Viktor Prokopenya: The #AI revolution should be celebrated

In November 1970, a group of scientists predicted that within 15 years an artificial brain would be created that could learn at an astonishing rate, surpassing human abilities. They universally agreed that such Artificial Intelligence (AI) would “precipitate the third Industrial Revolution, wipe out war and poverty and roll up centuries of growth in science, education and the arts”.

The scientists were a little optimistic on the timing, but AI is progressing by leaps and bounds. Just this week, for example, breakthroughs were announced in developing AI systems capable of: predicting how people will look as they age, sensing people through walls, and guessing the next steps of a recipe. Given the accelerating pace of AI research, it isn’t surprising that many people remain as enthusiastic about the sector’s potential as the scientists almost fifty years ago.

We sat down with one such entrepreneur, London-based venture capitalist Viktor Prokopenya, to gain some insight into why he believes that “AI will have a fundamentally life-changing impact on the world and how we live, akin to the advent of the internet and the invention of electricity.”

Prokopenya was interested in technology long before he became an investor. The 34-year-old spent several years in IT consulting, then turned to founding businesses himself—in between picking up various Master’s degrees and a Doctor of Business Administration from SBS Swiss Business School. One of his ventures in particular, mobile app developer Viaden Media, became a runaway success: its app All-In Fitness topped the Apple Store charts in over 40 countries. When Prokopenya sold Viaden for nearly $100 million aged 27, he was ready to deploy the expertise he had gained as an investor, helping to develop “innovative and exciting small businesses in which [he saw] high potential for long term growth”.

Seeking to back and mentor disruptive companies, Prokopenya formed VP Capital, which he described as “a global investment vehicle focused on the technology sector”. One of the areas that Prokopenya finds particularly interesting today is fintech. VP Capital, along with Larnabel Ventures, recently invested $25 million in Capital.com, a fintech company that launched a trading platform where investors can trade financial products and learn more about trading.

And much like other trailblazers working to revolutionise finance, Prokopenya’s company has developed an innovative function called “Smart Feed”, which uses AI to detect traders’ cognitive biases. As Prokopenya described the feature, “if a trader is prone to making mistakes based on behavioural biases such as overconfidence, AI will spot them, alert him and offer helpful content to boost his trading skills”. Recent research has suggested that pointing out such biases drastically improves trading performance.

AI is clearly Prokopenya’s overarching passion, a development he refers to as “an exciting frontier that will have a transformative impact on societies and businesses across the world”. While two of VP Capital’s significant investments so far have been in fintech, Prokopenya emphasized that he doesn’t want to restrict himself to specific industries, as AI will have disruptive effects across all industries, “from fintech to entertainment, to education, and beyond”.

And Prokopenya has the war chest to boot, thanks to a $100 million partnership with Larnabel Ventures. But if you have $100 million, why invest in AI? As Prokopenya notes, AI’s main advantage is its relatively low capital expenditures, since “its main resources are big data and human talent”—as well as the conviction that AI can, and will, fundamentally change the world for the better. So far, they’ve announced their backing for ten companies, including Droneforce—which uses AI to track down unauthorized drones—and Piper, which produces kits for children to build computers themselves.

Another promising investment in their portfolio is Banuba, a start-up that develops the technology underpinning augmented-reality mobile apps, meaning that the algorithms it develops could have almost infinite applications—from better selfie filters to educational programs. Banuba currently has more than 20 patent pending applications for everything from emotion detection to motion capture technology like that used in filmmaking.

But perhaps the most disruptive one of those 20 patents is the one undergirding a function called “Line of Sight”, which, Prokopenya claims, could make touchscreens obsolete. Using Line of Sight, “a person can interact with the screen, choose menu options and move objects without using their hands, only by using their eyes”. The implications of such a development could be enormous—allowing a musician to turn pages without taking his hands off his instrument, say, or making smartphones more accessible to disabled people.

Patents such as Line of Sight, with both humanitarian and financial promise, are the core of why Prokopenya advises other entrepreneurs to jump on the AI train: he observed that companies using AI “can be simultaneously great businesses and great investment opportunities”, a combination that is increasingly hard to find.

To hear Prokopenya tell it, the tremendous growth AI has recently enjoyed is just a precursor of what is to come, as the world is on the verge of a paradigm shift in which every industry will be revolutionized by big data and machine learning. In the next decade, Prokopenya believes that “robots will be more ubiquitous, new forms of education will surface, new professions will be created, and governments and companies will need to undergo a major shift in how they think about retaining talent and creating opportunities”.

One of the main forces pushing back against AI development has been concerns that robots will snatch away humans’ jobs. Prokopenya sees this as a positive, however—as AI takes care of mundane chores, people will be free to focus on “more creative and interesting job roles”.

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