K
Kathleen Martin
Guest
According to data from PitchBook, the funding for AI deals has continued its furious pace. In the latest quarter, the amount invested came to a record $31.6 billion. Note that there were 11 deals the closed more than $500 million.
Granted, plenty of these startups will fade away or even go bust. But of course, some will ultimately disrupt industries and change the landscape of the global economy.
“To be disrupted, you have to believe the AI is going to make 10x better recommendations than what’s available today,” said Eric Vishria, who is a General Partner at Benchmark. “I think that is likely to happen in really complex, high dimensional spaces, where there are so many intermingled factors at play that finding correlations via standard analytical techniques is really difficult.”
So then what are some of the industries that are vulnerable to AI disruption? Well, let’s see where some of the top VCs are investing today:
Software Development: There have been advances in DevOps and IDEs. Yet software development remains labor intensive. And it does not help that its extremely difficult to recruit qualified developers.
But AI can make a big difference. “Advancements in state-of-the-art natural language processing algorithms could revolutionize software development, initially by significantly reducing the ‘boilerplate’ code that software developers write today and in the long-run by writing entire applications with little assistance from humans,” said Nnamdi Iregbulem, who is a Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Consider the use of GPT-3, which is a neural network that trains models to create content. “Products like GitHub Copilot, which are also based on GPT-3, will also disrupt software development,” said Jai Das, who is the President and Partner at Sapphire Ventures.
Cybersecurity: This is one of the biggest software markets. But the technologies really need retooling. After all, there continues to be more and more breaches and hacks.
“Cybersecurity is likely to turn into an AI-vs-AI game very soon,” said Deepak Jeevankumar, who is a Managing Director at Dell Technologies Capital. “Sophisticated attackers are already using AI and bots to get over defenses.”
Continue reading: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomtaulli/2021/09/17/ai-disruption--what-vcs-are-betting-on/?sh=69a7a6c17754
Granted, plenty of these startups will fade away or even go bust. But of course, some will ultimately disrupt industries and change the landscape of the global economy.
“To be disrupted, you have to believe the AI is going to make 10x better recommendations than what’s available today,” said Eric Vishria, who is a General Partner at Benchmark. “I think that is likely to happen in really complex, high dimensional spaces, where there are so many intermingled factors at play that finding correlations via standard analytical techniques is really difficult.”
So then what are some of the industries that are vulnerable to AI disruption? Well, let’s see where some of the top VCs are investing today:
Software Development: There have been advances in DevOps and IDEs. Yet software development remains labor intensive. And it does not help that its extremely difficult to recruit qualified developers.
But AI can make a big difference. “Advancements in state-of-the-art natural language processing algorithms could revolutionize software development, initially by significantly reducing the ‘boilerplate’ code that software developers write today and in the long-run by writing entire applications with little assistance from humans,” said Nnamdi Iregbulem, who is a Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Consider the use of GPT-3, which is a neural network that trains models to create content. “Products like GitHub Copilot, which are also based on GPT-3, will also disrupt software development,” said Jai Das, who is the President and Partner at Sapphire Ventures.
Cybersecurity: This is one of the biggest software markets. But the technologies really need retooling. After all, there continues to be more and more breaches and hacks.
“Cybersecurity is likely to turn into an AI-vs-AI game very soon,” said Deepak Jeevankumar, who is a Managing Director at Dell Technologies Capital. “Sophisticated attackers are already using AI and bots to get over defenses.”
Continue reading: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomtaulli/2021/09/17/ai-disruption--what-vcs-are-betting-on/?sh=69a7a6c17754
