Vinod Khosla on auto-formalization as the next AI frontier — and his investment in Pramaana Labs

Speaker 2: He's looking quizzical. He's having fun. Well, let's bring in our next guest, Vinod Khosla, the founder and managing director of Khosla Ventures. Vinod, thank you so much for taking the time. How are you doing?

Speaker 10: I'm doing great. Great to be here.

Speaker 2: Fantastic to have you. I want to kick it off with some of the recent deal making that you've been doing. Your outlook on artificial intelligence is obviously front and center. But what has been the most recent fundraise that you've done? Why did it get you excited?

Speaker 10: Well, obviously, there's a lot hits on yesterday or today. We are working a lot and doing a lot of new things That I'm pretty excited about is a company like Pramana. Mhmm. But more importantly, the broad category of order formalization, which isn't talked about much. But humans aren't very good at talking to AI in driving what they precisely want. And that's where auto formalization becomes important, and companies like Fana become very important.

Speaker 2: How did you get into auto formalization? And I guess the big better question is, as an investor, you have to consider, is auto formalization on the direct path for the other labs? How do you think about competition in this area? Investors are going back and forth, and it's been fascinating to see things that appear to be directly in the path of the big labs. They're still growing revenues 2,000,000,003 billion $4,000,000,000 We're seeing $60,000,000,000 acquisitions. Everything seems to be going well up and down the stack. But why is there a particularly big opportunity right now?

Speaker 10: Well, the labs, they will do more and more over time, but I still see the opposite being very broad for venture capital and fund nodes. In terms of nodes are coming up with great ideas.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 10: One of example looks at the tag board and says it's not very precise because it's written by humans. You can make it into a machine checkable language. Mhmm. Mathematicians turn all their problems in this specific language. It is hard for humans to understand. Auto formalization allows that kind of formalization so computers can operate on it precisely, not problemistically. And that's a really important thing. Mhmm. If you look at today's world, AI systems have been awesome and the rate of capability development would be awesome. But they have some pretty big gaping holes. They still hallucinate. I don't think hallucination is going away anytime soon. Yeah. So the reliability is low. Humans aren't great at specifying what they want, the specification problem. Mhmm. And then verification of what are you getting the right answers? Or are they hallucinate? Those are all large interesting problems which are open for entrepreneurs. Things can be built in certain domains

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 10: Where you build a lot of value and a lot of capability that the general models don't do.

Speaker 2: How are you thinking about applications of this technology in particular? It's been so hard to predict the original GPT. No one was really expecting a knowledge retrieval service. It just sort of went viral when ChatGPT launched. Coding agents, some people had predicted those, but it was sort of an unexpected emergent capability. Do you expect that auto formalization as the next critical frontier of AI just makes all the existing applications better? Or is it actually going to unlock new applications?

Speaker 10: I think it will allow humans to use AI where it wasn't previously possible. Mhmm. If you want to know what your bank account is, you can't have a hallucination. If you have a medical problem, you can't have a hallucination. So auto formalization will significantly enhance existing models in domains like tax law. You know, you can have lots of tax startups, but they can't formalize.

Speaker 2: If you

Speaker 10: take tax law, it's a very specific thing. And that's an area Pramana is initially to say, can you formalize the tax code so computers can work on it precisely and not be subject to probabilistic answers or likely answers? So it's very, very important in certain domains to have precision, reliability, verification, and that's where auto formalization can significantly enhance the applications and still leverage all the power of LLabs.

Speaker 2: Mhmm. Well, we're excited to talk to the founder of Pramana in just a minute. We've been having a few technical errors, we will end this here and hopefully we can have you back on the show soon to go deeper. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today, Vinod. It's been

Speaker 1: a Yeah. Thanks for jumping on. It's an honor.

Speaker 2: Have a great rest of your day.

Speaker 10: Great to be here. Cheers.

Speaker 2: Thank you. Goodbye. Let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service.

Speaker 1: Have Unfortunate technical difficulties. I couldn't really hear anything personally. No. But fortunately, the founder Is coming on. Discussing. He's just

Speaker 2: a few minutes.

Speaker 1: Right now. So we're gonna hear it again and again. Sorry about that.

Speaker 2: Nikesh Arora is on the timeline. Quote tweeting, I like that he's you don't think of him as like a big poster. Obviously, 73

Speaker 1: followers posters.

