We will host Startup Iceland for the 10th time on June 1st this year. To say Startup Iceland has changed my life is an understatement, it has been a passion project to build a vibrant startup community to help founders build the future has become a reality now in Iceland. Iceland has become a vibrant place for startups and founders. I am excited to see how the next 10 years evolves in Iceland as it relates to founders and startups. The community has a number of activities happening throughout the year. The Government is more aligned with the notion of startups and innovation and technology, I am confident Iceland will continue to punch way above it weight. In the last 10 years or so we have invested in a number of startups and more importantly a number of startups have grown to become mature companies that is the evolutionary path you want to see. If there is one thing that I have learnt it is that one needs to be patient and have a long term view. Like everything we underestimate 10 years and over estimate 3 years.
The theme for this year is A.I. as I have written before the next decade is going to be the use of A.I. in everything that we do. It is not limited to massive challenges like climate change or the rising inequity or the rising cost of healthcare or global pandemic management. It is going to be interesting to say the least. The A.I. paradigm shift is going to be something that we will underestimate again over a longer horizon. The companies that take this seriously will fundamentally leave all their competitors in the dust. What is needed to make A.I. work for us? The basis for all A.I. is data without feeding the machine the right amount of data one cannot make A.I. do the things we want it to do. The most successful A.I. companies are all data companies, OpenAI the company founded by Sam Altman and others built the largest language model and ChatGPT-4 is suppose to be exponentially larger language model than ChatGPT-3. There is so much momentum in the A.I. space it behooves us to talk about it in this year’s Startup Iceland conference. Microsoft has been one of the early investors in OpenAI and announced yesterday that OpenAI Service is available in Microsoft Azure. Here is a video of how to use OpenAI Service in Azure.
