Former Y Combinator president Geoff Ralston launches new AI ‘safety’ fund
Geoff Ralston, known in the startup community for his years at Y Combinator, is back in the formal investment ring, he announced Thursday.
His new fund is called SAFE Artificial Intelligence Fund of Saif, which is both a explanation for his statement and a pun.
Ralston is specifically looking for startups that improve “AI safety, security and responsible implementation”, such as those of his fund website describes. He is planning to write $ 100,000 checks as a safe, “meaning to play,” he says with a $ 10 million limit. A safe is of course the investing now/price later pre-seed investment instrument developed by Y Combinator (it stands for simple agreement for future equity).
Although most VCs nowadays want to invest in AI startups, Ralston’s Take’s is a bit more focused on the idea of safe AI, although he admits that the concept is a bit wide.
“The vast majority of AI projects in today’s world use the technology to solve problems or to create efficiency or create new possibilities. They are not necessarily intrinsically unsafe, but safety is not their primary care,” Ralston tells WAN. “I plan to finance startups whose primary objective is safe – as I have (very broad) defined.”
That list contains startups aimed at improving the safety of AI, such as those that clarify the decision-making process of an AI or AI safety benchmark AI. It includes products that protect intellectual property, which ensure that an AI meets compliance requirements, combat disinformation and detecting attacks generated by AI. He also wants to invest in functional AI tools with built-in safety in mind, such as better AI forecast tools and AI-Intenschelde business negotiating tools that do not reveal commercial secrets to outsiders.
This may sound like a list of AI startups that strive for many VCs, but there are areas that Ralston says he won’t go back. An example is completely autonomous weapons.
“There are certainly use of AI that (will) be unsafe: use the technology to make organic weapons, manage conventional weapons without a person in the loop, etc.,” he explained.
In fact, he would like to finance ‘weapon safety systems’ that can detect or prevent attacks from AI weapons.
This is an interesting opponent of many of the contemporary Defense Tech founders and VCs. As WAN has previously reported, some people who build AI weapons are increasingly the idea that such weapons would work better without a human.
Yet all things AI nowadays are a busy field for VCs. That is where Ralston hopes that his YC connections can give him an advantage. Ralston left YC in 2022, after three years as president (succeeded by Garry Tan) and more than ten years as an adviser.
Ralston is planning to offer mentoring of the kind he did at the legendary startup accelerator and has promised to coach them by applying for YC. And he offers to help them tap his considerable investor network.
Ralston refused to say how big this fund is, how many startups he intends to support, or who are LP -Backers.
