Lux Capital’s Josh Wolfe on Investing in Robotics

Over the last year or so, probably every venture capitalist has gotten interested in artificial intelligence. So people are still figuring out what types of business models actually work, and who will end up making money in the space. Josh Wolfe has been at it for a long time. As a co-founder and managing partner at Lux Capital, he’s been involved in a number of deals in the space, and is already looking at what’s next after the wave of excitement for chatbots since ChatGPT was released. On this episode, we talk to Josh about what he’s excited about right now, including robotics, biotech, and maintenance. He tells us that just as ChatGPT opened everyone’s eyes to the power of chatbots, a similar moment is coming in the robotics space. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Key insights from the pod:
Use of generative AI so far — 4:10
Burgeoning failures in chatbots — 7:04
Robotics models versus text generation models — 9:24
Key man risk in robotics — 13:19
Open source and robotics — 17:11
Due diligence on AI — 21:02
Robotic arms — 23:41
Transfer learning for robots — 26:21
Other types of robotic learning — 28:02
Incumbents and developing robots — 33:18
Moats on chatbots — 35:50
Energy use and AI investing — 40:56
Expanding the context window — 44:15
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