Radical Ventures leads $100M Series B in Twelve Labs, bets on Anthropic becoming a pharma company by 2030

requests and password resets. And let me also tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Our next guest is Rob Taves from Radical Ventures. He's been on the show once, twice. I think this is his third time. We'll bring him in. How you doing, Rob? Good to see you.

Thanks for having me. Great to be here. Excited for uh appearance number three.

Yes, the three repeat. Uh first, uh congratulations. You just announced a deal, right? You invested in a video company. Is this correct?

That's right. Yeah. Yesterday we announced 12 Labs's $und00 million series Bit. Hit the gong for for

Yeah, we gota get the 12 lab CEO.

Yeah, we really should. But I do want to ask you about that. Hit that gong. 100 million. This is a big round. Serious B video super intelligence. Um

nice nice gong.

Fantastic. Um but uh like like what is the what is the basic uh thesis for that investment? Because uh you know Google has YouTube, they have TPUs, they have Deep Mind, Demis, they got everything. It feels like a crazy from a basic perspective that you would want to invest in uh in a video model. At the same time, like I wanted to generate a video, I go into I go into uh v V3, V4. I'm on the pro plan. I generated like it was not 100% there. There was still a lot of work to be done to get the video that I really wanted out of it. And so like what is the opportunity? What's the broad thesis?

Incredible exposure. That was a a distracting performance. Yeah. Uh so 12 Labs. Yeah. So so we at Radical first invested in 12 Labs back in their seed round in 20121. Got it.

So we've been working closely with them for a while.

Success.

And um and I think one important one important thing that's uh good to know about 12 Labs is they're not focused on video generation the way like

Sora or VO or you know any of these startups are. They're focused on video intelligence and video understanding.

Okay. So kind of a like a a simplification you can think of is like control F for video being able to understand like exactly what's happening in your video. Uh understanding the concepts and the people and the dialogue and so forth and it's a very

so if someone made like a three-hour live stream every

randomly there's a guy waving two mallets around it could understand the context around that humor that I that I exhibited composure. Honestly, I had never thought about this before and now that you mention it, TVPN would be like the ideal customer for 12 Labs. We got to we got to get a media conversation going.

I can't wait. I can't wait. It'd be awesome. Um, but uh you more recently or or I guess less recently, but but more relevantly produced five more AI predictions for the year 2030. What's your process for putting these together? Uh, we were having a lot of fun with this. we were reading them because one prediction stands out as like way crazier than the rest. Uh and I'm interested to know if you know which one I'm thinking of. Yeah, number three shocked me. I I think it's number three. Uh but but what what's the over process thesis? Is 2030 too far out? Like I like how I like when you grade yourself after the year ends, but uh what's the overall process for working with Forbes?

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I I have a lot of fun putting these prediction articles together and they always generate a lot of interesting discussion and and often heated heated feedback from people that disagree. Um, but big picture, I I write a column in Forbes about AI. I've been writing it since 2019. Every year since 2020, at the end of the year, I write an article with 10 predictions for the coming year in AI. Um, and then the following December at the end of every year, I go back and grade all 10 of the predictions and say like which ones did I get right, which ones did I get wrong. I try to be a pretty like conservative grader. So if things are like on the border, I'll I'll uh, you know, I won't give myself credit for them. But honestly, in a lot of ways, I

Wow. terrible venture capitalist. You got to go back and in the CMS edit the ones that didn't come true, delete them, and then take an endless victory lap around the ones that you got right.

That's the way to do it.

Yeah.

Rookie rookie VC rookie here.

Yeah. Honestly though, I it is in some ways it's more enjoyable. I find the process of grading them more interesting because you see like you see how the world unfolded in ways that you didn't expect. I think the reality is that like no one can predict the future to say the obvious and so I know a lot of these are going to be wrong. So it's just a very interesting thought exercise. Um and I a couple things that I really strive for is one to make them really like verifiable or falsifiable. It's very concrete as opposed to just saying like agents will become more of a thing in the future like something that's like really like this company will acquire this company or like this you know this this CEO will be fired or something like that. Um, and then I I also try to make them non-obvious and provocative, like things that people wouldn't originally think of. Uh, so anyway, to your point, I usually do them every year. I just published one that was five predictions for 2030. Yep, which is obviously even more speculative thinking 5 years into the future, but it it was fun.

