• AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton is warning that artificial intelligence could one day outsmart and control humanity. He says that a profit-driven AI arms race may be speeding up the danger.

Geoffrey Hinton, one of the “godfathers of AI,” is warning that the technology he helped create could take control of humans.

In an interview with CBS Saturday Morning, Hinton said AI had developed even faster than he had originally expected, citing the acceleration of AI agents as a particularly scary development.

He also predicted that artificial general intelligence, a theoretical AI system that possesses human-like cognitive abilities, could arrive in 10 years or less.

Hinton, who is one of the creators of key neural network technologies, has long warned that AI could pose an existential threat to humans.

In 2023, he left Google after becoming deeply concerned about the risks that artificial intelligence (AI) could pose to humanity. At the time, he said he wanted to speak openly about these dangers without being restricted by his ties to a major tech company.

He has previously warned that AI systems might one day become smarter than humans and act in ways we cannot control—potentially posing a threat to humanity itself.

In the interview, which aired late last week, Hinton doubled down on these concerns.

“If you consider the possibility that these things will get much smarter than us and then just take control away from us, just take over, the probability of that happening is very likely more than 1% and very likely less than 99%. Pretty much all the experts can agree on that,” he said.

“I’m in the unfortunate position of happening to agree with Elon Musk on this, which is that it’s sort of 10% to 20% chance that these things will take over,” he said, adding that it was still just a “wild guess.”

“The best way to understand it emotionally is we are like somebody who has this really cute tiger cub,” Hinton explained. “Unless you can be very sure that it’s not gonna want to kill you when it’s grown up, you should worry.”

He stressed that if the world continued to approach AI with a profit-driven mindset, there was a bigger likelihood of an AI takeover or bad actors co-opting the technology for dangerous means like mass surveillance.

“If you look at what the big companies are doing right now, they’re lobbying to get less AI regulation. There’s hardly any regulation as it is, but they want less,” Hinton said. “We have to have the public put pressure on governments to do something serious about it.”

Hinton is not the only AI godfather speaking out about the technology he helped to create. Yoshua Bengio, who won the Turing Award alongside Hinton in 2018, has also warned that AI could outsmart humans and potentially stage a takeover.  

Bengio has gone slightly further in warning about the dangers of AI, saying he feels guilt for helping to invent deep learning because it can now be misused in dangerous ways.

AI’s impact on the world

Despite his concerns, Hinton said there was also reason to be optimistic about the impact AI will have on the world, pointing to healthcare, drug development, and education as areas where AI could improve the human experience.

AI has already shown signs of reaching a human level of diagnostic skills, but falls short in other areas.

In education, the rise of AI tutors could help personalize education for students and offload some of teachers’ workloads. OpenAI has already partnered with several leading universities to give students and staff access to funding and “cutting-edge” AI tools.

Hinton said the rise of personalized AI tutors would be “bad news for universities but good news for people.”

He also changed his stance on job displacement from AI, saying he was now worried that people may lose their jobs because of the technology and warned it could exacerbate wealth disparity.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

As Insight Partners celebrates its 30th anniversary, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more influential venture firm that calls New York its home. Union Square Ventures created the blueprint for early-stage venture out of NYC, Tiger Global may earn the claim of infamy due to its 2021 spending spree, and Thrive Capital is quickly becoming a dynasty. But Insight, with its $90 billion of assets under management and army of software investors, has left an indelible footprint on New York—and the world’s—tech scene.

Part of Insight’s impact stems from its extensive alumni network of fund managers, which could fairly be characterized as a bona fide mafia—a venture equivalent to PayPal. In New York alone, there’s Elodie Dupuy of Full In Partners, Harley Miller of Left Lane Capital, Nnamdi Okike of 645 Ventures, and Bradley Twohig of Smash Capital, just to name a few, and I feel like I’m stumbling across someone new each week. 

I have a new article that details Insight’s unique, bottom-up approach to software investing, which helps explain its prolonged success. Where most venture firms build their sourcing around their partners, who typically come from extensive backgrounds in operating or investing, Insight instead relies on early-career analysts and associates, most straight out of college. 

It’s an approach that Insight’s cofounder, Jeff Horing, learned from private equity firms like Summit Partners and TA Associates, deciding to apply it to the burgeoning field of software investing. The idea is that, rather than relying on inbound deals or relationships, Insight could develop a framework for identifying success in untapped startups and then find them itself. And rather than hiring mid-career management consultants or bankers and retraining them to become investors, Insight decided to start hiring right out of college in the early 2000s, building a deep roster that has risen the ranks at the firm and set out on their own. 

