Over the weekend, just as most students were stumbling out of the bars, Songyee Yoon was racing across her South Korean campus. Towards the evening, she ran some programs on her college's supercomputer after which waited sleeplessly in her dorm while the pc processed her program. “I woke up at 2 a.m., 3 a.m. to walk around campus because I used to be so interested in the end result,” she said.
She was so strange on campus that an writer used her as inspiration for a television show about her college.
“The intent wasn’t to create characters based on an actual character,” she said. But because the writer talked to students to get materials, “she by some means kept hearing about this strange girl.”
And so Yoon became the inspiration for “Genius Girl.” Korean television show KAIST.
If writers made a show about Yoon's life today, it could look more like HBO's “Silicon Valley.” After earning her PhD from MIT, she rose to develop into president of South Korean video game developer NCSoft and today proclaims Principal Venture Partners (PVP), a $100 million fund to support AI startups. The fund will issue early-stage checks between 100,000 and “single-digit tens of millions” and has already invested in six startups, including model builder Liquid AI.
Her partners include the who's who of AI science: There's Daniela Rus, a renowned researcher who met Yoon through Yoon's work on the MIT board; Dawn Song, a MacArthur fellow who published intimately on computer security; and Jeremy Nixon, the founding father of AGI House, an AI hacking house that’s making headlines for attracting clients young talented founders.
PVP is one in every of the few investment firms with such an intensive academic leadership group – something Yoon sees as a bonus because the firm tries to shut deals.
“I believe founders wish to have a various group of advisors who can bring different perspectives,” she said. Yoon believes the PVP team's research background gives them a deep understanding of how AI has “evolved over time” and where it could be heading.
The team expects the following generation of unicorns to be AI-native corporations, meaning they were built with AI in mind from the beginning, moderately than with AI applications being brought onto the platform after the very fact. Yoon isn't apprehensive that they could have missed the boat when it got here to investing in foundational corporations like OpenAI or Anthropic. “If you take a look at the highest 10 NASDAQ corporations, greater than half of them are digital-native corporations that were founded after the appearance of broadband,” she said.
Yoon said the corporate will invest across industries. She is especially enthusiastic about AI's potential to remodel the insurance industry, whether through using AI to assist people understand what their plans cover or through insurance firms specializing in insuring autonomous robots .
Yoon can be concerned about AI's potential to exacerbate cultural colonialism, a subject she has written about last 12 months. She gave the instance of huge model builders proclaiming, “Oh, we’re training this AI with all the info on this planet.”
“But in the event you give it some thought, 35% of the world’s population doesn’t even have access to broadband,” Yoon said. “And they can’t be authors of the info used to coach this AI. Therefore, it’s inevitable that a majority of these cultures and viewpoints can’t be reflected.”
She admits it's an advanced problem that may only be solved through ongoing conversations and greater representation within the industry – for instance, through an AI-focused fund with three female partners.
“We’re not saying it’s a women’s fund, but I believe a number of female founders come to us because they know now we have more sympathy,” Yoon said. “And that we are able to see their true strength and real superpower.”
