machine learning

also referred to as: ml

21 statements across 15 episodes · 9 bullish · 5 bearish · 15 people on the record · first statement Oct 19, 2016 by James Cham · across every show →

Everything said about machine learning, oldest first

Oct 19, 2016 negative
Insight
James Cham: Doomsday and labor replacement debates miss real AI opportunities
“The danger, though, is that a lot of the conversation focuses on what I would call either Theological questions about the end of the world, which is interesting, but I think oftentimes not relevant, or questions around straightforward labor replacement, and I …”
James Cham Oct 19, 2016 ▶ 6:11 20VC: Greenfield Opportunities For Machine Learning, Why Massive Corporates Finally See It's Potential & Why VC's Investment Decision Making Process Needs To Change with James Cham, Partner @ Bloomberg Beta
Oct 19, 2016 bearish
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Cham: Many corporate ML projects will fail due to poorly defined problems
“My own bet is that you'll see a lot of that happening over the next few years as the number of high profile projects inside corporations end up not yielding fruit in part because the problem was not defined well enough, or there was an assumption that If we ju…”
James Cham Oct 19, 2016 ▶ 10:32 20VC: Greenfield Opportunities For Machine Learning, Why Massive Corporates Finally See It's Potential & Why VC's Investment Decision Making Process Needs To Change with James Cham, Partner @ Bloomberg Beta
Oct 19, 2016 positive
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cham: Google's 15-year quiet ML work is yielding major opportunities
“The work that Google has been doing for, you know, kind of quietly for the last 15 years is now yielding an incredible amount of fruit and creates all these opportunities.”
James Cham Oct 19, 2016 ▶ 7:44 20VC: Greenfield Opportunities For Machine Learning, Why Massive Corporates Finally See It's Potential & Why VC's Investment Decision Making Process Needs To Change with James Cham, Partner @ Bloomberg Beta
Oct 19, 2016 neutral
Insight
James Cham: Machine learning should be viewed as smart statistics, not magic
“One way to think about machine learning is that it is basically Really, really smart statistics that, that ends, that end up constantly improving. And I think that as a frame for thinking about machine learning rather than machine learning as magic is, is, is …”
James Cham Oct 19, 2016 ▶ 22:27 20VC: Greenfield Opportunities For Machine Learning, Why Massive Corporates Finally See It's Potential & Why VC's Investment Decision Making Process Needs To Change with James Cham, Partner @ Bloomberg Beta
Jan 13, 2017
Insight
Nelson: Machine learning excels at repetitive, low-variance NLP tasks like scheduling
“So scheduling, luckily, is very much one of them. Repetitive, right? You want the variance in response to be low, ideally. So in our case, you know, you're talking about the same handful of variables on every occasion. You have the ability to kind of constrain…”
Maren Nelson Jan 13, 2017 ▶ 22:23 20VC: Building An AI Company For The Long Term? How Humans & Machine Learning Can Work Together? What Applications Are The Conversational Interface Best Suited To with Maran Nelson, Founder & CEO @ Clara Labs
Jan 13, 2017
Insight
Nelson: Pushing ML past 80-90% accuracy is the primary product challenge
“It's letting machine learning get past the kind of stuck in 80 to 90% right land that isn't good enough to be shipped as a user facing feature. Getting over that hump is, is a huge challenge.”
Maren Nelson Jan 13, 2017 ▶ 25:42 20VC: Building An AI Company For The Long Term? How Humans & Machine Learning Can Work Together? What Applications Are The Conversational Interface Best Suited To with Maran Nelson, Founder & CEO @ Clara Labs
Apr 7, 2017 bullish
Insight
Shedletsky: Machine learning's biggest manufacturing opportunity is full-line feedback control
“I think what's most exciting is what we're working on, which is creating closed loop feedback control around the manufacturing line, not just one specific process, as is kind of done today, but the entire line, the entire supply chain, and I think that's a sup…”
Anna Shedletsky Apr 7, 2017 ▶ 23:34 20VC: How To Create FOMO For Investors, How To Manage VC Conversations & A Repeatable Process For Learning New Things with Anna Shedletsky, Founder & CEO @ Instrumental.ai
Sep 18, 2017 positive
Disclosure
Index Ventures prefers applied AI over core machine learning algorithms
“I would generally say that we're probably more excited about the application of machine learning rather than the algorithms and the processes of doing machine learning itself.”
Mike Volpi Sep 18, 2017 ▶ 21:14 20VC: Index's Mike Volpi on Making The Move From Player To Coach, What It Takes To Build Generation Defining Brands & How Europe Really Stacks Up To The US Venture Market
Sep 20, 2017 bearish
Opinion
Core AI and machine learning in 2017 is mostly just nifty tricks
“So I really don't think it does, and I would also argue that what people consider a core AI ML today is a bunch of nifty tricks, and so you see lots of nifty demos, but in terms of actual production AI or ML actually out there, a lot of it's a little bit mecha…”
Jeremy Conrad Sep 20, 2017 ▶ 6:07 20VC: Why Core AI Is Largely A Bunch of Nifty Tricks, Why Consumer Electronics Is The Hardest Thing To Do In Venture & Why Silicon Valley Will Dominate The Future of Robotics with Jeremy Conrad, Partner @ Lemnos Labs
Sep 25, 2017 bullish
Prediction Not checkable as stated
An infrastructure revolution will power the next wave of consumer platforms
“These things are very cyclical, and again, this is overly simplistic, but I think we're in the midst of a infrastructure revolution. Maybe it's around ML, maybe it's around cloud, maybe it's some combination of these things that are coming together, and there …”
