Ashton Kutcher’s VC firm, Sound Ventures, co-led by general partners Guy Oseary and Effie Epstein, is betting on AI — including with an investment in Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs, the investors confirmed on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 on Tuesday.
The startup, founded by Li, the Stanford professor dubbed the “Godmother of AI,” has already raised $230 million from investors including a16z, NEA, and Radical Ventures, valuing the company at over $1 billion. It aims to develop “large world models” that will be able to understand and interact with the 3D world, and is targeting game companies and movie studios as its first customers — the latter an area where a Hollywood actor-turned-investor could have input.
Announced last year, Sound Ventures’ $265 million AI fund has invested in various large language model companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Hugging Face.
Of note, Kutcher said today that the firm hasn’t yet sold any of its OpenAI shares — a confirmation that these investors believe the company will continue to get even bigger.
The team is also interested in startups working to bring AI technology to a new physical form factor or possibly, a new OS.
“I don’t know that the existing form factors that we have, or the existing operating systems that we have for hardware are optimized for [AI], but so we’re really curious about the space,” said Oseary.
He mentioned that Sound Ventures had met with Humane, the makers of the AI pin, two years ago, and had invested in Rabbit, the AI hardware startup co-founded by Jesse Lyu.
“The reason we got really excited about what Jesse was building is because of the Large Action Model component. So we actually look at the hardware as almost being irrelevant over time — the form factor didn’t matter,” explained Epstein, speaking about Sounds Ventures’ interest in the combination of AI and hardware.
“Maybe today it looks like a dongle that kind of looks like your phone, but tomorrow it looks like something else, and eventually it’s irrelevant,” she continued. “But this software is… learning our preferences and can take action on our behalf. And in fact, there’s a moment in time where a company like that could actually be founded and potentially disrupt a player like Apple,” Epstein said.
“It was less of a hardware play for us. We really looked at it as investing in another foundation model,” she added.
The VC firm is also interested in investing in the new AI device being built by legendary Apple designer Jony Ive, in collaboration with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
In fact, Kutcher said that they had “had a conversation with Jony today,” though TechCrunch understands a term sheet has not yet been signed.
“Somebody’s going to have a breakthrough in this space and it’s going to be really helpful and really profound for all of us,” said Kutcher.
