Ashton Kutcher's VC firm, Sound Venturesjointly led by general partners Guy Oseary and Effie Epstein, is betting on AI – including an investment in Fei-Fei Lis World Labs, the investors confirmed on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 on Tuesday.
Founded by Li, the Stanford professor dubbed the “Godmother of AI,” the startup has already raised $230 million from investors including a16z, NEA and Radical Ventures, valuing the corporate at over $1 billion . It goals to develop “big world models” able to understanding and interacting with the 3D world, and is targeting game firms and film studios as its first customers – the latter an area wherein a Hollywood Actor-turned-investor could influence.
Sound Ventures' $265 million AI fund, announced last yr, has invested in several major language modeling and AI firms, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Hugging Face, Stability AI and Magic.dev.
Notably, Kutcher said today that the corporate hasn't sold any of its OpenAI shares yet – confirmation that these investors imagine the corporate will get even greater.
The team can be all for startups working to bring AI technology right into a recent physical form factor or possibly a brand new operating system.
“I don’t know if the present form aspects that we’ve got or the present operating systems that we’ve got for the hardware are optimized for (AI), but we’re really interested in the space,” Oseary said.
He mentioned that Sound Ventures met with Humane, the makers of the Ai Pin, two years ago and invested in Rabbit, the AI hardware startup co-founded by Jesse Lyu.
“The reason we were so enthusiastic about what Jesse built is the Large Action Model component. “So we see the hardware as almost irrelevant over time – the shape factor didn’t matter,” Epstein explained of Sound Ventures’ interest in combining AI and hardware.
“Maybe today it looks like a dongle that type of looks like your phone, but tomorrow it looks like something else, and in some unspecified time in the future it's irrelevant,” she continued. “But this software learns our preferences and may take motion on our behalf. And the truth is, there’s a moment where such an organization could actually be created and potentially disrupt a player like Apple,” Epstein said.
“For us it was less of a hardware game. We really checked out it as an investment in a distinct foundation model,” she added.
The VC firm can be all for investing in the brand new AI device being built by legendary Apple designer Jony Ive in collaboration with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
In fact, Kutcher said that they “had a conversation with Jony today,” although TechCrunch understands that a term sheet has not yet been signed.
“Someone goes to make a breakthrough on this area, and it is going to be really helpful and profound for all of us,” Kutcher said.
