1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Daniel Cohen, General Partner at Viola Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. If you have more example, you can discuss them. I’m very interested in seeing what is actually fine traction in the customer base.

Daniel Cohen: I’m on the board of a company called Lightricks that is doing a lot of work in the text-to-video space. The text-to-video space is in the limelight after OpenAI released Sora. What we want to think about is, how can AI create not only a short clip, but a full 5-10 minute video? The big challenge is to get fast AI-created videos results, similar to how you can get a story in text within seconds.

Another thing is that the quality of a 20-minute video and what you can do with it is at the same level of a video shooting. AI is not a 100% there yet, so you can’t create a 20-minute real video, but we can create some commercials that have real characters and characters that change with a real story woven in. The whole future of video creation is definitely at the low end side of the market.

Sramana Mitra: Absolutely. The internet is full of video, right? The engagement you get on video is so much higher than anything else. So, you can create 90-second or 30-second videos like this, and it is enormously valuable.

So, I have a question about a relatively new development. You probably haven’t invested in anything like this yet, but are you starting to see this in your deal flow? This is apropos the announcement that we just saw from Anthropic about agents. They are opening up their agent platform where you can go in and start creating agents.

Sam Altman made this comment that AI’s Holy Grail is this all knowing colleague who’s going to be attached to you and know everything about your life and be assisting you in everything that you do.

I don’t believe in this because I don’t want to give all my data about all my life to some company like OpenAI or Anthropic. However, the architecture of agents being able to run software on their own and make these autonomous decisions gives us enormous potential to do next level of automation in enterprise applications, in business applications, and so on.

So, are you seeing this in your deal flow yet?

Daniel Cohen: About that Holy Grail, I’m not sure about a colleague that knows it all, it sounds kind of annoying to me also.

Agents by definition are a great target for replacement and can do certain things. Let’s look at our day-to-day life where we have insurance or travel agents. All these can be replaced by AI in a way to do it in the best way possible.

Agents can do a lot of things, not only in the sense of what they know, but also who they replace, right?

You talk about the colleague that knows it all, but what about the AI representation of myself, right? Two or five years from now, you’ll not be interviewing me because I’m busy; you’ll interview the AI version of me. Will the AI version of me say exactly what I’m saying right now? Now, on one hand, we laugh about it, but I think the reality is that there are a lot of interesting applications.

Sramana Mitra: What comes to my mind is the dating application. I think the CEO of Bumble who said that you want your agent to interact with somebody who’s matching with you and interview each other and then decide whether this is a match or not. Well, why not? I guess.

Daniel Cohen: For someone of my age, that sounds odd, although it’s interesting. Suppose I want to ask President Biden a whole bunch of questions that are really important for me and I can’t get an answer. Maybe the AI version of President Biden can actually answer some of these questions. It’s not that complicated and it’s actually quite interesting.

This segment is part 4 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Daniel Cohen, General Partner at Viola Ventures
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