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On the weekend , as most students were falter back from the bars , Songyee Yoon was rushing across her South Korean campus . Around dinner party time , she would run some programs on her college ’s supercomputer and then , as the computing machine chugged through her program , she ’d hold off sleepless in her dorm . “ I ignite up at like 2 a.m. , 3 a.m. to walk down the campus because I was so curious to see the result , ” she said .
She was such an quirkiness on campus that a writer used her as inspiration for a TV show about her college .
“ The aim was not to make characters based off of a actual character , ” she aver . But as the author talked to student to get fabric , “ she kind of keep hearing about this weird young woman . ”
And so Yoon became the inspiration behind “ Genius Girl ” on theKorean TV show KAIST .
Today , if writer were going to make a show about Yoon ’s life , it ’d depend more like HBO ’s “ Silicon Valley . ” After dispatch a Ph.D. from MIT , she climbed her way to becoming president of South Korean video secret plan developer NCSoft , and today , she ’s announcing Principal Venture Partners ( PVP ) , a $ 100 million investment firm to back AI startup . The fund will pen other - leg checks anywhere from $ 100,000 to “ single - finger’s breadth millions ” and has already invested in six startups , including modelling makerLiquid AI .
Her fellow partners admit a who’s - who of AI academia : there ’s Daniela Rus , a notable investigator that Yoon met through Yoon ’s work on MIT ’s board ; Dawn Song , a MacArthur Fellow who’spublished extensivelyon computer security ; and Jeremy Nixon , the laminitis of the AGI House , a AI cyber-terrorist house that ’s made headlines for attractingyoung gifted beginner .
PVP is one of the few investment firms with such a bass work bench of academic ball of fire — something that Yoon sees as an advantage when the house is attempt to win deals .
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“ I reckon founders would wish to have a diversified set of advisors who can bring different perspectives , ” she said . Yoon believes that the inquiry screen background of the PVP team give them a profound discernment of how AI “ has evolved over meter ” and where it might be headed .
The team is betting that the next contemporaries of unicorn will be AI - aboriginal company , imply they were construct with AI in mind from the start , not with AI app jerry - set up onto the platform after the fact . Yoon ’s not worried that they may have missed the boat on investing in foundational companies like OpenAI or Anthropic . “ If you look at the top 10 NASDAQ company , more than one-half of them are digital - native companies who commence after the introduction of broadband , ” she say .
Yoon say the business firm will endow across sphere . She ’s peculiarly mad about the electric potential for AI to transmute the insurance industriousness , whether that means using AI to help people understand what their plans cover , or insurance companies that specialise in underwriting autonomous robot .
Yoon is also worried about the outcome of AI ’s electric potential to exacerbate ethnical colonialism , a topic she wrote aboutlast year . She give the example of large model makers proclaim , “ oh , we train this AI using all the data in the world . ”
“ But if you think about it , 35 % of the domain ’s population do not even have accession to broadband , ” Yoon aver . “ And they can not be authors of the datum that has been used for training this AI . So it ’s inevitable that those kinds of cultures and viewpoint can not be reflected . ”
She admits it ’s a complicated problem that can only start to be solved through uninterrupted conversation and increase representation through the industry — like , say , an AI - focused fund with three female partners .
“ We do n’t say it ’s a female fund , but I cogitate I see a slew of the female founders follow to us because they know that we ’ll have more sympathy , ” Yoon said . “ And that we can see their real strength and tangible ace power . ”
