Venture capitalists erected their industry on the altar of profits, with perhaps a dash of rationalism. There is an element of faith needed to power their belief that taking flyers on early-stage companies can lead to billions—the Silicon Valley version of prosperity gospel. Still, it would be hard to argue that venture capital is a religious practice.
That seems to be changing. The tech industry is engaged in its own personal grail quest—the hunt for AGI, or artificial general intelligence—as engineers and investors become increasingly convinced they can mold their own version of God out of code. And amid the fervor, Peter Thiel is hosting a series of lectures in San Francisco on the Antichrist. The first was this week.
But does all tech-based spirituality need to be built around LLMs? I caught up with Somesh Dash, a general partner at the venture firm IVP, who has taken a different approach. Dash grew up Hindu, which he says he still practices in a more cultural sense, arguing for the need for community and service.
As he points out, the recent trend of technology has been the opposite. Rather than fostering connections between people, tech is increasingly focused on building machines that will interact with—and train—other machines. This seems to present a crossroads moment for humanity. It would be easy for us to retreat from each other, though Dash is optimistic that the rise of AI will showcase an important human strength that chatbots lack (or at least can only emulate): empathy. “That, I think, will persist and will never be fully replicated in any form of a machine or AI system,” he tells me.
If that seems too New Age-y to be practical, Dash points to his own experience to illustrate how he infused his investing approach with the ethos. After backing social platforms like Snap and Discord, he witnessed first-hand how initially innocuous forms of communication snowballed into something much more malicious, such as the white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville.
“What I was most excited by was this idea of collaboration, community, and fun,” Dash says, “But what I think I and everybody else was a bit naive to was how much of it, in the name of free speech, could be utilized without safeguards, to actually harm kids and lead to lots of problems.” Now, when Dash makes consumer investments, he makes sure there are trust and safety teams “deeply embedded in the psyche” of the companies.
More broadly, Dash argues that backing for-profit companies can still be an engine for societal change, such as his investment in the health tech company Abridge, which frees up doctors’ time by eliminating menial tasks. “By having the greatest impact, you’ll have likely a big financial return,” he says.
Of course, that’s not a new argument in Silicon Valley. It wasn’t too long ago that social media platforms like Facebook were touting their mission-driven approach to fostering community and change, with monster profits as a nice added bonus. It’s easy for companies to abandon any commitment to social good when the bottom line is at stake—just look at OpenAI’s push to change its nonprofit status.
But Dash still believes that more investors can infuse their strategy with empathy, which seems more fulfilling than funding their own personal AGI deities. “People are looking for meaning and leadership,” he tells me. “Every company I view, and every founder, has a responsibility, in my mind, to do things in a way that is safe and responsible.”
Leo Schwartz
X: @leomschwartz
Email: leo.schwartz@fortune.com
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