1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Ashish Gupta, Partner at Clearvision Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So Ashish, I’m gonna switch gears a little bit and ask you about hallucination. Now, here’s an amusing anecdote. A friend of mine sent me a screenshot. He tested what Meta has to say about Sramana Mitra.

And it is absolute garbage. According to it, Sramana Mitra has a degree in journalism and MBA from University of Texas, none of which is remotely true. He said, “This is what AI is saying about you.” I said, “Well, this is why General AI has a long way to go.”

This is an amusing instance. It doesn’t really hurt anybody.

Ashish Gupta: It could turn dangerous pretty quickly. You are in no need of a job. However, if somebody was looking for a job, and this is what the recruiting manager saw and blindly trusted a large company’s results over what was written in a resume, this person could be rejected.

That is one of the smaller things, but it is widespread, Sramana.

In fact, one of my colleagues is building a company that is addressing a very specific problem in the programming space. Everyone keeps talking about how programmers will be replaced with automated code generators. This colleague, who is the founder of a publicly traded company and has now started another startup, is focused on solving a particular problem: code review for one particular kind of programming. He was remarking to me a couple of weeks ago that he either has become incompetent, or these other people who are claiming that they can write entire systems are exaggerating. Because they are finding it hard to do reliable, predictable code review for just one programming language.

These are people I’ve known for seventeen years, and they have not turned into idiots. I think it is really the hype of a lot of the stuff that yet has not been deployed in enterprises. I’m seeing that consistently in most of the companies.

Sramana Mitra: Absolutely. I mean, generative AI is a very new technology, right? It’s barely two years in industry. It’s really one year in industry, not even two.

And to build that much technology on top of that to build whole systems, I mean, writing whole systems is serious business. This is a joke. So I think we are five years away from anything remotely close to that. That probably happened, but it’s not nowhere near there.

Ashish Gupta: Not imminent. For instance, a company called Pepper Content has internal tools, and they are becoming the next-gen agency. But it is very clear to the founder, and he positions it as an agency. Not, here is a set of tools, and henceforth, you can forget about NPP or publicists. He’s very clear that, hey, I’m also an agency. I have people. Because a lot of the content, it is obvious to the reader that this is machine-generated.

Sramana Mitra: Machine Generated content is really uninteresting, flat, no personality content.

Ashish Gupta: It’s flat. Yes, absolutely. I find it hard to put my finger on what. But when I read it, it is very clear that, nah, no flip.

Sramana Mitra: We have talked internally in my team because we do so much work with content. I said, “We’re not doing this because I’m known in the industry for a really strong, powerful voice. We are not going to tarnish that with this kind of flat garbage.”

By the way, if you remember, a few years ago, there were these terminologies we used to use in this business. One is do it yourself (DIY) and the other is do it for me (DIFM). I think many of these vertical AI solutions would perform better as DIFM technologies.

Ashish Gupta: I too am of that view, Sramana. My bias, while not complete, is to go after companies that are adding a human layer on top of this. That way, the customer has someone to interact with when using these solutions. The analogy that I end up using is, if I have to dig a hole in my backyard, I’m going to rent a crane with a driver. I’m not just going to rent a crane, because then, that hole could very well be in my living room. I’m not trained to use heavy equipment.

Sramana Mitra: Exactly.

Ashish Gupta: This is heavy equipment. You don’t park it in one’s living room and start playing with it and expect results that are productive. So you hire it with a driver.

Sramana Mitra: If you have a Ferrari and you drive it like a Honda Civic, that is not a good use of the Ferrari either.

 Ashish Gupta: Very true. Very true.

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Ashish Gupta, Partner at Clearvision Ventures
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