20VC: Why Data Size Matters More Than Model Size, Why The Google Employee Was Wrong; OpenAI and Google Have the Advantage, Why Open Source is Not Going to Win and The Main Regulation Risks Facing AI with Douwe Kiela, Co-Founder @ Contextual AI

Douwe Kiela is the CEO of Contextual AI, building the contextual language model to power the future of businesses. Last month Contextual closed a $20M funding round including Bain Capital, Sarah Guo, Elad Gil and 20VC. He is also an Adjunct Professor in Symbolic Systems at Stanford University. Previously, he was the Head of Research at Hugging Face, and before that a Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research.

In Today’s Episode with Douwe Kiela We Discuss:

1. Founding a Foundational Model Company in 2023:

• How did Douwe make his way into the world of AI and ML over a decade ago?

• What are some of his biggest lessons from his time working with Yann LeCun and Meta?

• How does Douwe’s background in philosophy help him in AI today?

2. Foundational Model Providers: Challenges and Alternatives:

• What are the biggest problems with the existing foundational data models?

• Will there be one to rule them all? How does the landscape play out?

• Why does Douwe believe OpenAI’s data acquisition strategy has been the best?

3. Data Models: Size and Structure:

• Why does Douwe believe it is naive to think the open approach will beat the closed approach?

• What are the biggest downsides to the open approach?

• Does the size of data model matter today? What matters more?

• How important is access to proprietary data? Are VCs naive to turn down founders due to a lack of access to proprietary data?

4. Regulation and the World Around Us:

• How does Douwe expect the regulatory landscape to play out around AI?

• Why is Europe the worst when it comes to regulation? Will this be different this time?

• How does Douwe analyse Elon’s petition to pause the development of AI for 6 months?

• Do founders building AI companies have to be in the valley?