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New investments for AI.

 Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence pion­eers are back­ing a new $550mn fund ded­ic­ated to invest­ing in AI start-ups, in a move that

Artificial Intelligence

bucks the wider down­turn in tech deal­mak­ing.

Toronto-based Rad­ical Ven­tures said it has received invest­ment from sev­eral lead­ers in the AI field.
This includes Fei-Fei Li, cre­ator of the influ­en­tial ImageNet project, Geof­frey Hin­ton, the pion­eer in neural net­works who is also a mem­ber of the Google Brain team, and the fam­ily office of former Google chief exec­ut­ive Eric Schmidt. Rad­ical’s fund comes amid a huge new wave of interest from ven­ture cap­it­al­ists in start-ups after San-Fran­cisco based OpenAI released Chat­GPT, a ques­tion­and-answer tool, in Novem­ber. Earlier this week, Microsoft inves­ted $10bn in OpenAI at a $29bn valu­ation.
«There’s no ques­tion there’s a lot of hype and money flow­ing into this space,» said Jordan Jac­obs, man­aging part­ner and co-founder of Rad­ical Ven­tures. «We’ve had an enorm­ous flood of inbound from every­one you can ima­gine».
Other Rad­ical back­ers include Advance, the group that owns Condé Nast and a big investor in Red­dit and Warner Bros Dis­cov­ery; the Singa­pore invest­ment group Tem­asek; and CPPIB, Canada’s largest pen­sion fund.
Dominic Bar­ton, former global man­aging part­ner at McKin­sey and chair of min­ing group Rio Tinto, is join­ing Rad­ical as an adviser and investor, help­ing its port­fo­lio com­pan­ies to build con­nec­tions among large cor­por­ate cus­tom­ers.
Rad­ical has also hired Aaron Rosen­berg, former head of strategy and oper­a­tions at Deep­Mind, to over­see a new Lon­don out­post, as it boosts its European invest­ments.

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  1. Roy29 January 2023 at 13:42

    These are bound to continue with the success of ChatGPT. It has its good parts and its bad ones like any change that comes along. But it's unavoidable I think. AI is going to become a part of our lives in the next year or so.

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