It’s interesting to sit back and think about tech waves over the last handful of years. Computing, extended reality, “big data”, machine learning, crypto/Web3, Generative AI, etc… Maybe it’s always been this way, but with each wave the “futurists” seemingly get more and more attention with their vision-casting content and consumers are left underwhelmed for a long time until a thing actually happens. By then, of course, a new tech hype is underway and the New Tech stops becoming cool to talk about, since it has already become an integrated and ubiquitous part of our lives (e.g. electricity, computers, cellular technology, social media, newsfeed algorithms, etc..).

In fact - as a slight aside - a company my partners and I invested in (CFX Labs) has created the first zero-fee international payment platform, kinda like Venmo but for cross-border payments. What they don’t need to talk about on their site is that the underlying technology uses the Solana blockchain instead of traditional banking rails to move money around. A few years ago they would be jumping up and down about their use of blockchain, but now it’s just an infrastructure thing. You don’t hear Walmart jumping up and down, for example, about some new supply chain improvement they made or whatnot….

So - interestingly - AI is nothing new. We’ve had thermostats (a form of AI) for decades. AI has evolved a lot, of course, and in this slice of history “AI” is synonymous - for the most part - with Generative AI. What many people don’t know, however, is that “Generative Pre-trained Transformers” (GPTs) have been around for over five years but it wasn’t until OpenAI released ChatGPT did the world freak out about it and it hit mainstream.

So - right now - we have lots of promises of “Text to X” and not a ton of integration and ubiquity. I suspect synthetic biology - or some new energy tech - will take the attention of our futurists by the time GenAI is everywhere.

However, one thing we can be extremely confident in, is that GenAI will indeed be everywhere. Our future will have robotic assistance - and autonomous robotic help - in basically every aspect of our lives. Massive companies will be built within every level of the stack (from infrastructure to applications) and it will be exciting to see which ones draw ahead in the race.

Of course, my partners and I are actively investing in new companies at every level of the stack, so if you are building in this space, please hit us up.