Ashton Kutcher, co-founder of Sound Ventures, believes that each company goes to grow to be an AI company, but that there may not be a winner within the space.
The actor and investor spoke at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 on Tuesday alongside Sound co-founder Guy Oseary and partner Effie Epstein to detail what the firm is in search of in founders and startups, and the way they consider foundational AI corporations are setting the stage for the long run.
“Foundation-layer AI corporations are going to be a few of the most beneficial corporations which have ever been created within the history of humankind,” Kutcher said.
He said it’s easy to underestimate how big of a deal AI is, and that he believes foundational AI models are going to be the muse of the whole lot to come back.
“There won’t be an organization on this planet that will not be, ultimately, shape, or form, using AI in the long run,” Kutcher said. “So every company goes to be an AI company. And it’s our thesis that whether it’s open source AI, whether it’s closed systems like Anthropic or OpenAI or World Labs, or whether you’re constructing software using Magic.dev, those things are going to be the underpinnings of the whole lot else.”
Nevertheless, he doesn’t think there will likely be a winner within the space. He believes that while foundational AI corporations converge in some ways, also they are differentiating.
“Sometimes you may get too smart and too cute and think which you can pick the winner, and there may not be a winner,” Kutcher said. “It may not be in one in every of these monopoly spaces, because there’s a whole lot of different those that stand to achieve lots from AI and AGI on the whole.”
While some people fear AI, Kutcher says everyone needs to be excited in regards to the potential that the technology brings.
“I believe a whole lot of people were afraid of the pc when it first got here out, and I believe a whole lot of people were afraid of the automotive when it first got here out, and a whole lot of people were afraid of the commercial world revolution when it happened,” Kutcher said. “And I believe this next level of innovation for humans, that humans needs to be very excited in regards to the potential, because I believe we’re all going to be able to doing rather more than we’ve been able to doing historically.”
Kutcher and Sound have been betting big on AI, because the firm launched a $265 million AI fund last 12 months to take a position in large language model corporations, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Hugging Face.
The actor, who has known OpenAI CEO Sam Altman since he founded Loopt, shared that Altman was superb with Sound investing in several different AI corporations.
“We do a extremely good job of maintaining silos of knowledge, not sharing outside of the businesses and never sharing across the businesses,” Kutcher said. “And we just had a way that we believed on this space.”
Kutcher noted that Sound hasn’t taken money off the table with OpenAI, which is now value $157 billion.
Kutcher also took time to share his advice for founders and advised them to not focus an excessive amount of time on their deck, noting that he and the opposite Sound partners don’t remember OpenAI’s deck.
“It’s in regards to the people and the humans which can be within the constructing, which can be constructing it, and the competencies that they’ve and why they’re gonna win, and the market thesis and what the insight is, that’s the breakthrough,” he said. “It’s not the deck. Like stop spending a lot time on the deck.”