A few weeks ago, I attended Insight’s annual sourcing summit—a kind of sales kickoff for its 75-odd analysts and associates, where it teaches them how to perfect cold outreach, among other skills. Horing, an enigmatic figure who seemed totally in his element addressing the crowd of aspiring investors, compared the practice to baseball. “Your edge [in investing] only comes from pitches that you look at,” he said. “You can be the best baseball hitter in the world, but if you don’t see the pitches, you’re not going to make the hits.” 

I spoke with 645’s Okike, who was part of one of Insight’s first analyst classes in 2002 and advanced through the firm before starting his own firm in 2013. He jokingly described the role as being a “glorified telemarketer.” Still, he said the approach of rigorous training and the application of specific metrics, such as web traffic, helped inspire his own firm, which applied the framework to earlier-stage investing, though he doesn’t hire right out of college. Left Lane’s Miller told me the same. “They’ve done a great service to the venture and growth ecosystem by just having the alumni network in the hundreds at this point,” Miller told me. 

Insight’s aggressive approach to sourcing and spending hasn’t always worked in its favor. Its $20 billion fund from the frothy days of 2021, characterized by rapid deployment and a disastrous investment into the crypto fiasco FTX, will likely remain a drag on the firm’s performance. But it continues to have success, including a recent multi-billion-dollar windfall from its bet on Wiz.  

And with Insight continuing its analyst program, bringing on around 14 analysts right out of college every year, its alumni network is only set to grow. “Sourcing is everything,” Horing told the new crop. 

You can read my full article on Insight here. 

Scoop…Though the crypto industry has long tried to shoehorn itself into the red-hot field of artificial intelligence, it hasn’t had much success. That could finally change with Nous Research, a decentralized AI startup that just closed a $50 million funding round, financed almost entirely by the crypto venture giant Paradigm. Nous says it has pioneered a new method for training open-source models using the blockchain. You can read all about it here. 

Leo Schwartz
X: @leomschwartz
Email: leo.schwartz@fortune.com

Submit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here.

Nina Ajemian curated the deals section of today’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Source link

In early April, Insight Partners’ cofounder and managing director Jeff Horing took the stage at his firm’s sourcing summit, a one-day annual event where Insight gathers its early-career analysts to train them on the firm’s secret formula for success. 

Horing is one of the more elusive figures in venture capital, keeping a low profile even as Insight has imprinted a $90 billion, multi-decade footprint on software investing. He was at ease, though, as he surveyed the 75-odd-person crowd of future investors, many of them straight out of college. In his 25-minute, ad-libbed address, Horing compared their job to baseball. “Your edge [in investing] only comes from pitches that you look at,” he said. “You can be the best baseball hitter in the world, but if you don’t see the pitches, you’re not going to make the hits.”

Founded in 1995, Insight is one of the most influential venture and private equity firms in tech. Helped by its deep roster of investors and outsize pool of capital, the New York-based firm has backed companies from Twitter to Wiz, growing its assets under management by 11x over the past decade and returning billions of dollars to investors in 2024 alone. 

Where Insight really stands out, though, is its model for finding investments, which is unique in the field of venture capital. Most firms have a top-down approach built around their partners, who are typically veteran operators or investors and source their own deals. Insight, in contrast, relies on its analyst program, hired straight out of college and trained in the art of cold calling and relationship building. Around 60% of the firm’s venture deals come from the sourcing team. 

Most of the analysts come into the firm as summer analysts when they are rising seniors in college, and then return after graduation. Last year, Insight received around 5,000 applications for the internship, hiring just 14 candidates, making the program an order of magnitude more competitive than Harvard. 

Looking out at the crowd, Horing described the assembled analysts as the “lifeblood of Insight.” 

“Sourcing is everything,” he added.  

Outbound pioneers

Horing started Insight with Jerry Murdock, now retired, several years before the early 2000s dot-com boom and bust, back when investing in B2B software companies was still a relative novelty. In his speech during Insight’s summit, Horing said the inspiration for Insight’s bottom-up approach came from two private equity firms, Summit Partners and TA Associates. The idea was that, rather than relying on inbound opportunities, Insight could develop a framework for measuring the future likelihood of success in startups—say, web traffic or revenue—and then find potential deals themselves. 