Okay, let's rip through them. First one is Anthropic will be one of the largest and most important life sciences companies in the world. We've obviously seen acquisitions. the models are just getting naturally better at bio drug development. At the same time, the big drug companies, they're not asleep at the wheel. They're spinning up their own labs, their own partnerships. Eli Liy has this Nvidia thing. And I'm interested in what how does that look? Because you could you could in in one way say uh Microsoft is one of the most important biotechnology companies in the world because a lot of tabular data stored in Excel. Um, we saw with Mythos that there were incredible cyber security capabilities. They ultimately had rolled out project glasswing, Palo Alto Networks, Nicash Aurora, you got Crowdstrike like they're still a cyber security company and then there's a very powerful model and there's a great partnership there. I would call anthropic an incredibly important piece of the cyber security supply chain. How does this what will this look like in 2030 for bio?

Yeah. Yeah. So you're right that horizontal technology providers like Anthropic or like Microsoft touch a a bunch of industries and are important to a bunch of industries. I think in the life sciences specifically anthropic will go way beyond that. I think that uh as I write in the article you know one of their incredible advantages is how super focused they are on particular areas and they the past few years they've been very focused on coding. uh they've excelled at coding, they built the best coding models and that's let them grow so quickly in the coding arena with cloud code and so forth. And the big question is like what's their next big focus area? And it it's becoming increasingly clear that next big focus area will be biology and the life sciences. It's something that Daario, the CEO, is personally very passionate about. He's written about it a lot. He he he's trained as a neuroscientist. Um so I think they're going I think they're going to go all in on life sciences. I don't think it's going to be like, you know, they're ser they're just serving the life sciences industry as one industry. Um, and honestly, even in the past like week or two since I wrote that article, I feel like it's it's started to uh snowball more. Like one big data point, one interesting data point was John Jumper, uh, who led the AlphaFold work at Deepmind and won the Nobel Prize alongside Demis just left deep mind to join Anthropic, which was an incredible get for them. uh and really brutal loss for Google. But I think that that's telling um and then just this literally two days ago or 3 days ago, Anthropic announced this new product that's like um clawed for for life sciences and they also announced they're actually going to start their own drug discovery program. Um and the way they the way they phrased it cuz to your point like all the big pharma companies are their customers today. The way they phrase it is like we're just going to focus on these like small orphan neglected drugs like they're not interesting to pharma companies anyway. Okay, we just want to do it so that we can learn firsthand about the drug discovery process. But I I think this is the first step and I I do think that over time Anthropic's ambitions are to to develop thermal drugs like essentially to eventually become a pharma company themselves. As crazy as that sounds today,

that is crazy. Talk about TSMC. It's not it's not uh impossible to imagine a scenario where they discover a novel virus and then offer the you know and then also make the vaccine and say uh this is the most dangerous virus of all time but uh don't worry just buy this

antivirus you know basically yeah that

which which I'm sure no one would have any

or maybe a new form of testosterone something maybe I could get behind

the the the performance-enhancing drugs uh industry maybe. Uh let's move on to TSMC and ASML. The monopolies will be broken. The semiconductor supply chain will be dramatically transformed. Is that Samsung? Is that Intel? Is that new startups? I know there are some companies that are trying to get into deeper in the supply chain. It feels like like we're now seeing uh you know chip design startups start to ship and there's more and more A6. Um but as you go deeper in the stack it feels like the timelines get longer. 2030 what's the nature of that uh monopoly breaking as you put it?

