Hello Everyone,

It could have been London, but after Brexit London is sort of well, not the center of Europe any longer. With Germany significantly behind in Generative AI, it could only be Paris. Paris, France has been chosen by a powerful elite to be the Generative AI center of Europe. But why?

A number of billionaires are successfully making Paris the nexus of AI of Europe. This is also part of lobbying campaign to make Europe and France, more similar to how the U.S. works in terms of AI regulation and scaling startups that favors the U.S.’s emphasis on BigTech owning the majority of the revenue generation from this movement.

The Generative AI bull market and hype will produce some winners. Already Mistral comes to mind, but there is another possibly in the “Agentic AI” space.

I’ve spoken about it before how 2024 is the foundational year for AI agents and LLM systems that can automate task flows. We see this in the new partnerships between Microsoft and the makers of Devin, Cognition AI labs. The existing hype aren’t the real first-movers. I don’t believe OpenAI, Cognition or Magic will get things right. I have more faith in H. What the heck?

Formerly known as Holistic AI, I’ve covered them before, now they are just H. Why is this important?

The Chosen One of Agentic AI

This is the tech optimism showing their cards in making Paris, France the next Generative AI center of the world. I don’t even understand the pedigree of Charles A. Kantor, but I can follow the money. Make no mistake, like Mistral, this is a GDM spin-off.

The four other co-founders all previously worked for DeepMind, the AI company owned by Google: Karl Tuyls was a research director at DeepMind, where he worked on game theory and multi-agent research. Laurent Sifre was a principal scientist who contributed to many of DeepMind’s flagship projects, such as AlphaGo, AlphaFold and AlphaStar. More recently, he also worked on Google’s Gemini and Gemma AI models. Daan Wierstra, who will become H’s chief scientist, was a founding member at DeepMind. And, finally, Julien Perolat worked on game theory and multi-agent research at DeepMind.

Just like how Mistral was “manufactured” with big money, the same is occuring here.

A Seed round of $220 million? Do you know how rare that is? Even in the hype of Generative AI?

Emergence of Frontier Action Models (FAMs)

H wants to create artificial intelligence (AI) agents that can replace human labor-intensive tasks, increasing worker productivity through the use of "frontier action models."

Where do I see this working out? In Finance, Law and Education. Agentic AI is not all about automating coding tasks.

H(+) is a bit like the symbol of transhumanism.

Bloomberg had revealed on May 7th, that Holistic AI, a new startup in Paris working to leapfrog other generative AI models, has closed the first tranche of a $200 million initial financing round, according to people familiar with the deal. 

The H founding team has already put together a group of 25 engineers and scientists, which indicates the startup plans to move quickly. Comparatively, Mistral AI, another well-funded AI company, has been much more conservative when it comes to hiring, according to Bloomberg.

By far the most interesting thing about the era of Generative AI hype of 2023 to 2025 is all the people who have left Google DeepMind, Google Brain, Meta, OpenAI, and Amazon to found their own companies.

xAI getting nearly $8 Billion in funding is how things are moving in this AI arms race around Generative AI. The likes of Cohere and Anthropic also need to do huge rounds to keep up. Scale AI has recently with a fairly good Trust and Safety idea (coming soon). But in Agentic AI, even OpenAI and Google have disappointed leaving the way for new startups.

The Next era of RPA

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Hello Everyone,

I think we need to take a moment to appreciate what Generative AI might do for science and innovation, what it has done for biology, medicine and biotechnology already!

Did Google know what it was doing when it acquired DeepMind? What a difference ten years and a bit of foresight can make, eh. Google paid $400 million to buy London-based artificial intelligence company DeepMind, in 2014.

Fast forward to 2024, 1.8M+ researchers have used @GoogleDeepMind’s AlphaFold protein predictions in their work on vaccine development, cancer treatment + more. AlphaFold 3 is the latest breakthrough, predicting the structures + interactions of all of life’s molecules with unprecedented accuracy. We’re sharing access to these capabilities through AlphaFold Server to enable other scientific discoveries.

If I’m a self-proclaimed emerging tech analyst, I’d be crazy not to give Alphabet some credit here. If our topic of this Newsletter is the Machine Economy, something I think is or will be real, this is pretty incredible.

Read the Blog

Google had a blowout Q1 Earnings, slapped on a dividend, had a huge buyback, and even has a morale crisis inside of the company, but for Science, it’s a big win.

AlphaFold 3 is here.

YouTube noticeably dramatizes everything:

Alphabet is stuck somewhere between the past and the future, a Gemini in all things. One AI empowered comment form their lats internal meeting read: “Despite the company’s stellar performance and record earnings, many Googlers have not received meaningful compensation increases” a top-rated employee question read.

Isometric Labs was itself incorporated on February 4, 2021 and announced on November 5, 2021.Isomorphic Labs was founded by Demis Hassabis. Who nows leads the merge of Google Brain and GDM.

Announcing AlphaFold 3: is their state-of-the-art AI model for predicting the structure and interactions of all life’s molecules.

• In 2020, the company made a significant advance in molecular biology by using AI to successfully predict the behaviour of microscopic proteins.

