Footloose
Humans vs generative AI; PVCP Rolling Fund launches January 1
For the last newsletter of the year, I did y’all a favor: I found the best video on YouTube.
Watch and see for yourself. And think about how long it took someone to create this.
Generative AI - the concept of AI being able to take a limited amount of input from humans and create vast tapestries of relevant, well-constructed, even artistic content around it - is all the media wants to talk about right now.
What I posted above is a strong human-created example: well constructed, everything in sync, spans multiple decades, demonstrates depth of knowledge, and here’s the big one: features humor at the end.
Generative AI can’t touch this standard right now.
But how close is it?
I asked ChatGPT, the text-based generative AI engine released just a week ago by OpenAI, to help me with the usual research for this newsletter:
Wow. Not bad!
Let’s go further:
Other than not knowing how to count - I asked for a five paragraph essay - this is actually kind of shocking how well this is written.
Among plenty of other areas of our lives, if you don’t think this technology will re-shape modern education, you better wake up.
Interestingly, ChatGPT responses have been banned from forums like StackOverflow with the reason being that the system’s responses are often incorrect. So there’s clearly still a lot of work to be done.
I happened to see on social media where someone asked ChatGPT to write a legal agreement between two parties and provided a significant level of detail. It wrote the document almost instantly. Neither the thought of asking the software that, or the potential for this type of response, I hadn’t considered.
Any employed person who doesn’t now bring some higher level form of communication to their job - either artful, or humorous, or otherwise uniquely interpretative - is now able to be dismissed and instantly replaced by AI. The technology also lacks much in the way of artistic flair or humor, but will be trained on specific data, and won’t make any of your human mistakes.
A lot will be said in the coming year about the rise of AI, but the biggest area of focus will be on how we adjust our educational system. And it needs to be quick, because the educational system was already in disrepair coming out of the pandemic, with kids that haven’t been in school consistently in years, anxiety and mental health issues running amok, and general lack of preparedness being the rule rather than exception.
There’s always issues to overcome with any new technology. This one isn’t any different. A lot of reasons to be optimistic.
Happy holidays and I hope to see you in 2023.
Karen Webster, the highly-regarded and well-known CEO of influential fintech website PYMNTS.com, will join us at Project Voice 2023 to deliver a keynote on the future of conversational commerce.
Project Voice 2023 is the main event here in the United States for conversational AI and voice technology. 2500 attendees from across all industries, along with over 100 media outlets, will attend.
Registration and program information is here.
Project Voice Capital Partners Rolling Fund, our VC fund focused on conversational AI (including plenty of generative use cases) & voice technology, is launching January 1.
The rolling fund structure is a pandemic-born innovation that enables investors to subscribe to our deal flow on a quarterly basis with smaller dollar commitments and greater flexibility than typically afforded to investors in more traditional funds. (You can read a FAQ about rolling funds here and about the innovation they have brought to VC markets here.)
Each quarter we will invest in at least three early stage, venture grade companies working within this domain. These may fall within any number of industry verticals (e.g. banking, healthcare, hospitality) and may include any number of adjacencies (e.g. biometric authentication, content moderation, audio data interpolation).
Our first two early stage companies for investment have been identified: Applied Brain Research, which has a unique patent and approach on optimizing voice on edge-based silicon, and Aug X Labs, a generative AI company using NLP to turn audio into videos, often in an enterprise marketing context.
You can check out all the fund information and subscribe here.