The extent to which the pioneering venture capitalist Sarah Guo believes in the promise of AI can be summed up in a stunning sentence: “Yes, I think we can solve disease.” That is to say, the 37-year-old isn’t simply one of her generation’s savviest and most forward-thinking investors—she’s a true believer.There is a reason, after all, that Guo’s four-year-old AI investment firm is called Conviction. She left her enviable perch at the venerated VC firm Greylock, where she was the youngest-ever general partner, in 2022 to launch Conviction. Once ChatGPT proved the commercial viability of AI, Guo began seeding a murderer’s row of companies in a vast spread of areas. There’s the legal firm Harvey, the medical company OpenEvidence, the coding startup Cognition, and the AI infrastructure platform Baseten, European AI lab Mistral, and chatbot builder Sierra. All are multibillion-dollar concerns today.By funding a range of promising startups, Guo sees herself as a buffer against the prospect that AI ends up controlled by a few billionaires—and that its output improves society at large. “The greatest mistake would be to say we are afraid so we’re not going to leverage it, learn about it, even regulate it,” she says. “It’s a global phenomenon with the opportunity to empower people and to solve a lot of problems. I would not invest in all of these companies if I didn’t believe the outcomes were good.”And there’s still plenty more to fund. “I think we’re in maybe the third inning of this revolution,” she says. “We’re at the beginning.”