Community-Led 💬 What's on the Minds of Early Adopters #18
LLM-driven use cases in market TODAY, Solving the problems of the future, Hundreds of AI Hackers and GenAI Trust Toolkit
Welcome to Community-Led. Each week we connect founders to dozens of early adopters and technology executives in fast growing startups and Fortune 500 companies. This newsletter surfaces the most interesting insights and conversations across the thousands of members of the Decibel community every month. Let’s dive in!
There is a lot of excitement (#understatement!) about Generative AI - Large Language Models (LLMs), ChatGPT, Bing, etc. - in the early stage ecosystem these days, and for good reasons. The emergence of this technology feels like a fundamental platform shift, much like the early days of cloud computing, and opens our minds to what is possible in every layer of the software stack.
We expect LLM-native startups to win over competing solutions with “bolted on” AI capabilities. This is particularly true in B2B enterprise infrastructure where latency, accuracy, data privacy and control, and governance continue to determine success with technical buyers. And we see LLMs used by early adopters TODAY both strategically, by creating competitive advantage, and as enablers, by accelerating R&D.
Powerful uses cases leveraging LLMs already are available in market. Botpress reinvented the entire (chat) bot-building process with the first ChatGPT-native bot-building platform. Credo AI launched their GenAI Trust Toolkit to ensure your organization can adopt GenAI efficiently and responsibly. Our portfolio companies are also working on brand new experiences: Spotify is using Sublime Security’s open and community-powered email security platform to protect from email/phish threats. Priceline is a new customer of Bicycle’s AI-driven anomaly detection business intelligence solution (featuring a killer ecommerce and payments use case).
Decibel is uniquely positioned at this intersection of GenAI and enterprise infrastructure software consumers and we will continue to provide access to this early stage innovation to our community. And if you really want to “go deep”, check out the Latent Space podcast hosted by my partner Alessio and his friend Swyx!
Their first guest was Logan Kilpatrick, the first dev advocate at OpenAI and their second was Varun Mohan of Codeium / Exafunction and they covered 1) How to cut inference costs by 90%+ (like @OpenAI just did), 2) Copilot for X (e.g., Harvey for Law), 3) Scaling Laws vs Serving, and 4) Key needs for LLMOps. Check it out here!
The Watercooler: What we’re hearing in the Community
Decibel Community Events
If you will build it, they will come - and they will build! Decibel hosted over 30 teams and hundreds of developers at our inaugural Latent Space Hackathon!
An opportunity to build throughout the week culminated in an exciting showcase of demos including winners such as Best AI Infra category won by helicone_ai, a prompt observability tool for GPT-3 applications, and Best OpenAI prompt won by MenuBites which lets any restaurant use AI to generate better images for their online menus (which also increases their traffic/value via Doordash and similar services).
We see the power in bringing together this community of builders/developers with our community of early adopters. Please reach out to me if you, or a team in your org, wants to participate in our next AI Engineering Demo Day and/or if you want an invite to our events at RSA - we are taking this show on the road! 🚀
An Inside Look at Innovation - Unlock the potential of Generative AI with Credo AI
Excited/intrigued about Generative AI systems AND curious/concerned about mitigating the risks caused by accelerating ML capabilities? Credo AI's Responsible Al platform ensures that your Al is compliant, fair, transparent and auditable throughout the entire lifecycle. Co-founded by Navrina Singh, who was most recently seen at Davos sharing her views on AI governance being a force multiplier to derive value from AI, Credo AI was honored with Fast Company’s 2022 Next Big Things in Tech Award.
Not sure where to start? Start with Credo AI’s GenAI Trust Toolkit! Whether you are using model API's like ChatGPT, tools like Github CoPilot, or products like Jasper, the GenAI Trust Toolkit helps ensure your organization can adopt GenAI efficiently and responsibly. The toolkit provides out-of-the-box policies and controls, as well as evaluation and moderation tools to ensure you have complete control of these systems. Check it out here OR just contact me and I will make you an intro! (they are hiring, too!)
Decibel Friends and Family Update
🎉 Congratulations…
Jason Phillips promoted to Chief Digital Officer at Cisco
Gary Harbison from Bayer to Chief Information Security Officer at J&J
Caitlin Tormey Mongiardini moves to Chief Business Officer at KNIX
William Gregorian now Head of Security & IT at Bilt Rewards
JJ Agha moves to SVP, Chief Information Security Officer at FanDuel
Sekhar Mallipeddi shifts to Executive Vice President, Cloud & Digital Transformation at AntStack
David Wiener now Chief Operating Officer at Rembrand
Kyle Tyacke to Associate Director of Technology at Catchy
Deepthi Bollu moves to General Manager, Digital Transformation, Shell Lubricants at Shell
Preeti Kaur from Carta to SVP/Head of Engineering at Honor
See you next time.
Thanks for reading. This is a community that you’re always welcome to add to. If you have any feedback or know a story that’s perfect for this newsletter, please reach out. Email me at Stacey@Decibel.vc.
Stacey