Venture capitalists erected their industry on the altar of profits, with perhaps a dash of rationalism. There is an element of faith needed to power their belief that taking flyers on early-stage companies can lead to billions—the Silicon Valley version of prosperity gospel. Still, it would be hard to argue that venture capital is a religious practice.
That seems to be changing. The tech industry is engaged in its own personal grail quest—the hunt for AGI, or artificial general intelligence—as engineers and investors become increasingly convinced they can mold their own version of God out of code. And amid the fervor, Peter Thiel is hosting a series of lectures in San Francisco on the Antichrist. The first was this week.
But does all tech-based spirituality need to be built around LLMs? I caught up with Somesh Dash, a general partner at the venture firm IVP, who has taken a different approach. Dash grew up Hindu, which he says he still practices in a more cultural sense, arguing for the need for community and service.
As he points out, the recent trend of technology has been the opposite. Rather than fostering connections between people, tech is increasingly focused on building machines that will interact with—and train—other machines. This seems to present a crossroads moment for humanity. It would be easy for us to retreat from each other, though Dash is optimistic that the rise of AI will showcase an important human strength that chatbots lack (or at least can only emulate): empathy. “That, I think, will persist and will never be fully replicated in any form of a machine or AI system,” he tells me.
