AI Camp: Augment

Betaworks is looking for the next generation of companies building in the AI space for our upcoming camp. AI Camp: Augment invests in companies using applied machine learning and generative AI to make tools that augment humans’ cognitive, creative, and collaborative activities. If you’re building a company and resonate with the below, AI Camp: Augment is for you.

AI Camp: Augment will be a three-month program here at Betaworks in NYC, where we will invest $500,000 and work closely with 8–10 pre-seed/seed companies to provide 1-on-1 mentorship time; tailored programming, events, and activities; collaborative opportunities with other cohort companies and builders in our network, and a total investment of $500k from Betaworks and our friends at Greycroft, Differential VC, and Mozilla Ventures. Betaworks’ portfolio company Hugging Face will also be providing cohort companies with early feature and accelerated compute access. AI Camp: Augment will run from 6/19/23–9/15/23 and culminate with a Demo Day, where companies can showcase their work to potential customers, investors, and partners. You can apply here .

Our seventh ML/AI Camp, Let’s start at the beginning …

Betaworks has been a foundational part of the NYC tech ecosystem for the last 15 years — first, as an incubator of brands you know and love like Giphy, Tweetdeck, Bit.ly, and Dots, and more recently as a pre-seed and seed stage investor in companies like HuggingFace and Stability AI, among many others.

We believe in thesis-based investing, and have spent the last seven years honing and iterating on our thesis around artificial intelligence. A significant amount of learning in that space came from Camp. We started with BotCamp (HuggingFace) in 2016 and have done seven other camps since (including VoiceCamp, VisionCamp, AudioCamp, SynthCamp, and more), most of which focus on a single mode of applied machine learning. And learn, we did!

Camp?

Camp is like an accelerator, but not. Rather than writing a small check into dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of companies across a wide variety of categories, we look at the evolution of technology and bet on a cohort of companies that are creating and/or defining a brand new category. We bring these founders together to learn from one another as they embark into uncharted territory, and tap them into our network of portfolio founders, tech big brains and, of course, investors.

In the case of AI Camp: Augment, we (along with many others) are looking at the rise in foundational models, and the opportunity they provide to give us new tools with which to build products that address timeless and universal needs — the need to think, the need to create, the need to share and communicate. Generative AI stands to proliferate more content — text, imagery, video, games, music, and media we haven’t even imagined yet — than ever before.

Entrepreneurs have the opportunity to leverage this technology, in this specific moment of disruption, to democratize creation, collaboration and cognition in unique ways, and give superpowers to existing and emerging activities that augment people’s ability to work, play, and interact with one another. Unlocking that will also require fresh thinking around attribution, discovery, and revenue models.

We’ve learned a lot from our investments in foundational models like Stability, infrastructure like Hugging Face (BotCamp ‘16), and countless application layer products like Maestro (THINKCamp ‘22), Resemble (AudioCamp ‘19), Hidden Door, and more.

So why call it AI Camp: Augment?

The leaps in AI technology have pushed us beyond single mode input and output toward something more broad, that better aligns with human cognition. So, while the first Camps out of betaworks were focused on a single mode of machine learning, like Chat, Voice, and Vision, the next generation of Camps will likely be multimodal. Thus, AI Camp.

But what do you mean by Augment?

We are interested in all facets of AI, but for this Camp, we are specifically interested in the products that augment the way humans behave, create, play, work, and think. Products that superpower humans, rather than replace them. That is the core thesis of this Camp.

So what are the attributes you’re looking for in AI Camp: Augment?

