Sequoia on AI: Is The Essay an Example of What Informed Analysis Will Be in the Future?
April 10, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
I read an essay produced by the famed investment outfit Sequoia. Its title: “Generative AI: A Creative New World.” The write up contains buzzwords, charts, a modern version of a list, and this fascinating statement:
This piece was co-written with GPT-3. GPT-3 did not spit out the entire article, but it was responsible for combating writer’s block, generating entire sentences and paragraphs of text, and brainstorming different use cases for generative AI. Writing this piece with GPT-3 was a nice taste of the human-computer co-creation interactions that may form the new normal. We also generated illustrations for this post with Midjourney, which was SO MUCH FUN!
I loved the capital letters and the exclamation mark. Does smart software do that in its outputs?
I noted one other passage which caught my attention; to wit:
The best Generative AI companies can generate a sustainable competitive advantage by executing relentlessly on the flywheel between user engagement/data and model performance.
I understand “relentlessly.” To be honest, I don’t know about a “sustainable competitive advantage” or user engagement/data model performance. I do understand the Amazon flywheel, but my understand that it is slowing and maybe wobbling a bit.
My take on the passage in purple as in purple prose is that “best” AI depends not on accuracy, lack of bias, or transparency. Success comes from users and how well the system performs. “Perform” is ambiguous. My hunch is that the Sequoia smart software (only version 3) and the super smart Sequoia humanoids were struggling to express why a venture firm is having “fun” with a bit of B-school teaming — money.
The word “money” does not appear in the write up. The phrase “economic value” appears twice in the introduction to the essay. No reference to “payoff.” No reference to “exit strategy.” No use of the word “financial.”
Interesting. Exactly how does a money-centric firm write about smart software without focusing on the financial upside in a quite interesting economic environment.
I know why smart software misses the boat. It’s good with deterministic answers for which enough information is available to train the model to produce what seems like coherent answers. Maybe the smart software used by Sequoia was not clued in to the reports about Sequoia’s explanations of its winners and losers? Maybe the version of the smart software is not up the tough subject to which the Sequoia MBAs sought guidance?
On the other hand, maybe Sequoia did not think through what should be included in a write up by a financial firm interested in generating big payoffs for itself and its partners.
Either way. The essay seems like a class project which is “good enough.” The creative new world lacks the force that through the green fuse drives the cash.
Stephen E Arnold, April 10, 2023
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