Eric Vishria Sep 25, 2017 ▶ 17:47 20VC: Benchmark's Eric Vishria on Why Career VCs Have Advantages Most Under Appreciate, Why We Are In An Infrastructure Renaissance & What Makes The Best VC Partnership
Sep 6, 2019 bullish
Opinion
Alex Wang: AI is underhyped and will rival the internet's impact
“So I actually have this belief that AI is either appropriately hyped or even maybe a bit under hyped in terms of its total impact. I think that it really is, if you were to think about technology in terms of these giant waves, I think there's the internet, the…”
Alex Wang Sep 6, 2019 ▶ 7:44 20VC: Scale Founder Alex Wang on How To Hire Incredible Talent Before You Are A Hot Company, Why Beating Competition Is Not As Clear Cut As Investors Believe & Why AI Is Under-Hyped Today In Terms of Total Impact
Jan 10, 2022 negative
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Carney: AI and NFTs Will Initially Increase Income Inequality
“So NFTs fall in this camp. Artificial intelligence, machine learning absolutely falls into that campus. Well, ultimately beneficial, but a period of time we're likely to increase inequality.”
Mark Carney Jan 10, 2022 ▶ 25:03 20VC: Former Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney on Why "Only the Niche Will Survive" in Crypto, How Governments and Central Banks Retain Control in a World of Decentralised Finance & The Winners and Losers in Crypto Exchanges and NFTs
Feb 22, 2023 bullish
Insight
Systrom: Machine learning is fundamentally changing social product consumption
“We think fundamentally machine learning is changing the way people consume social products, and we want to ride that wave and build the best social product using machine learning we can.”
Kevin Systrom Feb 22, 2023 ▶ 34:53 Kevin Systrom & Mike Krieger: The Founders of Instagram Reveal their New Project "Artifact" | E981 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Feb 22, 2023
Insight
Systrom: News is ideal for bootstrapping machine learning taste profiles quickly
“News is a great place to start because there's a ton of information out on the web. Machine learning is very, very good at analyzing it. And we can build portraits very, very quickly”
Kevin Systrom Feb 22, 2023 ▶ 24:57 Kevin Systrom & Mike Krieger: The Founders of Instagram Reveal their New Project "Artifact" | E981 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Feb 22, 2023
Insight
Systrom: Injecting margin randomness into decisions is optimal long-term
“Be a little bit random. And actually, machine learning would tell us that, which is that being a little random on the margin is actually optimal in the long run.”
Kevin Systrom Feb 22, 2023 ▶ 1:11:09 Kevin Systrom & Mike Krieger: The Founders of Instagram Reveal their New Project "Artifact" | E981 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jul 19, 2024 positive
Assertion Supported
Adams: Canva has integrated machine learning for over six years
“So, AI has really spiked in the last two years, but machine learning has been part of our product development process for six or seven years now.”
Cameron Adams Jul 19, 2024 ▶ 33:57 Cameron Adams: How Canva Builds Products: Lessons Learned, What Works? What Flopped? | E1179 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Aug 19, 2024 negative
Assertion Partly supported
Aidan Gomez: Curriculum learning has failed in machine learning
“What's funny is that curriculum learning has actually failed in machine learning. We don't really do curriculum learning. It's just throw the hardest material and the easiest material all at the same time and let the model figure it out.”
Aidan Gomez Aug 19, 2024 ▶ 4:09 Aidan Gomez: What No One Understands About Foundation Models | E1191 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Nov 3, 2025 bullish
Disclosure
Pineau admits she was wrong to be skeptical of neural networks
“I used to be quite skeptical that neural networks were necessarily the ultimate A solution to machine learning. I seem to be quite wrong on this one.”
Joelle Pineau Nov 3, 2025 ▶ 0:21 Cohere's Chief AI Officer, Joelle Pineau: Why Scaling Laws Will Continue & Future of Synthetic Data · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Dec 31, 2025 neutral
Insight
Fitzpatrick: Enterprise generative AI adoption mirrors machine learning, not SaaS
“So what's happening now is we're starting to realize that the Gen AI adoption paradigm in the enterprise works the same way that ML does.”
Matt Fitzpatrick Dec 31, 2025 ▶ 27:07 Matt Fitzpatrick: Who Wins the Data Labelling Race & Why Al Needs Forward-Deployed Engineers · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Apr 14, 2026 bullish
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Midha: AI infrastructure projects will continuously raise capital without end
“As long as the capabilities frontier keep moving and we want a healthy, independent ecosystem, we'll just keep Raising more capital. There's no end to that. I don't really, the day machine learning stops working as a systematic way to give humanity more capabi…”
Anjney Midha Apr 14, 2026 ▶ 58:53 The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Rejected It | The Four Bottlenecks in AI | Anj Midha · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Apr 27, 2026
Disclosure
AppLovin Scrapped Its Core Ad Tech Stack in 2022 to Rebuild Around AI
“Well, in 22 at the very bottom, we said, we're on an older version of machine learning. We're going to completely throw out our technology, rebuild it, and go to what is really cutting edge and current and in the field of recommendation systems.”
Adam Foroughi Apr 27, 2026 ▶ 12:28 AppLovin CEO: Why Founders Shouldn't Angel Invest & Why the Best Don't Need Mentorship · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
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