{"id":43205,"date":"2026-01-17T00:01:17","date_gmt":"2026-01-17T00:01:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/an-openai-researcher-turned-venture-capitalist-says-investors-are-3-to-5-years-behind-the-latest-ai-studies\/"},"modified":"2026-01-17T00:01:17","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T00:01:17","slug":"an-openai-researcher-turned-venture-capitalist-says-investors-are-3-to-5-years-behind-the-latest-ai-studies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/an-openai-researcher-turned-venture-capitalist-says-investors-are-3-to-5-years-behind-the-latest-ai-studies\/","title":{"rendered":"An OpenAI researcher turned venture capitalist says investors are 3 to 5 years behind the latest AI studies"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/66b268d4a5247369a3e9dd29?format=jpeg\" alt=\"AI bot blowing bubble\"\/><figcaption>Exuberance for AI has led to fears of a bubble forming in the stock market in recent years.<\/p>\n<p>iStock; Rebecca Zisser\/BI<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>Jenny Xiao of Leonis Capital says there&#039;s a lag between AI research and investment trends.<\/li>\n<li>Xiao, a former OpenAI researcher, aims to bridge venture capital and advanced AI research.<\/li>\n<li>She urges investors to understand AI&#039;s nonlinear progress and to adapt to rapid technology shifts.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There is a yearslong lag in the AI hype cycle, according to one former AI researcher turned venture capitalist.<\/p>\n<p>Jenny Xiao, who cofounded Leonis Capital in 2021 after a stint at OpenAI, said the current investment excitement around AI is far behind the actual research.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;There is a massive disconnect between what researchers are seeing and what investors are seeing,&quot; Xiao said on the Fortune Magazine podcast this week.<\/p>\n<p>What&#039;s being discussed at the biggest AI conferencesis as much as 3 to 5 years behind what researchers are thinking about, Xiao said.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;We are so behind the technical frontier, and that&#039;s the gap I really want to bridge,&quot; she added.<\/p>\n<p>Xiao, who dropped out of a Ph.D. program in economics and AI to take a researcher role at OpenAI, founded Leonis Capital to bridge the worlds of venture capital and deep academic AI research.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;With AI, there needs to be a new generation of founders. There needs to be a new generation of VCs,&quot; she said.<\/p>\n<p>It&#039;s also the first time investors need to be able to provide financial support to both the market and the technology, she added. Unlike SaaS companies, which were built on a &quot;stable tech stack,&quot; AI is moving fast. To keep up, Xiao said investors are going to need to be as technical as the founders.<\/p>\n<p>If she has one piece of advice for investors who haven&#039;t gone deep into the technical side, it&#039;s that they should know &quot;AI progress isn&#039;t linear,&quot; she said.<\/p>\n<p>They should know AI progress happens in &quot;lumps,&quot; she said. So, questions about why AI progress is slowing down or speeding up aren&#039;t the best way to characterize the rate of development.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;It&#039;s neither of those two extremes,&quot; she said. &quot;It&#039;s somewhere in between.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Leonis Capital did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.<\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Exuberance for AI has led to fears of a bubble forming in the stock market in recent years. iStock; Rebecca Zisser\/BI Jenny Xiao of Leonis Capital says there&#039;s a lag between AI research and investment trends. Xiao, a former OpenAI researcher, aims to bridge venture capital and advanced AI research. She urges investors to understand [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43206,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-43205","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43205\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}