#135 James Alcorn: Inside the AI revolution with one of the world’s leading investors focused in this space since 2015, Zetta Venture Partners!

The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal

James Alcorn is a partner at Zetta Venture Partners, one of the world's leading AI focused VC investors, serving technical founders building AI-native companies. Zetta has partnered with the founders of Kaggle, Domino Data Lab, Nabla Bio, and other leading franchises.

In this episode #135 w James Alcorn, learn about:

Given the extensive focus on AI and it’s exponential mainstream growth, I wanted to bring on someone who understands this space from various angels, the technological shift, business models, venture capital investment opportunities and what founders should know.

A couple of weeks ago, I contacted my network and one name that kept coming up was James Alcorn so here we are. James is a partner at Zetta Venture Partners, one of the world’s leading AI focused VC investors since their inception in 2015.

This episode can be best described as an introduction to AI, whilst being a deep dive into various aspects. I asked James about Zetta’s origin story given they’ve been 100% focused on only AI since 2015, his thoughts on AI today vs 5 years ago, what exactly led to ChatGPT becoming mainstream, open source vs priopetiary models, infrastructure vs application layer and more.

And yes, we cover a lot of questions that founders and investors are asking today including IP protection, metrics for investment, valuation, geographical differences and we end with a special rapid fire final sprint, make sure to listen through for this special conversation.

It’s now time to explore your curiosity. Please enjoy!

(Timestamps below)

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03:30 - Where were you born and live now?

04:02 - What was your first job and now?

05:19 - Entry into VC with Zetta

06:11 - Zetta as an “AI only” investor

07:39 - Rate of growth in AI today vs 5 years ago

09:55 - What exactly is Artificial intelligence?

13:06 - What led to ChatGPT breakthrough in late 2022?

14:50 - Open source vs proprietary models

17:52 - Large availability of compute today

19:46 - IP protection for early stage startups

24:33 - What makes an AI startup investible?

28:50 - Startups vs incumbents in platform shifts like AI

32:40 - LLMs in infrastructure vs application layer

36:19 - Differences in USA vs Israel vs China

38:12 - Are AI startups more capital intensive?

41:40 - Automated speech recognition (ASR)

46:00 - Vector databases

51:10 - AI progress in Australia

55:25 - Final sprint rapid fire