Brightwave CEO Mike Conover on AI, Investing, and Complex Systems

Academic Roots in Complexity Science

• 🧠 Mike Conover's academic journey at Indiana University focused on complexity and network science, studying how information, diseases, and influence spread across interconnected systems.
• 💡 His research involved modeling airline networks and pandemics, as well as analyzing early social media polarization, which ultimately led him to machine learning and AI.
• 🌌 He discussed the concept of hidden structures beneath daily life that govern events, drawing parallels to statistical physics and how crowds can behave like fluids.

The AI Breakthrough: ChatGPT & LLMs

• 🚀 The launch of ChatGPT surprised even experts due to its interactive, high-fidelity chat experience and ability to produce long-form content, marking a significant shift in generative AI.
• 🔬 Conover explained gradient descent as the core training method for AI models, iteratively adjusting billions of parameters to minimize error and predict outcomes across diverse applications.
• 📊 Large Language Models learn semantic representations from massive datasets, enabling them to make highly probable predictions for the next word, leading to complex, intelligent-sounding narratives.

Brightwave's Agentic AI for Investing

• 🎯 Brightwave is an AI-powered research platform designed for investment professionals to analyze complex data rooms and identify long-tail risks.
• 🤖 The platform utilizes agentic AI systems that autonomously define research plans, issue queries, and connect disparate information across documents to surface critical insights.
• ✅ These AI agents augment human judgment, allowing investors to move faster and think more comprehensively by performing massively parallel analyses and bringing relevant findings to attention.

Building an AI Company & Future Outlook

• 🛠️ Building an AI company in this early era involves rapidly evolving capabilities and product development driven by engineering's exploration of what's possible.
• 🧑‍💻 Brightwave focuses on hiring experienced, intrinsically motivated professionals with an