Coinciding with the Fundrise Innovation Fund’s investment in Theory Ventures, join us on the latest episode of Onward for a conversation between Fundrise’s CEO Ben Miller and Tomasz Tunguz, Theory Ventures General Partner and one of the next generation’s greatest VC investors.
Tomasz’s 15+ years in venture capital have included identifying seven startups that have gone on to become billion dollar unicorns. His experience — both in understanding systems and how new tech gets traction in the market — provides a critical perspective for analyzing how new technological paradigms become drivers for change, productivity, profitability, and growth.
And, as Tomasz demonstrates in this episode’s discussion, that experience is now a key tool for analyzing the outlook and potential of AI.
As Ben and Tomasz discuss, every major technological wave has two phases: a period of infrastructure development, followed by a period of commercialization. AI’s infrastructure has recently entered a time of thrilling breakthroughs, fueled by hardware like new chips from Nvidia and deep investment by tech incumbents like Google, Amazon, and the U.S. federal government. As a result, Tomasz is now asking what kind of software AI can make possible: the commercialization phase is when true innovation and investment opportunities are likely to appear.
The root of those innovations comes from AI’s aptitude for making sense of unstructured data. While efficient, large-scale data processing and management has driven tech growth for the past decade, it’s largely been restricted to structured data: information easily categorized and organized in predefined ways. When we refer to unstructured data, we’re instead referring to the rich but difficult-to-process information that lives within more free-form formats like language, art, conversation, heterogeneous patterns, or interactions across data types. AI is already demonstrating incredible capacity for intaking and utilizing this kind of unstructured data, leading to surprising revolutions in sectors as diverse as weather forecasting, for example, or food sales to restaurants, as AI can creatively research a business’s menu and infer what ingredients are needed to make a popular dish.
Ben and Tomasz’s conversation is a key introduction to the kinds of systems theory governing the thinking in AI today — such as the work by Herbert Simon that Ben mentions in the episode, describing how complexity is formed from simple building blocks — and the economic analysis that will guide how it eventually winds up in everyday applications, in all consumers’ lives.
No matter how tremendous the hype behind AI becomes, this conversation makes one thing clear: we’re witnessing the beginning of a new era for tech.
All this and more, on the latest episode of Onward.
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