Research
Research
Every day brings something new in AI, and sorting the noise from what actually matters can feel like a massive undertaking. We channeled our expertise as builders, investors, and operators to help you navigate the trends and breakthroughs shaping the future. Through market analysis, insights from our portfolio, and conversations with top researchers, our goal is to give you a clear view of AI today and where it’s headed tomorrow.
Exploring the latest research and innovations from across our portfolio.
What does it look like to build toward AGI for the real world? Skild released their 2024 research results for the development of Skild Brain, taking us behind the scenes of their journey toward “any task, any robot, one brain”.
Why did Bing’s chatbot adopt the persona “Sydney”? Anthropic’s new paper introduces persona vectors—patterns in a model’s neural activity that reveal and help control traits like sycophancy, hallucination, or “evil.” Their preventative steering technique offers a way to monitor and curb these personality shifts to keep models aligned with human values.
Magistral was created to “think things through,” while incorporating expertise from different professional domains, providing transparent reasoning, and offering multilingual flexibility. And they’ve documented both their successful and unsuccessful experiments in a new paper.
Traditionally, interactions between creators and image models centered around a prompt box. Goodfire has replaced this with a canvas that plugs directly into the “brain” of the model and uses its understanding of visual features to edit and create images in new ways.
We believe the future of search will be invisible infrastructure embedded in every app and powering AI in the background. Exa Fast is built for that vision. In internal benchmarks, it showed p50 latencies under 425ms, supported by a fully custom engine (no wrappers, no scraped SERPs).
In the legal industry, outcomes often hinge on large amounts of unstructured data. EvenUp’s latest releases—AI drafts, Smart Workflows, and Medical Bill Summary—are the latest examples of how targeted AI can close the justice cap for personal injury, triple drafting output, and reduce average settlement times.
After just one week, over 14,000 community votes have shaped the first public leaderboard for text-to-video and image-to-video models on LMArena. From Veo 3 to Kling 2.1 Master and Pika 2.2, the rankings are updated live and grounded in real user feedback.
You may have seen a paper out of Apple last month with the title, “The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity”, which caused a bit of a stir.
Reports
Reports
Each month on LinkedIn, we help you cut through the noise and highlight the AI updates you really need to know. It’s your place to catch up on AI research, market trends, and insights that matter most to founders, investors and builders.
Faction Ventures, L.L.C. ("Faction") and Lightspeed Management Company, L.L.C. ("LSVP") are separate businesses that operate independently of each other. Faction advises its own fund(s) and does not advise any LSVP clients, and LSVP does not advise Faction or any of its clients. LSVP and Faction are parties to an agreement pursuant to which LSVP holds certain interests in Faction and the fund(s) Faction manages.
continue to the Faction SiteClose
Close
Close
Close
Close
Close
Close
Close