These technologies and the tools that use them will affect every modality of human consumption (image, text, audio, video, etc.) and every form of human production (cognitive work, creative play, collaborative and social activity). Furthermore, these technologies will not only help us replace certain behavior, but more importantly allow us to augment existing behavior, and perhaps even create new behaviors altogether. Specifically, we believe the most valuable software of the AI age will have at least some of the following attributes:

• Human First & Positive Sum: Trying to replicate human action and cognition is a large but finite opportunity; trying to supplement human behavior (or create entirely new ones) is an infinite and unconstrained opportunity. We’re more interested in apps that give users superpowers over the things they inherently want to do and leverage the distinctive capabilities of foundation models to augment human capacity intensely in a narrow domain, or for surprising, unusual, non-obvious, augmentations. A great example is Re:Collect, which allows users to effortlessly connect and retrieve relevant information they’ve seen from across the web for their own creative ideation.
• Semantic Reasoning: The real unlock with LLMs is that they are large enough to be able to learn semantic structure. As such, products that make deliberate use of semantic reasoning (summarization, synthesis, argumentation, intonation, etc.) are far more interesting to us than ones that purely simulate syntactic understanding. For example, Maestro helps teams synthesize what the teams’ individual and collective goals are and minimize miscommunication errors.
• Interactivity: Creativity is not just drafting. It’s editing. The conversational and interactive UIs that power these models have a long way to go in terms of using semantic understanding to retain context, personalize and get better at specific tasks. We’re interested in companies that are thinking about UIs that focus on the context of interactions over time, like Second Voice, an LLM-based representation of your own inner voice, built to help you process your emotions and feelings via dialogue.
• Probabilistic (No One Right Answer): At their core, these models are probabilistic — they cannot create outputs with certainty. As such, they are ideally suited for usage where there isn’t necessarily a right answer. For example, with most search queries people are looking for deterministic answers. Regardless of the model/product’s overall fidelity rate, there will always be misses (false positives and negatives), and the cost of those misses can be catastrophic to users (imagine a car that makes a wrong turn or a medical chatbot that provides a mis-diagnosis). We’re interested in products and activities that are aware of what fidelity their tools need to provide and how to achieve it. A great example here is Wand, which allows artists to create probabilistic versions of some original material — imagine a game designer who can create NPC designs with as much detail as the Main Character.
• Multimodality: There are a lot of products that are refining unimodal creation (text, image, audio, video, etc), but human synthesis is always multimodal. Valuable apps will allow us to work with multimodal outputs by chaining different models together, or even using models trained across modalities and types of content. In addition, we think new models will make use of new atomic data structures, graphs, and more. With more than one modality, you’re increasing the surface area of possible use cases, like Fermat, which gives generative toolkits for brainstorming to creative teams that work across modalities, like product designers, storyboard artists, and marketers.
• Attribution: Creativity is collaborative. Startups focusing on the infrastructure required to allow for collaboration, alongside these superpower tools, will be set up for a future at scale, where creators can truly make a living off of these platforms. A great example is Never Before Heard Sounds, a new cloud based audio workstation that allows anybody to make high quality music without any prior experience, while also cleanly attributing the inspiring original artists of any work.
• Proximity to Data: High value information is a force multiplier to the capabilities of foundation models. In their current state, many problems, design patterns, and best practices related to directing the output of models to be grounded in domain specific data remain unresolved. Data centric and data aware applications of augmentative AI bridge siloed knowledge to end user utility. We want to work with companies that are innovating in information retrieval and traversal, especially if you have a plan to activate existing and dormant pools of knowledge.
• Technical Defensibility Across the Stack : We think value will exist across applications, middleware, and open & closed source foundational models.Every developer has received access to these transformative models, including your competitors. We’re looking for companies that have put immense thought into not only what allows their product to supercede incumbents, but also maintain an edge over future products down the line. In this context, that could mean running/training your own foundational model, fine-tuning an existing model based on contextual inputs, or using RLHF methods to improve your product. We are agnostic to the architecture of your product but have a preference for technical depth.

From prior Camp companies like Hugging Face, Resemble, Never Before Heard Sounds; co-investors like Greycroft, Differential, Mozilla Ventures, Lux, BLoomberg Beta, KPCB and more; prior speakers like Clem Delangue, Mike Mignano, Packy McCormick, Linus Lee; we’ve been incredibly fortunate to work with some of the best entrepreneurs and investors in AI — we’re looking forward to the next wave of entrepreneurs to join the community!

If this speaks to you apply right here.