But in the early days of the firm, before Insight brought on analysts, Horing and Murdock would source all the deals themselves, often leafing through pages of software trade publications to look at which startups were hiring—and therefore growing. 

Until that point, it was almost unheard of for venture capital firms to hire out of college—that was more the domain of banks and consulting firms. But why wait to hire someone in their mid-20s after they’ve done a few years at McKinsey and retrain them to be an investor? Why not just hire them out of undergrad? 

Insight began to experiment with the idea around 2001, launching its first summer analyst program two years later. Ryan Hinkle, now a managing director, joined that inaugural internship class. “I jumped in with both feet at a moment in time where no analyst had been promoted in the history of Insight,” Hinkle told Fortune in an interview. “There was no path—it was this conviction and belief that what we’re doing is special.”

Today, Hinkle helps lead the analyst program. He worked with Insight’s executive vice president of marketing Nikki Parker to build out the sourcing summit—a kind of sales kickoff for early-career employees, now in its third year. He said the analyst-first approach is rooted in Insight’s rethinking of the traditional portfolio theory in venture, where most firms focus on a specific stage of investment, such as seed or growth, but across different sectors. Insight, instead, invests at different stages, but concentrated on software, and generally B2B software. 

“Sourcing became necessary because no one had heard that story before,” Hinkle told Fortune. “Initially, the sourcing program was the evangelical wing of the Insight experience, so that every founder that was relevant to our investment thesis knew we existed.” 

The program is now institutionalized. At the summit, senior Insight employees taught the gathered analysts and associates how to do cold outreach and meticulously track their communications and conversations—they estimate it takes around 9 touches to break through to a potential lead. Last year, Insight analysts made nearly 50,000 calls, sent 300,000 emails, and reached out to 65,000 companies. 

But it wasn’t always that way. Nnamdi Okike was a member of one of Insight’s first analyst classes in 2002. He spent a decade at the firm before starting his own venture firm, 645 Ventures, with Insight’s backing. He told Fortune that he remembers being seated at a desk with a computer and a phone when he started and being instructed to start making calls. 

“My first couple of years, I was a glorified telemarketer,” he joked. “And really not very glorified.” 

Okike said that Insight pioneered the practice of outbound sourcing by developing metrics for what it was looking for in a startup. Based on one—web traffic—he remembers sourcing Facebook back when it was called TheFacebook, even meeting with the original cofounder Eduardo Saverin. Unfortunately for Insight, the firm ultimately passed on the future Meta colossus because it was too early stage.  

Landing a job

There are more spots available in the analyst program than when Hinkle or Okike started, but it’s still highly competitive, with only around 14 out of 5,000 applicants hired every year. Hinkle said that anyone hired as a summer analyst, or intern, has a seat available after they graduate, though Insight will typically supplement with a few full-time hires. 

There is no set structure, though after they start work full-time in September, analysts are eligible for a promotion to associate two Memorial Days later. Hinkle says that out of around 500 analysts in the firm’s history, around half have become associates. They then get to decide what type of deals they want to focus on, such as earlier-stage investing or buyouts. “The third and fourth years tend to be the juiciest years of a person’s sourcing history,” Hinkle said. 

Harley Miller started as an analyst in 2010 before climbing the ranks to associate, senior associate, vice president, and principal. He left in 2019 to start his own venture firm, the consumer-focused Left Lane Capital, which Insight backed. “You were live, you were in it,” Miller said, recalling his early days at the firm. “You have to be able to deal with a little bit of ambiguity and amorphousness in that day-to-day and derive energy from that.” 

Hinkle said that when looking at applicants, Insight mostly looks at qualitative indicators: Do candidates have an enthusiasm for tech without necessarily being a coder, a sales mindset, and an entrepreneurial spirit? “You have to be a self-starter and be motivated that I’ve made 25 outreach attempts—I can go home, but I can also spend six minutes and do one more,” he told Fortune.  

Once hired, Hinkle said that Insight emphasizes apprentice-style live coaching, where analysts and associates are brought along to deal negotiations and board discussions to observe before being encouraged to speak up. “You just start to build your database of impressionability and a track record of being effective with CEOs and management teams,” he said.

30 years into Insight’s history, with software-focused venture capital now one of the most competitive asset classes, the firm is still exceptional for building its sourcing around 22-year-olds. “It works for us because for over two decades, that has been true,” said Hinkle. “I was recruited with that tagline, and I still recruit with that tagline.” 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com