Writing | Page 11 of 97 | Union Square Ventures

Progress in Artificial Intelligence (May 7, 2024)

Progress in artificial intelligence has come in the form of a bag of tricks, some of which have proven to be unreasonably effective: word embeddings as a way of representing semantic similarity; the attention mechanism for contextualization; self-supervised learning on [...] Read more

Investment in Paragraph (May 2, 2024)

Today, we're thrilled to announce our investment in Paragraph, the leading platform enabling onchain publishing. Paragraph is joining forces with our portfolio company Mirror, which first defined many of today’s onchain publishing primitives. View the full post on Paragraph. Read more

The Original Designs for the Web (Apr 29, 2024)

In the original designs for the World Wide Web, there was a clear line drawn between the services people interacted with (websites), and the software they used to access those websites (browsers). An important distinction was that while the websites [...] Read more

Anticipating Web3 and Crypto (Apr 4, 2024)

For over a decade now, USV has been eagerly anticipating the emergence of “Web3” alongside “crypto”. What we mean by this is that while blockchains and crypto assets are still viewed by the world at large as financial technologies, they [...] Read more

Current Needs in Electrical Infrastructure (Mar 20, 2024)

Existing electrical infrastructure is ill-suited to our current needs. It was developed for a world where we simply sent firm AC power from centralized power plants to end-customers. Today, however, electricity flows multi-directionally, as both AC and DC, and more [...] Read more

Reshaping the Market Structure for Search (Feb 29, 2024)

The market structure for Search is currently being reshaped. Horizontal and LLM-based “search agents” like ChatGPT and Perplexity are placing unprecedented pressure on search engines like Google. Cracks are beginning to form, from which new possibilities of search are rapidly [...] Read more