Sound Ventures confirms investment in World Labs as part of strategic AI investments

This Tuesday at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, Ashton Kutcher, co-founder of Sound Ventures, and co-leads and general partners Guy Oseary and Effie Epstein took the stage to discuss the future impact of AI and why Sound Ventures is betting heavily on it. Actor-turned-investor Ashton Kutcher predicts that "every company is going to become an AI company," emphasizing that foundation-layer AI companies will be among "the most valuable companies ever created in human history."

Sound Ventures announced a $265 million AI fund last year, which has since invested in companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Hugging Face, Stability AI, and Magic.dev. Notably, the firm also took the opportunity this Tuesday to confirm it has recently added AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li's World Labs to its portfolio. World Labs recently emerged from stealth with $230 million in funding, which place the startup's valuation at over $1 billion. World Labs is focused on tackling the problem of endowing AI with real-world spacial and temporal reasoning capabilities, starting with the development of large world models, which are the spatial reasning counterparts of large language models.

Even if Kutcher confirmed onstage that Sound Ventures has not sold its OpenAI shares, a crucial aspect in Sound Ventures' investment strategy is the consideration that there might not be a winner, in the sense of the industry becoming a monopoly. According to Kutcher, a key differentiator is that "a lot of different people that stand to gain a lot from AI and AGI in general." Kutcher remains optimist about the technology's potential, likening AI to transformative moments for humanity such as the Industrial Revolution, or the introduction of the car and the personal computer.

Looking to the future, Sound Ventures plans on investing in companies working on giving AI a new form factor, like an operating system or even AI-optimized hardware. The firm is exploring AI hardware investments, including their investment in Rabbit's AI device and having met with Humane, the startup behind the Ai Pin. Sound Ventures has also shown interest in Jony Ive's secretive collaboration with OpenAI's Sam Altman.