The Robots Are Coming

Speaker 2

Hi, welcome to this week's That Was The Week. We've had a couple of weeks off. In fact, I had a wonderful 10 days in the UK. I met with some old friends who had birthdays. I met with my siblings, which was great. And then the second birthday was actually in Cornwall, which is a beautiful part of the UK with white sand beaches. The weather was good. Had lots of hiking, lots of nice food. And now I'm back. However, sadly, Andrew Keane is not back. He's traveling himself on his way to watch Arsenal versus Tottenham on Sunday. He's a Tottenham fan, otherwise known as Spurs. And then he's off to, I think, Sicily for a vacation. So you just got me this week. The newsletter is...

Speaker 2

self-explanatory. The robots are coming is this week's news item number 15 for 2024. Typically if you do about 40 to 45 newsletters a year. And The Robots Are Coming is inspired, very much inspired, by an article this week written by Mario Gabriel. Mario is the author of The Generalist, which is a Substack publication. And he wrote a pretty decent, let's put the screen share on, you can see, pretty decent article called The Robotics Renaissance. Highly recommend you read it. But it's inspired by a couple of things. Let's start with this. This is the Tesla robot being tested, doing tasks that require a lot of dexterity. As you can see, it's tethered. It's plugged in to the mains there. But it's balancing. It's able to use its hands. It's able to fold things. um and uh you know these are things that it would have been very unlikely a robot could be trusted with not so very long ago but this uh the tesla video is um

Speaker 1

nowhere near as good as this one this is boston dynamics who uh you probably have heard of. This is their latest robot, which is electric. And it's able to balance, turn, walk.

Speaker 2

It's pretty amazing what the advancements in robotics are. Now, obviously, a robot is just carrying out tasks assigned to it by a program. What's really interesting is that with the rise of AI, and this week has been a big week in AI, if you look at the section of this week's newsletter that covers AI, Let's just turn that on. You can see here, meet your new assistant, Meta AI built with Llama 3. Meta's battle with ChatGPT. Google is combining its Android and hardware teams into a single AI team. Snowflake, which is a tool I use at SignalRank, released an AI into its developer environment this week, and Slack has raised one. If you think about those developments in AI, combined to the developments in robotics, it seems very clear that we're about to enter a phase of development where robots and software can both carry out tasks, but also learn how to do tasks in the real world. And as AI moves from computer screens to the real world, lots of things will open up. I should probably note that Tesla's latest self-driving software, which I think is called 12 point something called 0.5, it is claimed better than human drivers on most tasks. So even though much of the talk around AI and robotics has been very futuristic, I think it's becoming less futuristic. We're now in a period where we can expect application of these things to specific tax. And it's very likely that that will happen quicker than any of us believe. In the editorial, I quote Mario on the impact of this. One of the things he notes is that not just America, but especially America has an aging population. And therefore, the labor force is too small for the tasks at hand. And he makes the point that immigration is one solution to that. As most of you know, I'm a big supporter of controlled immigration to supply the need to both skilled and unskilled jobs. But robots are also part of the solution. And that aging population and shrinking workforce is not everywhere, but it's a global phenomenon in most of the developed countries. So robots doing jobs is sorely needed. And when you think about the value that that will create, I use the word value precisely, meaning the addition of new things to the world produced by labor, in this case, robotic labor, that value is going to explode. So the GDP of the world will grow in proportion to what robots can do because rising productivity which is another word for less labor, more machinery and techniques, robots being on the machinery side, rising productivity gives rise to rapid advancements in value production. And the possibility of

