This weekend, while most students were returning from bars, Songyee Yoon was rushing to her South Korean campus. At dinner time, she would run some programs on her university's supercomputer, and then, while the computer ran its program, she would wait sleeplessly in her dorm room. “I woke up around 2 or 3 a.m. to walk around campus because I was very curious to see the outcome,” she said.
She was such a weirdo on campus that a writer used her as inspiration for a TV show about her college.
“The intention was not to create characters based on a real-life character,” she said. But as the writer talked to students to get materials, “she kept hearing about this weird girl.”
And this is how Yoon became the inspiration for “Genius Girl” on the Korean TV show KAIST.
Today, if the writers were to make a show about Yoon's life, it would be more like HBO's “Silicon Valley.” After earning a doctorate from MIT, she worked her way up to become president of South Korean video game developer NCSoft, and today she's announcing Principal Venture Partners (PVP), a $100 million fund aimed to support AI startups. The fund will write startup checks ranging from $100,000 to “single-digit millions” and has already invested in six startups, including a model maker. Liquid AI.
Her fellow partners include a who's who of AI academia: there's Daniela Rus, a renowned researcher whom Yoon met through Yoon's work on the MIT board; Dawn Song, a MacArthur fellow who widely published on computer security; and Jeremy Nixon, the founder of AGI House, an AI hacker house that made headlines for attracting talented young founders.
PVP is one of the few investment firms with such a comprehensive group of academic powerhouses — something Yoon sees as an advantage when the firm is trying to win contracts.
“I think the founders would like to have a diverse set of advisors who can bring different perspectives,” she said. Yoon believes that the PVP team's research background gives them a deep understanding of how AI “has evolved over time” and where it might take it.
The team is betting that the next generation of unicorns will be AI-native companies, meaning they were built with AI in mind from the start, not with AI applications tinkered with on the platform afterwards. Yoon isn't concerned that they missed the boat by investing in foundational companies like OpenAI or Anthropic. “If you look at the 10 largest companies on NASDAQ, more than half of them are digitally native companies that started after the introduction of broadband,” she said.
Yoon said the company would invest in all sectors. She is particularly excited about the potential of AI to transform the insurance industry, whether it's using AI to help people understand what their plans cover, or insurance companies specialized in the subscription of autonomous robots.
Yoon also worries about AI's potential to exacerbate cultural colonialism, a topic she has written about last year. She gave the example of great modelers proclaiming, “oh, we’re training this AI using all the data in the world.”
“But if you think about it, 35 percent of the world's population doesn't even have access to broadband,” Yoon said. “And they cannot be the authors of the data that was used to train this AI. It is therefore inevitable that these types of cultures and viewpoints cannot be reflected. »
She admits it's a complex issue that can only be resolved through continued conversations and increased representation within the industry – such as, for example, an AI-focused fund with three female partners .
“We're not saying it's a women's fund, but I think a lot of female founders come to us because they know we'll get more sympathy,” Yoon said. “And that we can see their true strength and their true super power.”
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