As we look back on a year of remarkable advancements in AI, we are excited to share some of our favourite Radical Reads features. These highlights dive into how AI is reshaping the ways we work, live, and play, offering perspectives on its transformative impact.
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Happy holidays and best wishes for the year ahead.
Fei-Fei Li: With Spatial Intelligence, AI Will Understand the Real World
Fei-Fei Li, CEO and Co-Founder of Radical Ventures portfolio company World Labs and Radical Scientific Partner, discusses her transformative vision for AI’s future in a featured TED Talk. Drawing a parallel between biological evolution and technological advancement, she explains how spatial intelligence, the ability to process visual data, make predictions, and act on those predictions, represents the next frontier of AI innovation.
Just as the development of sight sparked an explosion of life on Earth, Fei-Fei argues that spatial intelligence will enable AI to understand and interact with the physical world. Read our feature.
Exclusive: Geoffrey Hinton on his Nobel Prize
In a historic moment for AI, Geoffrey Hinton was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics alongside John Hopfield for his foundational breakthroughs in artificial intelligence.
In an exclusive interview with Radical Partner Aaron Brindle, Geoffrey reflects on his journey from physics dropout to Nobel laureate, the connection between physics and modern AI, and his enduring curiosity about how the brain works.
Geoffrey is an investor in Radical Ventures. Read the full interview here.
Agents Are The Future Of AI. Where Are The Startup Opportunities?
Radical Partner Rob Toews explores the transformative potential of AI agents and the most promising opportunities for startups in this emerging space. Rob argues that while there is significant activity in agent infrastructure, the biggest opportunities lie at the application layer.
Agentic applications are revolutionary because they are not just productivity software but can be the workers themselves. Read Rob’s analysis here.
The Art of Artificial Intelligence Research
Charles Fisher, Founder and CEO of Radical Ventures portfolio company Unlearn.AI, argues that science and AI research is an artistic endeavour driven by intuition, creativity, and experimentation.
AI research challenges traditional perceptions of science as purely logical and data-driven. Charles suggests that AI researchers should develop a deep understanding of AI principles and express their unique insights through creative problem-solving and experimentation.
By blending structured principles with an artistic approach, AI researchers can achieve groundbreaking results and contribute to advancing the field. Read Charles’ thoughts here.
Ari Morcos, Co-Founder and CEO of Radical portfolio company DatologyAI, offers practical advice on building research-focused startups.
“Startups are freaking hard,” he emphasizes, noting that “while strategy matters, excellent execution is critical — and execution comes down to having the right people at the table.”
His advice centres on maintaining high hiring standards and identifying talent that thrives in uncertain environments. Read our excerpt of the conversation from the 2024 Radical AI Founders Masterclass here.
Sara Hooker on Commercializing AI Research
Sara Hooker, Head of Cohere For AI and VP of Research at Cohere, discusses the development of Aya Expanse, a family of multilingual language models that set new performance benchmarks. In conversation with Radical Partner Molly Welch, Sara shares practical advice for researchers transitioning to commercial product development and emphasizes the shrinking gap between research and productization. This conversation was part of our annual AI Founders Masterclass series. Read our excerpt of the conversation here.
Exclusive Q&A with Cohere CEO & Transformer Co-creator Aidan Gomez
Following the launch of Command R+, Cohere’s latest large language model, Radical Partner Aaron Brindle spoke with CEO and Co-Founder Aidan Gomez about the future of enterprise AI. Command R+ excels at business-critical capabilities like RAG with citations, multilingual coverage, and enterprise tool use. Aidan shares insights on Cohere’s customer-first approach and commitment to building enterprise-ready AI technology. Read the full interview here.
Was Linguistic AI Created by Accident?
Stephen Marche, a novelist, essayist, and cultural commentator whose work has appeared in esteemed publications like The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Esquire, and The Walrus, delves into the origins of transformer architecture. Marche shares how Aidan Gomez, now CEO of Cohere, co-authored the seminal paper “Attention Is All You Need” as a college intern at Google. This technology has become the backbone of modern linguistic AI, changing how machines process and generate language. Read the full article here.
AI That Can Invent AI Is Coming. Buckle Up.
Radical Partner Rob Toews examines the frontier of AI systems capable of conducting AI research, potentially leading to recursive self-improvement. While the concept of self-improving AI has long been discussed theoretically, Rob explores how researchers are making tangible progress toward this reality and its implications for the future of artificial intelligence. Read Rob’s analysis here.
Canadian AI Sovereign Compute Strategy
Canada was the first country to launch a national AI strategy in 2017. This year, the Canadian Government built on that foundation with a landmark $2.4 billion program to support the computing needs of Canadian AI companies and researchers. Radical Ventures Co-Founder and Managing Partner Jordan Jacobs explains how this investment helps secure Canada’s position as a global AI leader by ensuring Canadian companies have access to the computational resources needed to compete in the rapidly evolving AI landscape. Read Jordan’s thoughts here.
Radical Reads is edited by Leah Morris (Senior Director, Velocity Program, Radical Ventures).
