Geoff Ralston, known to the starting community for his years at Y Combinator, returns to the official investment ring, he announced Thursday.
His new fund is called the Safe Artificial Intelligence or Saif, which is an explanation of his dissertation and a game of words.
Ralston specifically searches for newly established businesses that “enhance the security, security and responsible development of AI”, such as his mutual capital website describes. He plans to write $ 100,000 as a safe, “punded,” he says, with a maximum of $ 10 million. A safe, of course, the investment now/Price Later on a pre-existing investment tool that pioneered the Y Combinator (means simple agreement for future shareholders).
While most of the VCs these days are trying to invest in new AI companies, Ralston’s taking is a little more focused on the idea of safe AI, although it admits that the idea is a bit wide.
“The overwhelming majority of AI projects in the world today use technology to solve problems or create efficiency or creating new opportunities. They are not necessarily inherently unsafe, but security is not their primary concern,” Ralston says. “I intend to finance the newly formed businesses whose primary goal is a safe AI – as I have defined it (very widely).”
This list includes the newly established companies that focus on improving AI security, such as those that clarify the AI decision -making process or AI security. Includes products that protect intellectual property, those that ensure that AS complies with compliance requirements, the fight against misinformation and the detection of attacks produced by the c. It also wants to invest in AI operating tools with built -in security, such as better AI prediction tools and AI business trading tools that will not reveal corporate secrets to strangers.
This may sound like a list of newly established businesses that are seeking many VCs, but there are areas that Ralston says he will not return. An example is fully autonomous weapons.
“There are definitely uses of AI that will be (will) unsafe: using technology for the creation of biological means, to manage conventional without human weapons in the loop, etc.,” he explained.
In fact, he would like to fund “arms safety systems” that could detect or prevent AI weapons attacks.
This is an interesting opposite view of many of today’s founders of technology and VCs of today’s defense. As TechCrunch has previously mentioned, some of the people who build AI weapons have increasingly floating the idea that such weapons would be better to operate without human.
Still, all things AI is a full of VCS field these days. There Ralston hopes YC connections will give him an advantage. Ralston departed from YC in 2022, after three years as president (succeeded by Garry Tan) and over a decade as a consultant.
Ralston plans to provide guidance of the kind he made at Started Startup Accelerator and has promised to train them through the way he will apply to the YC. And offers to help them make use of its important network of investors.
Ralston refused to say how big this fund is, how many newly established businesses it intends to return or who are the supporters of the LP.
