Phew, That Was a Week

Last week we had no AI section due to slow news. This week, wow!

DataBricks bought Mosaic.ai for $1.3bn. Inflection, developer of the Pi AI chatbot (try it, it's good, if a little too friendly) raised $1.3bn, MidJourney released version 5.2 of its platform and, DeepMind stated that its next algorithm (strange word for this tech) will eclipse OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Billion-dollar acquisitions are rare. Databricks is a private company valued at around $38 billion, so it paid 3.5% of its value for Mosaic.ai. Why? Because data wants to be queried and data users would like to avoid writing code. It is a smart acquisition.

Any large company facing business customers or consumers will need to buy or develop AI. Early movers will lead the way.

But the real focus this week is on the media business, broadly defined. Om Malik is the top Essay of the Week because he boldly goes where nobody has gone before and predicts that the Apple Vision Pro will change movie watching. Read his story, it's great. Not only is he right, so look out the theatres, but I will go one further and predict it will own the live sports experience within a few years also. There are very few things that would make me want to wear a face covering for two or more hours, but a great movie or a 3D seat at a live sport, sitting in a virtual stadium, is one of them. And if it's Manchester United I will do it every game, 60 times a season or so.

Ai is going to have a huge impact on the media. Big publishers are already trying to slow it down with accusations of copyright infringement.

Barry Diller, accusing AI companies, said this week:

"Firstly, our content is being harvested and scraped and otherwise ingested to train AI engines," he said at a recent industry event. "Secondly, individual stories will be surfaced in specific searches. And, thirdly, our content will be synthesized and presented as distinct when it is actually an extracting of editorial essence."

Now, read that again, but imagine it is accusing a human being of the same. This human brazenly read a lot, listened to a lot, and watched a lot. She then has the audacity to form views that she could not have formed prior to those efforts. Every opinion or fact she utters has been harvested and ingested to train her brain. She spits out parts of her learning every time she speaks or writes. She sometimes refers to specific stories without crediting them, often because the source is not relevant in the context. Or she simply can't remember the source. She presents herself as having original thoughts that are, in part, synthesized from her consumption of other people's work. Oh, wait. That is every human being.

AI is more like a human than a thief. It reads, listens, learns, and forms words. It is not copying or plagiarising. It is learning from what came before. That is not infringement. indeed the very purpose of publishing is so others can consume and ingest and learn.

So on this issue, I have to tell Diller (and Congress) that they are smoking up the wrong tree here. Andrew Keen has a good interview with Matt Higgins on the challenge AI poses to the publishing industry.

And finally, a lot this week on venture capital. Take a look at Coatue's slides from its East Meets West event. They are a good summary of the current state of startups and venture capital.

Oh, one more thing. Video of the Week with Marc Andreessen is wonderful.

Essays of the Week