Amazon Is Spending $100 Million to Teach Cloud Clients About AI
Inflection AI Drops New Model for Personal Assistant (9:21 a.m.)
Artificial intelligence startup Inflection AI announced at the tech summit that it’s releasing a new large language model — the kind of AI system that underlies generative tools like ChatGPT — to power its Pi personal assistant product. Called Inflection-1, the LLM is supposed to outperform OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, according to the company.
Inflection AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman called artificial intelligence “the most radical transformation of our lifetime” during a panel discussion at the summit. Reid Hoffman, who co-founded LinkedIn and is a partner at VC firm Greylock Partners, added that Inflection AI’s Pi chatbot takes a more personal, emotional approach compared with ChatGPT. “IQ is not the only thing that matters here,” he said. “EQ matters as well.”
Sam Altman Cautions Against Over-Regulation of AI: (8:45 a.m.)
Sam Altman, chief executive officer of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, said lawmakers around the world should be careful not to “overdo” regulation of artificial intelligence and that it should be limited to “existential risk-level” systems.
In an onstage interview, Altman said all powerful technologies can be used in dangerous ways, and AI is no different: “Things will go wrong,” he said, citing potential cybersecurity risks among others. The world can manage those risks through global regulation, Altman said, but regulations should only be on “these powerful existential risk-level systems” and “you don’t want to overdo it.”
The upsides to developing and improving upon AI systems are so tremendous that the world shouldn’t try to stop the technologies from happening, Altman said, citing the potential for better educational systems and healthcare.
“At this point, given how much people see the economic benefits and potential, no company could stop it,” he said. But global regulation “can help make it safe — which is a better answer than stopping,” Altman said. “I also don’t think stopping it would work.”
Read More: OpenAI CEO: AI ‘Most Important Step Yet’ For Humans and Tech
–With assistance from Eari Nakano, Priya Anand, Hannah Miller, Ed Ludlow, Eliyahu Kamisher, Tom Giles, Caelyn Pender, Lucas Shaw, Emily Chang and Natalie Lung.
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