It's not new, it's time !
Artificial Intelligence is now a grown-up...
We walked into the store. Right here, by the entrance, stood a pyramid of the precious... The Nintendo NES! A pack with a console, two controllers, Super Mario Bros, and of course, Duck Hunt with its infrared orange gun (not very woke if you ask me…).
You could buy the whole pack for 990 Francs, approximately $250 in today’s value. I remember this day quite vividly. It was the fall of 1988. I was 5 years old.
Back home, my father unboxed the console and plugged it into the screen of our computer. At the time, he was the marketing director of a French computer designer and manufacturer called Exelvision. He was so proud of all their innovation, and indeed, the pace of their releases was impressive. It had a voice synthesizer, an infrared keyboard, a ton of applications, and even artificial intelligence!
Looking back, it’s undoubtedly the stepping stone of my passion for tech entrepreneurship.
What happened to Exelvision is very French but also very unfortunate… It was a visionary team with exceptional technical and product skills. But it was also an innovative company to kill for incumbents back then. Also, their lack of focus and strategic intelligence didn’t help. Surprisingly, they had the right sales ethos and were deploying tremendous effort to sell as many units as they could. In retrospect, Apple died too back then. IBM & Microsoft won.
The reason why I am bringing that up is that 30 years ago, we were already speaking about artificial intelligence. It takes time to make horizontally transforming technologies mainstream. Ask Alex Lebrun, who started in 2002, building one of the first robust Intelligent Virtual Agents. Now he is scaling healthcare!
People get excited about Web 3 because it has structural implications that are revolutionary, and it is shaking the established order of things. But I am equally excited by Artificial Intelligence as it allows us to break many technical ceilings and go beyond what is humanly possible!
When I talk to entrepreneurs building tech companies with a strong artificial intelligence ethos, I ask myself this question: Does it improve how artificial intelligence can spread and be used by more people across more industries, or does it unlock something that wasn’t possible before and that would benefit to millions of people in a very meaningful way.
That’s how we came to back companies like Nabla.com, Gladia.io or Wave.ai
Nabla is building the most sophisticated, reliable assistant that any care provider could dream of, allowing them to focus on what they do best and the relationships with their patients.
Wave is allowing anyone to be effectively coached in a continuous way. Before that, coaching was only for the elite who could afford it or provided by all sorts of so-called professionals with questionable results. In any case, it was also limited to a short period of time as it couldn’t be done continuously.
As for Gladia, they are providing a fast scaling-grade platform for companies to run algorithms effectively. We are used to faster and faster response time, it’s impossible to imagine a world where outputs are returned in several seconds instead of milliseconds.
It’s also fascinating to see so many experiments around artificial intelligence to generate images, texts, and outputs of all sorts. It’s just the beginning. I can’t wait for a new generation of defining companies to emerge and pave the way !
Reach out :)