• by Laurie Sullivan , 6 hours ago

Among Google Ventures (GV) investments in Europe, 80% are in AI or AI-native companies that seem to do something new or in a way that could not have been done before.

GV is owned by Alphabet, but operates independently. It has been run by Tom Hulme since 2014, and has invested more than $1 billion in European start-ups such as Elon Musk’s Neuralink, and Q.ai, which Apple acquired.

Neuralink raised $205 million from GV and other sources.

During an interview with the Financial Times (FT) conducted in late February and published this week, Hulme spoke with correspondent Tim Bradshaw, about whether Google Glass-style smart glasses could make an AI-powered comeback.

“We have never seen technology harnessed as quickly as this has been,” Hulme told FT. “As an example, ChatGPT going to 100mn users in two months [is] extraordinarily quick.”

The natural-language interface seemingly makes it more attractive for people to latch on to the technology, he said.

“You’ve got distribution, you’ve got scalability and you’ve got low friction to use them,” Hulme said. “So we’re seeing these companies grow faster than ever.”

When the subject turned to whether people want to wear cameras on their bodies and talk to an AI in public, Hulm said investors don’t typically gravitate toward projects with a past, meaning those that have failed and the company wants to revive them in a different way. He referred to Google Glass. Basically because the investors doesn’t want to be part of a project that might fail again.

“You could have applied that logic to autonomous vehicles for the last 12 years, 15 years since a lot of the work over at Stanford and Darpa,” Hulme said, referring to technology used in Waymo or earbuds. “I think the same is true with augmented vision, these glasses. And I think when they show enough utility, these things tip into feeling normal extraordinarily quickly.”

He acknowledged that human behavior and the willingness to change will drive AI adoption. Humans -- particularly in enterprises -- are changing more slowly than Google Ventures had predicted.

“But my expectation would be: AI is democratizing access to intelligence,” he said. “It will augment most white-collar workers. White collar work is a $20tn addressable market instead of $2.5tn, which is software.”