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🏠 Sequoia's AI Vision

🏠 Sequoia's AI Vision

Time to ride the wave

Brett Goldstein
April 08, 2024

Sponsored by

GM! Brett, here! This weekend I stumbled upon a Japanese fried chicken restaurant near my apartment that had a virtual cashier from the Philippines! I snapped a photo, blasted it out on twitter and had the most viral moment of my life! 18M impressions later, I'm thinking I should write up a deep dive for next week!

this is insane
cashier is literally zooming into nyc from the philippines
— brett goldstein (@thatguybg)
Apr 6, 2024

🏠 AI

AI Ascent 2024

Sequoia Capital has a ringside seat to the AI boom. At their AI Ascent 2024 event, they laid out their bold, hugely enthusiastic vision for AI's seismic impact in the years ahead.

The opening remarks hit hard, with Sequoia's Pat Grady laying out the massive scale:

"We may be standing at the precipice of the single greatest value creation opportunity mankind has ever known."

Pat Grady

Sequoia’s observations:

• Drawing parallels to game-changing tech waves like mobile and cloud computing, they see generative AI riding a similar meteoric trajectory

• AI startups have shockingly already made $3 BILLION in their first year - massively outpacing SaaS that took 10 years

• But the revenue numbers are just the beginning...

According to Sequoia's Konstantine Buhler, AI's truly groundbreaking impact will be in driving radical productivity gains and cost reductions across must-win areas like:

Education
Healthcare
Housing

Areas that have evaded tech's deflationary effects until now.

Sequoia Dreams of AI-Powered "Neural Net" Companies

Imagine entire companies functioning as hyper-optimized intelligent networks.

With collaborative AI assistants seamlessly working behind the scenes to continuously enhance processes like:

Engineering
Product Personalization
Customer Support

They even raised the possibility of ultra-powerful "one-person companies" taking on challenges that currently require armies of humans.

Reality Check: Not a Cakewalk

Huge hurdles remain:

Bridging the gap between AI's magical demos and real-world underperformance
The astronomical computing costs that still dwarf revenues.

As Sequoia partner Sonya Huang bluntly put it:

If you look at the amount that companies are pouring into GPUs right now, we spent about $50 billion just last year on Nvidia GPUs...and everybody's assuming if you build it they will come. AI is a field of dreams, but so far...we've identified about $3 billion or so of AI revenue plus change from the cloud providers. We've put $50 billion into the ground, plus energy, plus data center costs and more. We've gotten three out, and to me that means the math isn't mathing yet.

Sonya Huang

The Big Picture: It is potentially the "greatest value creation opportunity" for humanity. What did you get done last week?

Missed out on Ring and Nest? Don’t let RYSE slip away!

Ring 一 Acquired by Amazon for $1.2B

Nest 一 Acquired by Google for $3.2B

If you missed out on these spectacular early investments in the Smart Home space, here’s your chance to grab hold of the next one.

RYSE is a tech firm poised to dominate the Smart Shades market (growing at an astonishing 55% annually), and their public offering of shares priced at just $1.50 has opened.

They have generated over 20X growth in share price for early shareholders, with significant upside remaining as they just launched in over 100 Best Buy stores.

Retail distribution was the main driver behind the acquisitions of both Ring and Nest, and their exclusive deal with Best Buy puts them in pole position to dominate this burgeoning industry.

Secure your stake before the offer closes.

🤝 THE LATEST IN…

TECH

Sony takes on the Apple Vision Pro.
Varda raises $90M to ramp up its space manufacturing efforts.
Airbus announces an electric air taxi.
China may dominate electric cars.

AI

Sam Altman and Sir Jony Ive are collaborating to create a new AI device.
Google launches Genie which can create a video game based on a napkin drawing.
LLMs do better at legal questions than lawyers.
Meta changes its policies to better tackle deepfakes.

SCIENCE

Today, a total solar eclipse will cross North America.
Landfills bake the planet even more than we realize.
Physicists are making a nuclear clock.
Can LLMs read the genome? This one decoded mRNA to make better vaccines.

CRYPTO

Base hits $4B TVL as monthly transactions outstrip Ethereum and Arbitrum.
Solana developers working on solutions to solve the network congestion issues.
Pantera Capital posted 66% gain for crypto fund last quarter.
Do Kwon and Terraform Labs found guilty.

🏃‍♀️ QUICKIES

Raise: Leash Biosciences, a biotech company focused on AI and ML, raised $9.3M in seed funding to revolutionize medicinal chemistry using modern computational methods and large-scale biological data.

Stat: $7.3B. Amount of funding secured by fintech startups in Q1 2024, marking a 16% decline from the previous quarter and the lowest level since early 2017.

Rabbit Hole: Snapchat Venture Capital Investment Memo.