at the end of the week Songyee Yoon runs around her South Korean campus as most of the students fall backwards from the bars. Around dinner time, she ran some programs on her college's supercomputer. He waited in his bedroom, sleepless, as the computer went through his program. “2 o'clock in the morning I woke up at 3 am and walked out of the campus because I was so eager to know the result,” she said.
It's weird that a writer on campus used her as the inspiration for a TV show about college.
“The goal is not to create characters based on real characters,” she said. But when the author talks to the students, “He hears about this strange girl.
Thus, Yoon became the inspiration behind “Genius Girl.” Korean TV show KAIST.
Today, If the writers were to show Yoon's life, It's more like HBO's “Silicon Valley.” After graduating with a PhD from MIT, She became president of South Korean video game software developer NCSoft, which today announced Principal Venture Partners (PVP), a $100 million round of funding for AI startups. The fund will write early-stage checks ranging from $100,000 to “single-digit millions” and has already invested in six startups, including a model maker. Liquid AI
Her colleagues include an AI academic: well-known researcher Daniela Rus, whom Yoon met through Yoon's work on the board of MIT; Dawn Song is a MacArthur Fellow. Widely published. computer security; AGI House is titled to attract founder Jeremy Nixon and the AI hacking house. Young talented founders.
PVP is one of the few investment firms with a strong academic bench — something Yoon sees as an advantage as the firm tries to source deals.
“I think founders need to have a diverse group of advisors who can bring different perspectives,” she said. Yoon believes the PVP team's research backgrounds give them a deep understanding of how AI “evolves over time” and where it's headed.
We are betting that the next generation of Unicorns will be AI-native companies. This means they are built with jerry-rigged AI on the platform, not with AI applications from the start. Yoon isn't worried that he's missed the boat on investing in foundational companies like OpenAI or Anthropic. “If you look at the top 10 NASDAQ companies; “More than half are digital-native companies that started after the introduction of broadband,” she said.
Yoon said the company will invest in various sectors. She is particularly excited about AI's potential to transform the insurance industry. That means whether it's using AI to help people understand their plans or leveraging insurance companies specializing in autonomous robots.
Yoon has also written about the issue of AI's potential to exacerbate cultural colonialism. last year. She cites the example of big model makers saying, “Oh. This AI is trained using all the data in the world,” he proclaimed.
“But if you think about it, 35% of the world's population doesn't even have access to broadband,” Yoon said. “They cannot be the authors of the data used for this AI training. So it is impossible to reflect these kinds of cultures and views.”
Along with three female colleagues, she admits it's a complex issue that can only be solved by continuing conversations about AI-focused funding and increasing representation across the industry.
“It's not necessarily a women's fund, but we're seeing a lot of female founders come to us because they know we're going to be more empathetic,” Yoon said. “We get to see their true power and their true superpower.”