Greymatter

As anyone who has experimented with the latest artificial intelligence tools that generate human-like responses to text, every interaction with technology is increasingly becoming a conversation. Beyond pre-programmed responses based on specific key words, interacting with AI trained on large language models is beginning to feel like a natural back and forth dialogue.

"In the future, I think there will be an ever-present relationship that you have with an AI that helps you to make sense of the world around you," says Inflection AI CEO and co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, whose company recently released Pi, or "personal AI", designed to listen, talk, and provide support like a companion.

Listen to Suleyman and his Inflection co-founder Reid Hoffman on the Greymatter podcast discuss how they approached building the "AI sidekick" that is Pi, and share their vision for the future of the technology.

You can read the transcript of this conversation here: https://greylock.com/greymatter/inflectionai-the-ai-friend-zone/

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As Airbnb makes its public debut, Greylock general partner Reid Hoffman looks back on the past decade of working with the company. Greylock led Airbnb's Series A in 2010. Hoffman initially heard the company described as "renting couches," so he passed at the first opportunity to invest. But later conversations with early investors prompted Hoffman to meet with Airbnb founders Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk. Within two minutes, he decided to partner with the company.

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Greylock general partner and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman looks back on the career of his friend and fellow entrepreneur Jeff Bezos. Recently, Bezos announced that he would be stepping down as CEO of Amazon, the iconic blitzscaling company that he has led since 1994.

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Engaging with customers is one of the most difficult challenges for most companies. With the growing number of ways consumers interact with brands — from phone calls, to texting, to social media messaging — it’s becoming increasingly hard for companies to aggregate interactions into useful information. Even today, customer service products focus on individual communication channels and treat customers as case numbers or tickets. The founders of Gladly think this standard needs to change. They are reimagining the business/consumer relationship by centralizing all communications and making the atomic unit of their product what it should be: the customer. Gladly CEO Joseph Ansanelli and VP of Engineering Michael Wolfe have a deep history of successful ventures together. The two first worked with each other at Kana, an early customer service software company that helped managed email and web based communications. The pair later founded Vontu, a data loss prevention software that was later acquired by Symantec. In 2015, they got the band back together and incubated Gladly at Greylock with mission to change how large enterprises interact with their many customers. In the latest episode of Greymatter, Joseph and Michael sit down with Greylock partner and Gladly board member, Jerry Chen. The founders share their vision for reinventing customer service, identifying spaces ripe for disruption, and what it takes to become the industry standard. Below are a few key takeaways from the discussion.

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Innovation happens fast in the cloud-first era of today. Yet the tools and processes that allow software developers to ensure their products are secure were designed for a different era. apiiro was formed to reinvent the secure software development life cycle, by creating a unified platform that allows developers to embed security at the earliest stages. Idan Plotnik, CEO and co-founder of apiiro, joins Greylock general partner Saam Motamedi and Imperva CISO Samir Sherif to discuss the new challenges of software development and security.

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