Ashton Kutcher’s VC firm, Sound Ventures, co-led by general partners Guy Oseary and Effie Epstein, is betting on AI — including with an investment in Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs, the investors confirmed onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 on Tuesday.
The startup, founded by Li, the Stanford professor dubbed the “Godmother of AI,” has already raised $230 million from investors including a16z, NEA, and Radical Ventures, valuing the corporate at over $1 billion. It goals to develop “large world models” that may find a way to know and interact with the 3D world and is targeting game firms and movie studios as its first customers — the latter an area where a Hollywood actor-turned-investor could have input.
Announced last 12 months, Sound Ventures’ $265 million AI fund has invested in various large language model and AI firms, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Hugging Face, Stability AI, and Magic.dev.
Of note, Kutcher said today that the firm hasn’t yet sold any of its OpenAI shares — a confirmation that these investors imagine the corporate will proceed to get even greater.
The team can be occupied with startups working to bring AI technology to a brand new physical form factor or possibly, a brand new OS.
“I don’t know that the present form aspects that we’ve got, or the present operating systems that we’ve got for hardware are optimized for [AI], but so we’re really inquisitive about the space,” said Oseary.
He mentioned that Sound Ventures had met with Humane, the makers of the Ai pin, two years ago, and had invested in Rabbit, the AI hardware startup co-founded by Jesse Lyu.
“The explanation we got really enthusiastic about what Jesse was constructing is due to Large Motion Model component. So we actually take a look at the hardware as almost being irrelevant over time — the shape factor didn’t matter,” explained Epstein, speaking about Sound Ventures’ interest in the mixture of AI and hardware.
“Possibly today it looks like a dongle that type of looks like your phone, but tomorrow it looks like something else, and eventually it’s irrelevant,” she continued. “But this software is… learning our preferences and may take motion on our behalf. And in reality, there’s a moment in time where an organization like that would actually be founded and potentially disrupt a player like Apple,” Epstein said.
“It was less of a hardware play for us. We actually checked out it as investing in one other foundation model,” she added.
The VC firm can be occupied with investing in the brand new AI device being built by legendary Apple designer Jony Ive, in collaboration with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
In actual fact, Kutcher said that they’d “had a conversation with Jony today,” though TechCrunch understands a term sheet has not yet been signed.
“Any person’s going to have a breakthrough on this space and it’s going to be really helpful and really profound for all of us,” said Kutcher.
