My guest today is Sarah Guo, founder and managing partner of Conviction, the venture firm she built to back AI-native companies from their earliest days. 

Sarah has become one of the most sought-after early-stage investors in AI, often the first check into the companies defining the frontier. 

In this conversation, we go inside that frontier: what the small group of people actually building AI believe right now, why some of the field's best researchers are wrestling with their own sense of purpose, and how close we are to robots in the home and a genuine acceleration in scientific discovery. 

At the center is Sarah's conviction that no single company will own the future of AI, and what that means for founders, investors, and anyone allocating their time and resources in a world moving this fast.

Our managing editor Dom Cooke wrote a profile of Sarah for Colossus, "Sarah's Wager," on how she built the firm closest to the AI frontier and why she's now betting against its biggest companies. 

Please enjoy this conversation with Sarah Guo.

For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. 

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Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant.

Timestamps:

(00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like the Best

(00:02:16) Investing Without a Backtest

(00:03:31) The AI Wager

(00:06:16) Building the Best Investment Firm

(00:08:37) Finding Non-Obvious AI Opportunities

(00:11:00) The Frontier AI Talent Race

(00:13:50) Compute as the Constraint

(00:19:10) The Future of Robotics

(00:22:15) Making Investment Decisions

(00:26:13) How Sarah Spends Her Time

(00:28:15) Raising a Venture Fund

(00:30:49) Lessons From Her Parents

(00:34:38) The Case for Open Source AI

(00:39:01) Abundant Intelligence Isn't Inevitable

(00:40:55) Compute Independence

(00:43:14) Debates Inside Conviction

(00:45:27) AI's Opportunity in Biology

(00:48:58) Why Conviction

(00:50:31) Finding Truth and Taking Risk

(00:54:16) What Changes in the Next Year

(00:56:46) The Kindest Thing