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Four Futures

We are in a moment where the future is both wildly exciting and highly uncertain. The acceleration of AI has created a new paradigm of possibilities but also fundamental questions we can’t yet answer. Will we continue speeding towards exponentially growing and continually (potentially self-)improving technology indefinitely or will plateaus, short or long t...

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A third path

Internet knowledge creators are at a crossroads. Independent writers, recipe bloggers, wellness podcasters, and parenting experts who’ve spent years building their own online knowledge bases face what appears as a binary choice: compete for attention against AI-generated content or sell their carefully crafted work as training data to large language models. On one side, creators watch generative models (often trained on scraped web data) produce endless streams of content at a fraction of the...

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Data springs

Everyone’s asking what AI tools you’re using these days. New ones are dropping every week and it's hard to keep up. I do my best to experiment with different ones and am constantly swapping things in and out. But I’ve begun to notice a meaningful difference in which tools stick and which end up collecting dust. The tools that stick for me are those that have a unique and near frictionless mechanism of data capture natively embedded in their UX. I’ve started to call this a “data spring.” Here’...

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What we’ve learned about AI learning

This post was originally published on the USV blog here. It's been over a year since Albert shared his vision for 'tutors for everyone,' and we're all the more convinced that AI will not only make knowledge more accessible, but also unlock radically new learning experiences. The sad truth is that our institutional education system remains fundamentally broken and unable to keep pace with the technological changes happening all around us. This isn’t anyone’s fault per se, but simply the very n...

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Toward a social theory of venture

To practice venture is to practice social theory. It's not novel to point out that to really understand what’s happening in today’s technology market, we must situate it within its broader societal context. Yet during periods of intense technological innovation and irrational exuberance, the social underpinnings that shape this market can often go under-appreciated. During times like these, there’s value to be had in leaning on disciplines like social theory to gain a more human, and therefor...

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Does AI change how much my data is worth?

Placing financial value on an individual’s personal data, let alone selling it, has always felt like a futile exercise. While ‘big data’ is a hot com...

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Deep reals

It’s never been more difficult to tell whether what we see online is real or fake. AI bots are being paid to leave fake reddit...

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The fragmentation of search

The market structure for Search is currently being reshaped. Horizontal and LLM-based “search agents” like ChatGPT...

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Let's talk about you

In college I majored in something called 'Social Studies,' which was a catch-all term for a hybrid social sciences degree. I studied a bit of everything: economics, statistics, intellectual history, sociology, philosophy. But I ended up taking the most courses in anthropology. Anthropology is the study of how humans derive meaning from the world around them. I joke that one of the reasons I ended up in venture was because I loved anthropology in college. Technology is a rich medium for unders...