Unusual Ventures reposted this
HumanSignal and Unusual Ventures hosted a dinner yesterday with a group of leaders and scientists, working at the frontier of AI systems & data. Most of the focus was on how data needs are changing and evolving, especially as more agentic systems are being built. A few observations that stuck with me: - In agentic systems, it’s surprisingly hard to draw the line on whose side the agent should take, user vs company, user vs policy. Many failures aren’t about raw capability, but about missing context, or missing empathy. - That empathy gap is especially interesting. We talk a lot about instruction-following, but much less about following human empathy: understanding intent, stakes, and trade-offs the way a human would. - Rubric design and rubric management came up repeatedly. More and more, system quality seems to hinge not on the model and data alone, but on how well evaluation criteria are defined, maintained, and evolved over time. - A strong, shared theme: the need for expertly crafted and carefully curated data. This has always been a differentiator, and increasingly, these datasets are core assets and proprietary IP that companies own. What ties all of this together is that as autonomy increases, so does the need for continuous, well-designed human input: not just to correct outcomes, but to encode judgment, values, and context into the system itself. The work is shifting from “labeling answers” to shaping behavior over time. Huge thanks to everyone who hosted and joined the discussion: Niamh O'Donnell Robbie Th'ng Elanchelvan Elango Vlad Kroz Jeanie Fang Himanshu Gupta Raghav Gupta Olga Pospelova Eliza Kosoy (PhD) Sudeep Das Wei Wei Gaurav Hardikar Maria Alejandra Barrios