AI or Bust
Another week when there are many talking points.
The Q3 Venture Capital data is out, and both Gene Teare at Crunchbase and Peter Walker at Carta have significant insights this week. In an essay of the week, Kyle Harrison takes a stand back and examines the entire venture value chain - as we have discussed a lot in prior weeks. It is a great effort by Kyle and a very good read,
Also, Sam Bankman Fried is not in front of a Jury. Only two days in, the prosecution is mounting a strong effort to undermine his ethical stance, with his former CTO saying he was asked to write code enabling Alameda, SBF's hedge fund, to take unlimited loads from FTX. It is not yet clear if this is criminal. I will wait for the defense case and consider it. But these two days have been difficult for SBF.
Meta is announcing Quest 3, which resembles Apple's forthcoming approach (see through the mask into the room). Meta also announced the next version of its VR glasses with Ray-Ban. These look promising, to be honest. I might even pony up for a pair (prescription lenses too).
But for me, the story of the week is still AI. Open AI announced DALL_E 3 and that it will be included in ChatGPT. ChatGPT is also getting visual acuity - interpreting images and drawings. I have even seen demos of it writing code from paper sketches to make websites. Audio input and output are also now live in the mobile app.
Rex Woodbury writes an over-arching piece comparing the mobile revolution to AI. He concludes that AI will be far more significant than the already mighty impact of mobile.
This is exciting.
It means that the comparison in the title of this piece - the Mobile Revolution vs. the AI Revolution - is something of a misnomer. AI is bigger, a more fundamental shift in technology's evolution. VR/AR, perhaps underpinned by Apple's forthcoming Vision Pro, might be a mobile-scale revolution - a massive shift in distribution. That's probably 5-ish years away. But AI is bigger.
........
The internet, mobile, and cloud looked like their own distinct revolutions - but rather, they may have been sub-revolutions in the broader Information Age that's dominated the last 50 years of capitalism. We're now seeing a brand new sea change - one that only comes around every half-century.
In other words, we're in for a helluva ride.
This is hard to disagree with. I use ChatCPT at SignalRank. In the past two weeks, I have reduced my code by 90% while increasing how good the results are. I'm probably a B+ SQL programmer. With ChatGPT, I became A++, measured by the code's productivity, quality, and complexity. Refactoring twelve months of work in two weeks relies on all the learning during that time, but without AI, I could not have done even close to what I have delivered.
Gene's piece on the Q3 funding environment shines a light on AI's impact on funding in an otherwise awful environment.
AI companies raised more than $10 billion this past quarter, on par with Q2 2023, Crunchbase data shows.
The largest AI rounds went to OpenAI competitor Anthropic. The company raised $1.3 billion from Amazon and committed to using AWS and Amazon's inhouse chips to train models.
Cloud data company Databricks raised $500 million at a value of $43 billion in a deal led by T. Rowe Price. That was the largest priced round last quarter and marked an up round from Databricks' $38 billion value in 2021.
The impact of AI on humanity seems to have no real upper limit. This isn't the place to discuss all of the applications, but they will be many and large.
Tweet of the Week discusses some of the technical debates around LLMs. Gary Marcus is still comparing ChatGPT to a perfect AGI and finding it wanting, which is right. It is wanting. But the more astounding fact is what it is great at. We will all have digital AI assistants able to help with pretty much any task, and it's coming soon. Google filed patents this week on the mechanics of robotics, and I think AI in physical objects that can perform tasks is in our mid-term future too.
But my favorite read this week was Halide founder, Sebastiaan de With, reviewing the iPhone 15 Pro Max camera system. It is very detailed and lovingly put together. The camera is amazing. Enjoy...
Essays of the Week