Ashton Kutcher

Ashton Kutcher (born 1978) went from That ’70s Show heartthrob to one of Hollywood’s most successful tech investors, with early bets on Skype, Airbnb, and Uber through A-Grade Investments and, since 2015, Sound Ventures. In 2023 Sound Ventures raised a roughly $240 million AI fund with stakes in OpenAI, Sam Altman’s lab, and Anthropic — making Kutcher financially as well as rhetorically invested in the technology.

Early access to Sora

Speaking with Eric Schmidt at the Berggruen Salon in June 2024, Kutcher described using a beta of OpenAI’s video generator Sora, saying he rendered a clip of an ultramarathoner fleeing a desert sandstorm in five minutes, and that some of the footage “you could easily use in a major motion picture or a television show.” He predicted an era in which anyone can generate a personal movie on demand, flooding the world with more content than there are eyeballs to watch it.

His conclusion was competitive rather than apocalyptic: with infinite cheap content, only genuinely great, water-cooler work will matter — “the bar is going to have to go way up.” The remarks landed months after the SAG-AFTRA strike ended, and the backlash was fierce; crew members and actors read a wealthy investor musing about $100 establishing shots as their livelihoods being rounded down to a line item, and outlets chronicled the mockery.

Kutcher has framed AI adoption as inevitable, arguing that resisting the tools is a losing strategy for creatives, and pointing to his own pivot from acting to investing as evidence that reinvention beats retrenchment.