(Re)Share | #15 - AI Everywhere All at Once
AI Policy, Safety & Applications | Deepfakes | Robotics | New Space | Nuclear Power
AI has permeated every corner of my content diet. Not just VC Twitter and the typical tech rags, but mainstream / normie media. Like the past AI booms, most conversations seem to revolve around job loss and safety concerns, although this time does feel more dire. In large part, this is due to the voices involved. No longer is fear mongering the dark art of grandstanding politicians and fringe academics. Today some of the most concerned are the Silicon Valley elite themselves.
My day job has conditioned me to be an upside thinker and while I remain a techno-optimist I am paying close attention to the shifting sands. Political positioning is changing rapidly and anti-tech seems to be the only bi-partisan enemy these days apart from China. The potential of significant (overreaching?) regulation is increasing, which could make the future of AI / ML investing markedly different than the past.
Stuff worth sharing
Locking the door behind you - The Future of Life Institute released a short, open letter requesting a complete pause on advanced AI model development (defined as stronger than GPT4) for at least six months. This dominated the news. The significance of this demand is not from the letter itself, but from the signatures supporting it - Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Andrew Yang, Evan Sharp, etc. There’s been as much discussion about the moratorium itself as the incentives of those who’ve signed.
That’s not what she said - There is an entire economy off AI generated, fraudulent pornographic content. I’ve shared stuff on deepfakes in the past, but this is an extreme example of the risk that powerful algorithms can have.
Financial fast follow - Bloomberg threw it’s hat in the GPT ring with the launch of their own fine tuned model, BloombergGPT. What they clearly lack in naming ability they do make up for in technical reach. The model boasts 50-billion parameter reach, trained on over 700 billion tokens of public and private financial data. Investing in hedge fund tech just got even worse.
A material improvement - “Gen AI” may the new “big data” but there are some remarkably exciting applications within material science. This thread from an LLM hackathon provides excellent evidence.
Look robotic Mom, one hand! - Very cool experiment recording (+ associated paper) of a self-supervised approach to robotic dexterity. I found this uniquely amusing by juxtaposing to my sister who currently can’t do any of these basic tasks after breaking her hand. (She’s fine)
Look Engineering Manager, no hands! - While lawyers and accountants are losing sleep over AI stealing their jobs, software engineers seem to better rested than ever. Github’s CoPilot, perhaps the most prominent example of human + AI collaboration, released a stats-rich blog post on the project’s success to date. 46% of code is now written by CoPilot and Github claims that the tool speeds developers with their own coding up to 55%.
Interstellar pissing match - Jeff Bezos is very mad that he is losing the billionaire space race to Elon Musk, so it’s full steam ahead at Amazon. Project Kuiper is a multi-year project aimed to launch thousands of nano-satellites into low and mid Earth orbit for wireless connectivity.
Lacking (battery) chemistry - More on the growing tensions and strategic supply chain considerations between the US and China over EV batteries.
Capitalism will save us - My good friend and fellow early stage VC, Ferdi Sigona, wrote a quick thesis on financial infrastructure opportunities via the carbon economy. Ferdi’s views broadly reflect my own in this space, although he gets bonus points for framing the entire narrative in a balance sheet framework.
Atom and Eve - A very interesting podcast summarizing the current state of advanced nuclear fusion experiments. The promise of perpetual energy has been a perpetual pipedream but this time things may be different. A combination of private funding, modular engineering and macro climate awareness could provide the required ingredients for unlocking the atom.
Shameless Plug
The Fly VC portfolio had a bit of a moment these last few weeks:
Autonomous vehicle system, Wayve, hosted Bill Gates on a driverless ride around London.
Hospitality OS startup, Thynk, announced a $13 million Series A, led by our friends at Singular.
Interview intelligence platform, Metaview, released an AI-powered notes feature and it’s going like gangbusters.