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Ryan Cunningham

Principal at AI Fund with extensive experience in AI and product management

Ryan Cunningham is the Co-Founder and Partner at SHACK15 Ventures, a venture capital firm based in San Francisco that focuses on AI and deep technology investments. He has a robust background in building startups and leading product teams, having previously worked at Uber and AI Fund, where he was instrumental in developing various technology-driven companies across domains such as distributed training and swarm intelligence.

Cunningham's investment approach is characterized by a strong technical foundation combined with strategic insights, emphasizing first-principles reasoning and unit economic models. He is particularly interested in autonomous systems and leads research and development efforts at SHACK15 Ventures related to research tools powered by retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technologies.13

He holds a bachelor's degree in finance and economics from Georgetown University and has accumulated extensive experience in product management and strategic roles, including positions at Spiketrap and Credit Suisse. Additionally, Cunningham is a voice actor, powerlifter, and martial artist, and he owns two parakeets named Kiwi and Meimei.12

Highlights

Jun 6 · linkedin

Do we really need domain-specific models?

New post just went up on Machine Yearning. Picking up from last week, we get more tactical on fine-tuning vs. model routing, then tie off with how modular approaches to AI deployment make your systems more anti-fragile.

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May 31 · linkedin

Just published part 1 of a two-parter on Machine Yearning. This one introduces pitfalls of the model-centric approach to first-wave AI companies (e.g. Inflection and Stability), economic quirks in the inference market, and teases some emerging solutions like model routers. Next week we'll get more tactical on implementing these recs.

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Related Questions

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Ryan Cunningham
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Experience

Principal at AI Fund (December 2023 - Present)
Senior Associate Builder at AI Fund (July 2021 - December 2023), Echelon AI, Kula, Speechlab, Workhelix, ValidMind, FourthBrain, Bearing AI

Location

San Francisco Bay Area