Yeah totally. Yeah. Today TSMC and ASML are so completely dominant in their respective fields. TSMC in fabricating chips, ASML and making lithography machines that people don't even think about the possibility of like what if there were other companies that could do what they do. And it is it's kind of insane how how monopolistic this industry is. And like that's not the that's not the ideal uh market structure for society long term. And there's so many incentives for competitors to try to disrupt them and and displace them. And so I do think that like as dominant as they are today, the seeds are germinating of their eventual decline and disruption. Um to your question, I think certainly there are a bunch of startups and we can talk about those. I think maybe the single most most interesting challenger which got announced a couple months ago and I feel like not enough people are talking about yet it will it will bubble to the surface more over time is Elon Musk's terapab

and I'm sure you guys have talked about this in one form or another on the show but in a nutshell Elon basically said like his re like it's very clear first principles reasoning he was like he calculated that his companies alone will need 50 times more chips than like all the chips that are being produced in the world today between the autonomous vehicles, the robots, like putting comput into space, etc. Uh, and so his reasoning was basically

unless we do Terraab, we won't have the chips.

Yep.

And we need the chips,

so we're going to do Terraab, which is like very very

Yeah. Yeah. And and and you just see it all over the place with like the Intel story. is also linked to Elon but uh the OpenAI Broadcom chip anthropic doing custom AS6 very obviously T TPU there's Apple's getting squeezed to TSMC there's so many different buyers that are ready for other options and the the key moment was just like getting everyone around the table to sort of form like that anti-TSMC alliance right so I was definitely I like it feels like 2030 that's feels very reasonable to me um all of these predictions number one Number two, I was nodding along. I was like, "This is a good take. I'm I'm in." And then you drop telepathy will be a wellestablished way to communicate by 2030. And I'm like, "Look, maybe, but we are at five people that have like do you so start with like what is your definition for telepathy?" Because then we got to get to Okay. We because then we got to get to like I assume millions of people installed like does Neuralink does Nolan does P 0 at Neurolink count as having te telep telepathy or telepathic powers or or are we still like pre zero to one on telepathy?

Yeah. So I in in every one of these prediction articles like there needs there needs to be at least one that everyone just thinks is totally ridiculous. Like if you're if you're predicting the future 5 years out, like it should sound a little ridiculous.

Uh so this one definitely was like I was pushing the envelope the most with this one.

In terms of like a definition of telepathy, I I tried to define it very simply, which is a human being able to communicate with other people using only their thoughts.

Um and so I do I would actually say that telepathy has been achieved today. I I wouldn't count Nolan. Okay.

Um because he can what he can do is control a cursor on a computer screen.

Um what I would define as telepathy is if you can think a thought and have your thoughts translated into words

uh that other people can read or hear. Uh and that actually has already been accomplished by BCIS. And I I wrote about in the article this this guy Eddie Chang who's like one of the leading BCI researchers in the world. He runs uh the neurosurgery department at UCSF. He's a longtime UCSF professor and his lab has demonstrated in recent years that you actually can implant uh BCI chips into people's brains and you can tell what they're trying to say and then you can turn you can turn the brain signals into actual words. Um that obviously has just been done in like small scale research uh clinical study context. It's obviously not like available commercially.

What's your prediction for when you chip your brain? Ooh,

I I am definitely down to get an invasive BCI. Like, I'm I'm open to it. I I probably will not be patient number one or number two, but yeah, I I would say sometime in the 2030s.

Well, we've haven't Have we not already had patient one or two? So, what what are you waiting for?

Yeah.

Come on. Come on. Let's get some skin in the game.

If you want the non-invasive option, we found a very very elegant solution. We can pull up this image of uh of uh the telepathy machine that we were laughing at earlier from the early days. Have you seen this?

Is that uh is that an MEG?

I think so. Yes, this is MEG.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's only the size of the Empire State Building.

You keep scrolling up. So, we got a ways to go. But, uh bold prediction. Bold prediction. I love it. uh uh that is the one that I would be most like seems uh a little close but there is there is a lot of development there and so it's interesting uh now number four AI consuming less energy why how is there no Jevans paradox on on the energy if we the models get better even if they get more uh energy efficient won't we just use them more like how how are you defining the energy consumption and how do you see it evolving

yeah you guys will be proud to know I referenced Jeff Jevans paradox in in the in the article obligatory. Um, yeah. So, as I as I write in the article, like important clarification, I'm not predicting that AI will consume less total energy in 2030 than it does today.

