Rocky Yu: Inside AGI House, Talent Density & Why AI Is Built by Communities – E661
episode
BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech: Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand & Malaysia Startups, Founders & Venture Capital VC (English)
31 min
1 speaker
4 chapters
transcribed 17 days ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
at his apartment we all watching the movie X McKenna, trying to see oh what's the future of AI look like. Today though all those people in that room becomes very important people in the industry. But that time this they are very nerdy researchers get together to talk about the future of AI.
Welcome to Brave. Learn from Southeast Asia's best tech leaders. Build the future, learn from our past, and stay human in between. No BS on Success. I'm Jeremy O, Venture Capitalist, Sierra Founder, Harvard MBA, Science Fiction Nerd, and Dad of Two Daughters. Every week, we debate startup news, interview change makers, answer listener questions, and share personal insights. Join our movement of over 40,000 members and get transcripts, resources, and community at www.bravesea.com. Stay well and stay brave. Hey Rocky, really excited to have you on the show. Here you are, technical superstar, CEO and founder and now leading AGI house in the community. So good to see you in Singapore. Rocky, can you uh tell us about yourself?
Yeah, sure. First of all, thank you for having me here. Um actually here for a conference and um got a chance to talk to you. My name is Rocky, founder and CEO of AGI House. So it's a community of AI founders, researchers. Yeah, as the name suggests. They started house, but now it's much bigger than house. We have a company like a winter back company operating the community. The mission is accelerated humanity transition to high. At the same time we have given that most important AI company early. This back in like 2023, started from the community we s recently set up a fund investing early stage, pre-stage founders.
Yeah, fantastic. Let's go back in time. I understand you're in Beijing, you were an undergraduate, and you chose to study computer science. So why did you study computer science instead of
Uh something else. There's a lot of coincidence. I also was d determined or destined to do certain things. And of course curiosity drives much of my life at this issue. And I think a big part of the choice in studying computer science, I was fascinated by the idea how computers generate images, like realistic, so realistic. That's more than twenty years ago. Yeah. So I was fascinated by that. And my research, my lot of the activities around like computer graphics uh type.
Wow.
Like Toy Story. How do they generating all those things using computers? A big fan of uh Steve Jobs, a lot like the studios. Actually, it leads to today what I'm doing because right now the thing that powers the whole AI innovation is the company called NVIDIA. So at that time NVIDIA is less known than today. They're doing one thing, they're selling computer graphics cards. Yeah. So it's the piece of hardware that rendering computer graphics doing the sap specific things that I just described because a lot of algorithms are very computational expensive. So you need dedicated software to do those renderings for the graphics. I was doing research on that then Back in two thousand seven, two thousand eight, they first released the CUDA.
That's why they starting to repurpose
yeah
computer graphics as a paracomputing platform which runs all the AI right now, the trainings runs on that. So I was very early, very lucky to be in that whole wave that later paves the way to what I'm doing.
And so there you are learning computer engineering. In your early phase of career you were a technical leader and engineer. So tell me more about that.
Yeah. From the experience, the computer graphics research. I went to s school in Beijing and I went to the US for graduate school. I met a lot of professors doing all the research and I know that um my goal is no longer being a researcher, be uh because I believe that the alternative is a better way to really push the technology forward. So I dropped out of Ph programs started a company called Digimetrics actually using CUDA to decode in the digital video and audio to detect with the bad frames. It's like a digital SaaS product back in 2009, 2010, and then we sold the company and did a few other things.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–7:11
2
How did Rocky’s early fascination with computer graphics shape his AI career?
7:11–21:57
3
What sparked the creation of AGI House during the pandemic?
21:57–29:35
4
Why does AGI House prioritize talent density over community size?
29:35–31:45
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech: Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand & Malaysia Startups, Founders & Venture Capital VC (English)
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