AI Pitchfest: George Bandarian's talk on the "Transformative Power of AI"

So as we're going to go into the pitch fest, I want to dive a little bit deeper into why we chose AI as the theme of the pitch fest. Might seem obvious. I mean, it's just the hottest topic, not just in vc, but in the world right now. Right. It feels. But like, personally, my fascination with AI started back in my 20s, hopefully. You guys recognize this face. That's Ray Kurzweil, inventor, futurist. He's also like Google's head of AI. But when I was in my 20s, I read this book, the Age of Spiritual Machines, and I really, that was the first time I got. And that was over two decades ago and I got a glimpse that of what's coming. And it's interesting that we're now here. Every age of technology has had, ever since the personal computers came out, each decade has been really defined by technology. In the 80s, you had the operating system and software. In the 90s you had the Internet. In the 2000s, that's when mobile really came on. And 2010 was all about cloud computing and extending, all that. And the 2000s is really going to be all about AI. How do we know this? I'm sure you guys all, everybody's familiar with AI, but I'll share some things that maybe you haven't seen that I think are really interesting. If you look at all of humankind's inventions and technological advances all the way to the most recent ones, everything takes time to reach global scale. These are some of the fastest. Here on the left, I have my pointer, but I think you guys could see Nothing has reached 100 million as fast as ChatGPT did two months. Spotify took 55 months. That's almost six years. Even TikTok took nine months. But two months. For ChatGPT, people are adopting AI and using it like nothing we've ever seen before. The one that's even more interesting than this one, I don't know if any of you guys have seen this slide before, but this one's from Andreessen and basically this shows all the open source communities and how fast their community, the open source community grew and basically as measured by the stars and anybody familiar with stable diffusion and stability, AI, right? So who can see them on the chart? The blue, you think it's this one, right? It's actually this. That's how fast their community reached. What took these guys seven to 10 years, Bitcoin, Ethereum, carpet, all that, literally like a couple months. So it's having a unique effect both on the developer side as well as on the user side, both consumer or chatgpt as well as businesses for all the, all the use cases. So, I mean, we're right in the middle of something big. I think most of us kind of realize that right now we're in the stage right here, right? Enhanced narrow AI. This is what we're going through. Soon we'll reach the general AI when this might be scary for some people, but you know, where it will have, you know, the singularity, when AI will have full cognitive capabilities and can be smarter. Right. Than how we are. And eventually we'll get to super intelligent AI, but we'll save that for another talk. I don't want to freak anybody out that came to have a good time. But what we do know, what we do know is that these innovations are changing like every industry from healthcare to every industry and in every single way. So I think the key takeaway here is everyone in the room needs to be learning and playing with AI. You know, you need to be using it personally, you need to be using it in your business. And I think that just, it's going to be more and more important. It's not just for the ones that are presenting, the startups that are presenting. Every startup has to leverage AI and not just in the pitch, like Brian said, to try to save your pitch, to try to make money. But actually, how are you leveraging that? That's one of the things we're working with our portfolio companies is how are they using, how are the founders using it, how are they using it with their teams and of course, how are they.