Antonio Gracias says he longs for “proentropic” startups, those that are designed to survive chaos.

There is a new key term that we need to know as part of this artificial intelligence revolution, at least according to Antonio Gracias, founder of Valor Equity Partners.

While we chat in this year’s edition Upfront Summit in Los Angelestalked about the term he coined, proentropic, a descriptor for startups designed to thrive in chaos and disruption. These disruptions include the increasing volatility of climate and geopolitics and, of course, technology.

The term has its roots in physics, where entropy is a measure of the amount of disorder or uncertainty in a system. The second law of thermodynamics is that disorder in a system will increase over time and cannot be stopped; It is natural that a system, similar to real life, always advances towards a state of greater disorder.

Gracias admitted that the term could be difficult to understand and that he started thinking about it back in 2013, when he thought that a combination of deglobalization and technological change would “globally change all power structures.”

He said the world has been tilting toward chaos since at least the end of the last century as “human populations have gotten larger and technologies have changed.”

“We’re looking for companies that are really good at predicting that future state and determining where to go,” he said, citing his portfolio company, SpaceX, as an example.

“It’s not just that today they are in a market that they believe works, but that they have incorporated into their strategy and into their people a way of thinking about the world that is probabilistic,” meaning that anything can change at any time.

“It really takes into account what could happen in extreme cases and really benefits from them,” he added.

In another part of the conversation he spoke about the company’s conviction strategy and once again referred to the global macroeconomic situation. “We are entering a period in the economy where if you really want to build a better world, you are going to have to have moral courage.”

He talked about the intersection of climate, energy and hardware, using Tesla as an example. “You can build cool things without much computing if you know how to integrate software and hardware,” he said. Gracias also talked about what he thinks the future of this moment will be.

“The predominant narrative is that artificial intelligence is going to be terrible. Job losses, social unrest,” he listed. “And I believe this is not true. I am going to work very hard in the next five to 10 years to make it not true.” Instead, he believes the opportunities are greater than ever.

For example, he believes that as low-code/no-code tools become more effective, more people will be able to start businesses, unlocking never-before-seen levels of productivity. “Who knows what they will build,” he continued.

“We will decide if we have a utopian or dystopian future.”