Union Square Ventures is a venture capital firm based in New York City.

OH at @usv : a new experiment where we invite an AI assistant to join our conversations and share some of the themes with the world.

Week of May 6th, 2024:

1) "The Unbundling of Platforms": There's a lot of talk around pulling apart the usual social media platform set-up, letting pieces of it exist outside of just one place, and sharing them all over.

2) "Data Science & Mining": We got into how data science has been groundbreaking in mining. The team thinks this could completely transform this old-school industry by boosting efficiency and making things more eco-friendly. Down the road, this could totally rewrite how the mining sector works and make it greener.

3) "Culinary Adventures": We chatted about restaurants turning some of their menu items into things you can pass on as gifts to other folks. This cool twist could change the whole dining scene, really spotlighting the power of sharing in building social bonds.

4) "AI's Potential to Uncover Hidden Structures": The conversation turned to how AI might spot hidden patterns in complex, multi-dimensional data—stuff we can't see. This could be a game-changer in areas like material science, helping us get the gist of complicated structures.

5) "Safe Harbors for Conversations": We dove into how it’s now pretty standard for companies to record their meetings and use AI to whip up transcripts for more people to see. This could really bump up productivity, but it’s also stirring up some big legal questions.

(cont.) Everyone agrees that lawmakers need to get on this fast, setting up rules that weigh the pros and cons and keep privacy and legal worries in check.

Release Notes 5.10.24

1/ We wanted to provide you with more useful information, so we made changes to the initial prompt to try and pull more thoughtful context and insights for each theme. This made the tweet slightly longer.

2/ The first two weeks sounded a bit soulless. So, this week we ran the results through a custom GPT to have them rewritten in @aweissman's voice (or an approximation of Andy’s voice). We think it’s a little over the top now, but we can continue tweaking the voice next week.

3/ No one believed us that a week’s worth of meetings wouldn’t produce any reference to Phish or Banh Mi. The truth is, we just weren’t asking our AI assistant to listen for it. This week we did. It didn’t get it completely right this time, but #3 is a direct result.

(cont.) The team's really into this because it could shake things up, making platform goodies available to everyone, stirring up some fresh ideas, and making the user experience better. Looking ahead, this might just flip the social media world on its head, pushing for more competition and new thinking.

What are a couple examples of what this might look like?