Speaker 2

you know, unlimited value is not any longer fake. It can be real, which begs the question, who will benefit? And, you know, there's a big political debate about that. Some people think that the people like Mark Zuckerberg want to be the sole beneficiaries. Others like Sam Altman have thought about things like world coin to distribute that wealth by taxation, actually, and by world coin into the hands of everyone. But clearly, as the world gets richer due to automation, and as human leisure time grows, as the working day shrinks, the question of how to distribute value to make everyone's life better is a real question. And you don't have to be a communist or a capitalist to recognize that that's an important question. They have and have an answer to it i do note the the the the kind of loud noises coming from silicon valley these days particularly from mark andreessen and elon musk where everything that isn't just pure advancement in tech technologies called communist is is really silly What we're looking at here is the first time ever that innovation could create human freedom. And by freedom, I mean freedom from work. And that will theoretically revolutionize human life to be a much higher quality. And it does require thinking about how to execute on that unless you are unconcerned with other human beings, which I don't think we should be. So that's this week's newsletter. It focuses on AI and robotics. There's a lot else in the newsletter. Because Andrew's not here, let's not spend too much time talking about everything. But I do think that Facebook's open sourcing of its large language model known as Llama 3, which was trained on trillions of data items and has a version that is basically 70 billion

Speaker 2

is the measure of how big it is. And it is equal to chat GPT-4 on most things. Clearly chat GPT-5 is coming soon, I would imagine, and that will reset the playing field. But the fact that that's open source and that developers already are downloading Llama 3 and building applications using it, and you're starting to see AI show up in Twitter, in Slack, in Salesforce, and everywhere else, means that AI is going to be ubiquitous. And Facebook's launch is going to accelerate that. And so asking the question a year from now, when we're talking about AI, what are we talking about? It's very unlikely that it's a small number of big companies. It's far more likely that it's everywhere and commoditized to some extent using models that have already been pre-trained and released for free. And that is a big deal in terms of what we can expect to happen.

Speaker 2

Other noteworthy things this week, there's a couple of them. The Congress and the House of Representatives did pass a bill signed by Biden that says that TikTok must be sold by its owners within nine months or be banned. My take on that is that it's probably entirely unconstitutional, that bill, and TikTok for certain will challenge it in court. And I would predict we'll win. And therefore, the idea that TikTok is going to be banned is somewhat fanciful and very unlikely to happen. And this will be a non-issue, pretty much a non-issue. The election will happen before any conclusion for sure. But I still think no matter what the outcome of the election, it's going to be a non-issue. There's a great piece in this week's newsletter by Carter on the state of pre-seed investing. I won't repeat what it says here, but it does show that there are less and less rounds still attracting large amounts of capital, but there's less of them. And that's true across the entire venture ecosystem. We're in a phase of venture capital where the money locked up in prior investments is so large that it's preventing new money flowing into new investments at the rate that it was previously. That's not just due to market constraints, it's really money flows are blocked. We've talked about that before. And Google fired 28 employees this week. They were, I think you could accurately say pro-Palestinian protesters who occupied an executive office here in the Bay Area, asking that Google ceases to do business with Israel on one of its projects. And they were fired. I actually agree they should have been fired. I mean, work is not really a place to start having employees lay down the law about what the business of the company is. So I kind of agree they should be fired. I don't agree that they were wrong to voice their opinions. They just shouldn't do it at work or disrupt their employer in doing that. That's just my point of view. That said, the startup of the week is Boston Dynamics because of that robot. And the X of the week this week is Aaron Levy, the CEO of Box, who quotes another tweet, which I thought was pretty pertinent to what we're discussing this week. He makes the point that iRobot stock is down 90%. Let's share this and then you can see. iRobot stock is down 90% since Amazon announced the intent to acquire it, and it was then blocked. Blocking non-monopolistic M&A only makes it less likely to fund risky ideas because there are fewer exit opportunities. It's bad for innovation. Ironically, it's fine for Amazon. So something that was meant to punish Amazon actually benefits it. And that comes from the tweet down below that said that it will be when Lina Khan resides from the FTC and companies can get acquired again, that tech innovation will be able to unlock

Speaker 2

benefits of ai no sane person is going to sign up for a 10-year death march and play ipo roulette with their lives if um lena khan is basically blocking their exit i agree with that and that is this week's that was the week sorry andrew isn't here i'm sure this is a lot more boring having me speak to camera than having andrew challenge me but there it is see you next week bye