Speaker 2: He's successful. But he said, congratulating prime minister Narendra Modi on becoming India's longest serving elected prime minister. April of leadership earned the trust earned through the trust of 1,400,000,000 people across three democratic mandates from lifting 250,000,000 people out of poverty to making India the world's fastest growing major economy. PM Modi's tenure has been nothing short of transformational. Look forward to a continued US India partnership. Love that. Yo Gesh says, bro went from stopping global ransomware attacks at Palo Alto Networks to doing math calculations on PM Modi's calendar milestones like it's his final exam.

Speaker 1: Just in quotes too. It's great. And Nick actually appreciates it.

Speaker 2: There's been debate over beverage media. Have you seen this? This is a very I saw this eight likes but I think this is an interesting post worth discussing. So Vassa, I don't know exactly this account before but beverage media doesn't have the good nuts to call out celebrity brands objectively because the economy is fanboy of fanboy ing in CPG. Celebrity founders sell tickets to events but they don't always move the industry forward. I think he's probably subtly subtweeting the maybe Tom Brady launch of the of the the nuts, which is a reference to the coconut water brand that's Tom Brady launched. But this does happen all the time. There's a lot of celebrity brands. We've had some celebrities on the show to talk about their brands. It's fun. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. That's the fun part about interviewing a celebrity about their brand. You kind of get to clock it and be like, no. Like, know, this person's really onto something.

Speaker 1: I think Wyatt they they named the brand that is they ran fully ran out of other names. Oh, really? Literally the last possible name that they could choose.

Speaker 2: We're not getting an invite. Tom Brady will not be coming to our event and selling tickets. But it's interesting because yeah, BevNet reports on CPG brands. They're one of the insider media, sort of the tech crunch of CPG, at least in beverages. They also have Nosh for food. And there's a number of other CPG media and critics. But if you got to have one of those celebrity founders at your event to sell tickets, you get into this weird, you get sort of audience captured, I don't know, celeb captured. You just get raptured aura of the celebrities and you have to stay out till two a. M. Partying with them. It's craziness out there. But beverage media, I think it's just interesting in the backdrop of more a more and more celebrity brands. Although it does feel like we're at peak celebrity brand at this point. And I feel like the more modern celebrity strategy is just invest in companies that have a number of good VCs on the cap table. Be happy with that. You can still

Speaker 1: Disagree.

Speaker 2: Or a farm. Yeah. Okay. Disagree. Explain.

Speaker 1: Think celebrity celebrity brands have always been a thing. They're just way more in your face because now celebrities have their own channels that they can communicate.

Speaker 2: I'd say they're less in my face. I I say we're on the decline. Top celebrity brand.

Speaker 1: No. I'm quoting John Feeney. No. I think it's just getting it's getting easier and easier to start a business. I think you'll see more celebrity brands. I don't necessarily think you'll see more breakout

Speaker 2: brands. Yeah. Okay. So your claim is is quantity is increasing. I think

Speaker 1: it's probably getting harder.

Speaker 2: Quality is decreasing.

Speaker 1: Quality More distribution. Yeah. Yeah. Greater greater I mean, there's gonna be some breakout celebrity brands. Yep. There's gonna be big exits. Yep. There's gonna be as many failures as ever. Right? I mean, my favorite example was like Travis Scott, a few years ago, launched a RTD, like, canned cocktail thing. Shut down, I think, within a year. Like Yeah. Maybe maybe maybe more. And so I I think you're just gonna see more and more and more.

Speaker 2: Would you put the Johnny Knoxville Neo Cloud in the in the bucket of celebrity brands?

Speaker 1: That is something I would like to see. Less Yeah.

Speaker 10: Less C

Speaker 2: K Y two k.

Speaker 1: Less beverage, more neo clouds.

Speaker 2: More

Speaker 1: neo. I wanna see Johnny Knoxville levered up.

Speaker 6: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Right? Yeah. I wanna see him

Speaker 2: Racking GPUs himself.

Speaker 7: Yeah. I want

Speaker 2: him like operationally involved too.

Speaker 1: Not just like Not just a pretty face.

Speaker 2: Endorsement.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Not just a pretty face. So anyways, I think more on the horizon and it's not you know, a lot of I I don't know. I feel like some people don't don't like this but I think it's fine.