TechCrunch · AI · 2 ч назад
Insight Partners’ Devin Parekh on why the firm is diversifying while everyone else bets the farm on OpenAI and Anthropic
Insight Partners' Devin Parekh opens up about losing Legora to General Catalyst, why he's fine holding stakes in rival AI labs, and why — even as everyone else piles into OpenAI and Anthropic — his $90 billion firm is deliberately staying diversified.
Подробности
Devin Parekh has co-run the heavyweight investment firm Insight Partners for 26 years. Unlike many VCs who are loud on X and seem to live on podcasts, Parekh and Insight Partners tend to lay low.
In this sit-down with TechCrunch at its StrictlyVC event on Thursday night in New York, Parekh was refreshingly candid about some of the firm’s wins (it has led and co-led numerous rounds in Databricks, for example, and owns stakes in OpenAI and Anthropic); the deals it hasn’t won, including buzzy AI legal-tech company Legora; conflicts of interest in venture investing; and why Insight has stuck to a diversified strategy even as VCs have piled into the frontier AI labs.
There’s a researcher who’s become the big story of the week — do you think that concerns about AI risk amount to hysteria, or do you have real concerns?
Sure, there’s a risk some non-state actor gets access to an open-source model and creates a biological weapon. But there’s an even higher probability we get a massive decrease in the time it takes to develop new drugs and cure diseases. I’ll take that bet.
I’m on the board of NYU Langone — what AI is already doing with patient data is amazing. We can look at 50 million patient records and tell someone walking in for something unrelated that they have a 25% chance of a heart attack. Net-net, I think this is highly positive.