On the weekend, as most college students had been stumbling again from the bars, Songyee Yoon was dashing throughout her South Korean campus. Around supper time, she would run some packages on her faculty’s supercomputer after which, as the pc chugged by her program, she’d wait sleepless in her dorm. “I awakened at like 2 a.m., 3 a.m. to stroll down the campus as a result of I used to be so curious to see the outcome,” she stated.
She was such an oddity on campus {that a} author used her as inspiration for a TV present about her faculty.
“The intention was to not create characters primarily based off of an actual character,” she stated. But as the author talked to college students to get materials, “she sort of stored listening to about this bizarre woman.”
And so Yoon grew to become the inspiration behind “Genius Girl” on the Korean TV present KAIST.
Today, if writers had been going to make a present about Yoon’s life, it’d look extra like HBO’s “Silicon Valley.” After finishing a PhD from MIT, she climbed her approach to changing into president of South Korean online game developer NCSoft, and in the present day, she’s asserting Principal Venture Partners (PVP), a $100 million fund to again AI startups. The fund will write early-stage checks anyplace from $100,000 to “single-digit tens of millions” and has already invested in six startups, together with mannequin maker Liquid AI.
Her fellow companions embody a who’s-who of AI academia: there’s Daniela Rus, a famend researcher that Yoon met by Yoon’s work on MIT’s board; Dawn Song, a MacArthur Fellow who’s revealed extensively on laptop safety; and Jeremy Nixon, the founding father of the AGI House, a AI hacker home that’s made headlines for attracting younger proficient founders.
PVP is without doubt one of the few funding companies with such a deep bench of educational powerhouses — one thing that Yoon sees as a bonus when the agency is making an attempt to win offers.
“I believe founders want to have a diversified set of advisors who can carry totally different views,” she stated. Yoon believes that the analysis backgrounds of the PVP staff give them a profound understanding of how AI “has developed over time” and the place it is likely to be headed.
The staff is betting that the subsequent technology of unicorns can be AI-native firms, that means they had been constructed with AI in thoughts from the beginning, not with AI functions jerry-rigged onto the platform after the actual fact. Yoon’s not apprehensive that they could have missed the boat on investing in foundational firms like OpenAI or Anthropic. “If you have a look at the highest 10 NASDAQ firms, greater than half of them are digital-native firms who began after the introduction of broadband,” she stated.
Yoon stated the agency will make investments throughout sectors. She’s significantly excited concerning the potential for AI to remodel the insurance coverage trade, whether or not meaning utilizing AI to assist individuals perceive what their plans cowl, or insurance coverage firms focusing on underwriting autonomous robots.
Yoon can be apprehensive concerning the concern of AI’s potential to exacerbate cultural colonialism, a subject she wrote about final 12 months. She gave the instance of enormous mannequin makers proclaiming, “oh, we prepare this AI utilizing all the information on the planet.”
“But if you consider it, 35% of the world’s inhabitants don’t even have entry to broadband,” Yoon stated. “And they can’t be authors of the information that has been used for coaching this AI. So it’s inevitable that these sorts of cultures and viewpoints can’t be mirrored.”
She admits it’s an advanced downside that may solely start to be solved by steady conversations and elevated illustration by the trade — like, say, an AI-focused fund with three feminine companions.
“We don’t say it’s a feminine fund, however I believe I see a variety of the feminine founders come to us as a result of they know that we’ll have extra sympathy,” Yoon stated. “And that we are able to see their actual energy and actual tremendous energy.”
