Antonio Gracias says he craves “entropy-inducing” startups — ones built to survive chaos.

There’s a new key term to know as part of this AI revolution, at least according to Antonio Gracias, founder of Valor Equity Partners.

While chatting this year Advance Summit in Los AngelesHe talked about the term he coined — proentropic — which is a descriptor for startups designed to thrive in chaos and disruption. These disruptions include increasing volatility in climate, geopolitics, and of course, technology.

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

Gracias admitted that the term can be difficult to understand, and that he began thinking about it in 2013, when he envisioned that the combination of de-globalization and technological change would “change all the power structures” globally.

He said that the world has been tending towards chaos since at least the end of the last century, as “population has increased and technologies have changed.”

“We look at companies that are really good at predicting that future state and knowing where it goes,” he said, citing his investment firm SpaceX as an example.

“It’s not just that they’re in a market today (that) they think it’s working, but (they’ve) built into their strategy and their people a probabilistic way of thinking about the world” — meaning anything can change at any moment in time.

He added that he “really takes into consideration what might happen in an emergency and actually takes advantage of it.”

Elsewhere in the conversation, he talked about the company’s persuasion strategy and again referred to the overall situation in the world. “We are now entering a period in economics where if you really want to build a better world, you are going to have to have moral courage.”

He spoke about the intersection of climate, energy and appliances, using Tesla as an example. “You can create great things without a lot of computing if you know how to integrate software and hardware,” he said. Gracias also talked about what the future believes at this moment in time.

“The prevailing narrative is that AI will be terrible. Job losses, social unrest,” he added. “And I believe this is not true. I will work hard in the next five to 10 years to make this not true.” Instead, he believes the opportunities are greater than ever.

For example, he believes that as low-code or no-code tools become more effective, more people will be able to start companies and thus unleash unseen levels of productivity. He continued: “Who knows what they will build?”

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