Sound Ventures’s managing partner says AI fund oversubscribed

CEOs and business leaders can not afford not to pay attention to artificial intelligence, said Effie Epstein, a managing partner of Sound Ventures.

Sound Ventures, a venture capital firm founded by Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary, has closed an AI fund oversubscribed at nearly $240M in the past decade, Epstein said.

That fund is designed to invest in AI technologies at the foundation level, Epstein said, adding that Sound believes obstacles to building new AI platforms mean they will rely on existing foundation models, such as OpenAI's GPT.

We believe that every application will ultimately plug into a foundational company, because it's very expensive to build, she said on Fox News Digital.

In a statement, Effie said, access to talent and the capital required to build a foundation model faced challenges for new AI applications, such as photo and text generation models.

When you look at the application layer, the easiest thing to do is not to build your own, but to plug into the existing, she said.

Even though ChatGPT by OpenAI quickly adopted by millions of users, Epstein said, it will take longer for businesses to adopt new AI technologies. Despite this, CEO s can 't afford to pay attention, she said.

She added that every industry sector function will be impacted at the end of the day.

In a speech at the Milken Institute Global Conference in May, Kutcher said artificial intelligence is an equity and inclusion play that is massive. We believe this is potentially the most significant technology we will experience since the advent of the internet, Mr. Kutcher said in a statement. The foundation model layer companies are defining the category and, in our opinion, they have the capacity to transform businesses and everyday life.