Artificial Intelligence

The importance of voice assistants in the screenless future is hard to overestimate. We see speech-driven user interfaces as a key component of the next computing paradigm, so it’s helpful to understand empirically where each platform stands today. In February, we compared…

Amazon’s Q1 earnings call last night sounded somewhat similar to Google’s call just an hour earlier, highlighting a lot of the same AI and machine learning investment themes.  Jeff Bezos discussed increasing leverage of AI and machine learning to drive operational efficiencies…

Google CEO Sundar Pichai used tonight’s Q1 call to double-down on his “AI-first” mantra.  Several areas were highlighted, where Google will lead and define its mission to organize the world’s information with machine learning.  Beyond AI initiatives to enhance core…

Friday’s news of Apple’s permit to test self-driving cars in California should not have come as much of a surprise given the poorly kept secret of Project Titan. But the permit begs the question of whether Apple is building a…

Amazon’s third-party developer strategy has Alexa looking like the Gingerbread Man of digital assistants. After taking over CES in January with multiple Alexa-enable devices, there’s been little pause in Alexa skills and device-enabled growth. As of this writing, we count more…

The Loup Ventures NCAA bracket contest isn’t as hotly contested as we thought it would be. We entered Bing’s AI bracket into our pool, and it’s just as busted as the others. In fact, Bing’s bracket will finish at the…

At this point, it might not even be that crazy to say it, but we think AirPods are going to be a bigger product for Apple than the Watch. After using AirPods for the past month, the Loup Ventures team…

The trend in computing towards more natural user interfaces is unmistakable. Graphical user interfaces have long been dominant, but machines driven by more intuitive inputs, like touch and voice, are now mainstream. Today, audio, motion, and even our thoughts, are the basis for the…

Today, we’re excited to announce a new investment in Realvision. We see great opportunity in the crossover between AI and VR. The company’s machine learning and computer vision platform creates immersive 3D, VR-ready models for real estate listings. Not only does the platform…

We recently hosted a panel of 8 college students from the University of Minnesota. The goal was to better understand how millennials think about social media, communications, video, VR, AR, the selfie generation, the future of work, and privacy. Here’s a…

There’s been a lot of talk about Apple buying Tesla, but what if Apple simply made a $10 billion equity investment in the company instead? It sounds so good — Apple working with Tesla. In theory, it would make our…

I always wanted to cover Tesla, but as an internet analyst, the stock fell outside of my coverage space. Despite this, I continued to study the company and ultimately invested because I believe that Tesla is not a car company, but…