1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Jukka Alanen, Rebellion Ventures (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to conclude with some general questions about how you see the industry developing. How do you view General AI?

In our world of startups and venture capital, we are really looking at the specific problems – the verticals, the functionals, and the domain specific intelligence. That’s really where we see the capacity to build significant companies and where there are what we call the tools or the picks and shovels of making all that work. Those are the opportunities for building startups currently.

Then there are the OpenAIs who are flushed with capital and are building these very large horizontal platforms. That’s a different category of investment.

But how do you view General AI? Is General AI even relevant?

Jukka Alanen: I’ll contrast and compare a little bit with artificial general intelligence (AGI) as there’s a lot of excitement around that. Basically what AGI seeks is to match human level general intelligence. We have a different point of view. We think that in the real world, it’s really the capability to act that delivers business results rather than how much general intelligence you possess.

So that’s why we focus on how can AI bring in the capability to drive results, not just the level of general intelligence compared to your human intelligence. That capability to drive results and act is typically more context and domain-specific – what really matters to perform and drive results in a specific job. Furthermore, in the real world, for AI to do that, you need more than just intelligence. You need capabilities to operate and interface and act in specific environments and contexts.

Sramana Mitra: Yes, there is workflows, APIs, etc.

Jukka Alanen: A lot of that is workflows and integrations as opposed to the general level of intelligence. If you look at this from an enterprise customer perspective, if there’s AI that just matches humans, that’s great. However, it’d be even better to have AI that can have superior capabilities, at least perform specific jobs and tasks in terms of cost, accuracy, and speed. Then the economic business case to actually invest in that technology and deploy that is more compelling than just generally matching human type of intelligence.

So I think it’s a more pragmatic approach to driving results with AI than just matching human intelligence in general.

Sramana Mitra: Yes, I’m with you. From our perspective of the entrepreneurship ecosystem, artificial general intelligence is almost irrelevant. It’s really in the problem-specific intelligence and the problem-specific workflow API, and everything in context that can really drive superior automation. That’s really where the opportunity is for startups.

Jukka Alanen: As different AI technologies evolve, it’s important for entrepreneurs to think about that as a toolbox. As the toolbox is getting more capable and powerful, you need to think about what problems can you apply the toolbox for and make sure that you’ve got really significant problems where it’s critical for customers to solve those problems, and you can bring radically new type of value for them by applying the toolbox. That’s really where there’s a massive amount of opportunities for entrepreneurs. As that toolbox gets better, it gives even more opportunities for entrepreneurs to solve more and more problems and create more and more value for customers.

Sramana Mitra: Very good. Great discussion, Jukka. I’m happy to hear that your vision of launching the fund on specifically focused on AI has come true since we last talked and that we have real use cases that we’re discussing now. So we’ll catch up again in a few months and good luck.

This segment is part 6 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Jukka Alanen, Rebellion Ventures
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