I'm predicting that for any given task, AI will consume like many orders of magnitude less like million potentially millions of orders of magnitude less energy. Sorry, millions of times less energy than it does currently. Um,

that's a lot. And but but because of Jeban's paradox like we I my view is that demand for intelligence is basically infinite across humanity. And so we will find we will find uses for all of the compute that we have. But I do think that we'll look back and think of the today like 2026 AI frontier models as like comically energy inefficient.

AI investor says demand for AI is infinite. It's also goes when Mark Andre said venture capitalist is the only job that cannot be automated.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Or demand for like that there there's no fun too big I think was another line from from somebody. Uh very very fun. Uh the last one I mean we could stay on the energy a little bit more but uh let's move on to number five. The fifth prediction for 2030. The question of whether AIs deserve legal rights and protections will be a mainstream societal and political debate. right now. I feel like if you threw that up to America, 99% of people would say, uh, no rights and also don't just don't do it at all. Just shut it down. So, how are we getting from how are we getting from turn it off, it's fake, it's hallucinatory, it's useless, it's going away, it's been forced on us is something hilarious I hear. Um, and how do we get from there to actually we need to give AI rights? Yeah, this is another one that I think should sound ridiculous when you first read it because like any good prediction should sound a little bit ridiculous looking into the future. Um, I do what I think the key driver of change will be is that I think like AI has started to penetrate in terms of everyday Americans, everyday citizens usage, but it's still very early. I think 5 years from now like everyone will interact in very extensive ways with AI and have close relationships with them than endure over time. We'll have AI employees, we'll have AI friends, we'll have AI doctors, we'll have AI girlfriends and boyfriends, which is kind of like a like a uh punchline today, but like that totally is going to be a mainstream thing. Um, and then I think an important additional thing is uh we won't AI will not just be in the digital world anymore. We will al humanoid robots will also start to proliferate and so these these things will have physical forms that look like us.

So I do think as they as the models get better and better as they become more and more sophisticated we will eventually start to feel like maybe these are things that they're not just objects that we we can like abuse and mistreat and treat as property like maybe they do maybe they do have something approaching sentience and and maybe we need to be thinking about how to treat them properly. And I again it sounds ridiculous today but it is worth noting that like all the frontier labs the people that are closest to these models and see what they can do anthropic and and Google deep mind in particular have started hiring people to work on like

model rights model sentience model consciousness etc. So, I do think it's going to I don't I definitely don't think it's going to be like, "Oh, yeah.

Just put the tokens in the bag, bro."

I mean, yeah, it will be interesting because uh I mean, we're going through this debate right now with the nationalization thing, which is that uh oh, if you want to make sure every American benefits from the value that's created these labs, like, well, these labs will be taxed and they will pay taxes and that will go into the broad population. And similarly, like should you should it be illegal to, you know, take a baseball bat to a a robot? Well, it's illegal to take a baseball bat to a Whimo right now and we don't need new laws for that. Uh yeah, not unless you own it. But oh, so so you're saying it would go further and even even uh even Demis could

I have I have one final prediction I want from you. When do you think a humanoid robot could beat Jon and Beer Pong? The funny thing is we played beer pong together, I'm sure.

Yeah, 100% today. No question. It It would crush both of us, Kugan.

No, no, no, no. You have zero. Not a general purpose robot. Not a general purpose one. Like you couldn't just go and get a unitry and just say play beer pong and it wins. But yes, I think if one of your portfolio companies had a week in the lab to do a fine tune and practice 100%. You guys talked to Pete Florence from Generalist recently that the generalist models will will be crushing beer pong soon.

For sure. For sure. Yeah, we agree.

I'll believe it when I see it. I think it's the last human act of any that will have any real significance. The last

the one job Hayes the one job

cuz the robot can't do play by the rules. It can't actually drink.

Yeah.

The liquid.

So disqualified.

Disqualified instantly.

Okay. Okay. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Yeah. Until they get a humanoid that can run on Kors Light, it's over for robots.

Be possible. Who knows? Uh, have a great