• With the latest incarnation of AlphaFold, researchers at DeepMind and sister company Isomorphic Labs—both overseen by cofounder Demis Hassabis—have mapped the behaviour for all of life’s molecules, including human DNA.

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Hello Everyone,

In the world of Code there’s GitHub, GitLab, and? Wait for it, there’s Augment.

Gartner estimates that over half of organizations are currently piloting or have already deployed AI-driven coding assistants, and that 75% of developers will use coding assistants in some form by 2028.

As you may have noticed I’m fairly interested in this Newsletter on the topic of AI supercharging coding — and the idea that developers, real software engineers are embracing it.

Secretive AI coding assistant startup Augment raises $227M to rival GitHub’s Copilot

In a world where Devin is worth $2 Billion, what now? And I’ve got to admit Augment has been pretty secretive. Launching out of Stealth with this much funding is fairly unusual and it turns out Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO) is behind this one too.

So What is Augment>?

• Augment Inc., an AI coding assistance startup, has emerged from stealth with $252 million in funding at a near-unicorn valuation of $977 million.

• The company aims to empower software teams with AI, and upend the way software development is done today.

Ex-Microsoft software developer Igor Ostrovsky believes that soon, there won’t be a developer who doesn’t use AI in their workflows. 

Download Augment

Investors

With investments from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and VCs including Index Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Innovation Endeavors and Meritech Capital, Augment aims to shake up the still-nascent market for generative AI coding technologies.

• Eric Schmidt

• Index Ventures

• Sutter Hill Ventures

• Lightspeed Venture Partners

• Innovation Endeavors

• Meritech Capital

Igor recently wrote on this LinkedIn:

“In late 2021, I became fascinated by the potential of a rapidly emerging technology: generative AI (... even though it wasn't called that yet). I tried to learn about it as much as I could as quickly as I could.

As a software builder, I could see just how much generative AI will transform my field. We saw early promise in technologies like GitHub Copilot and projects like AlphaCode, but it was clear that this is barely even the beginning. I was picturing humans and AI collaborating together at building software, humans *augmented* by AI.

The idea of software developers augmented by AI is coming closer to reality day by day, even though there is still a long way to go. Today, we've raised a $227M Series B at $977M valuation for Augment, a startup working towards this vision.”

He continued:

“I am very excited about the team that came together behind this vision (including Guy Gur-Ari, Scott Dietzen, Evan Driscoll, Dion Almaer, and a dream team of Research Scientists, Engineers and "best of" team members in other roles), the investors who've chosen to back us, and most importantly, the product we are building.”

While at Microsoft, Ostrovsky worked on components of Midori, a next-generation operating system the company never released but whose concepts have made their way into other Microsoft projects over the last decade.

Series B

The company says its mission is to empower developers with powerful AI capabilities that will ultimately transform the way software is developed. Augment’s co-founders include Igor Ostrovsky, a former chief architect at Pure Storage Inc. and software engineer at Microsoft Corp., and Guy Gur-Ari, who previously worked as an AI researcher at Google.

Visit Augment Website

• Augment's AI platform is designed to have an expert understanding of codebases, operate at the speed of thought, support teams instead of just individuals, and carefully protect intellectual property.

• Early customers, like Keeta, have reported a more than 40% increase in developer productivity across the board.

With so many AI at the intersection of coding companies during this fresh period, it’s going to be interesting to see which one gets serious momentum.

I certainly do not agree that Cognition Labs (creator of Devin) is now valued at a $2B. You might have seen the various YouTubes that debunked their demo.

I’m not sure how exactly Devin, Augment or others will do against GitHub Copilot and other more established players with huge budgets, but we’ll see.

In 2022, Ostrovsky and Guy Gur-Ari, previously an AI research scientist at Google, teamed up to create Augment’s MVP. To fill out the startup’s executive ranks, Ostrovsky and Gur-Ari brought on Scott Dietzen, ex-CEO of Pure Storage, and Dion Almaer, formerly a Google engineering director and a VP of engineering at Shopify. At least they seem to have a solid team, although details about their technology were not shared in the announcement.

Augment does plan to make money the old fashioned way however: standard software-as-a-service subscriptions. Pricing and other details will be revealed later this year, Ostrovsky added, closer to Augment’s planned GA release. Not a big surprise there.

• The company intends to reveal more when it launches its platform in general availability at some stage this year.

• The company’s secrecy may have something to do with the highly competitive nature of the nascent industry it wants to disrupt.

1. GitHub Copilot

2. Cognition AI Inc. (Devin)

3. Magic AI

4. Gemini Code Assist

5. AWS’s CodeWhisperer

6. Tabnine

7. Codegen

8. TabbyML, and omg are there so many others!

We can speculate that rapid growth is perhaps the best shot Augment has at making waves in an increasingly cutthroat industry. I’m seeing still a lot of coders using Claude 3 or ChatGPT on top of all of this. That’s where ChatGPT for Enterprise might actually make sense.

So how do players survive in this lucrative but challenging arena? Eye-watering compute costs alone make the AI coding assistant business a challenging one to maintain.

It’s not going to be easy. Microsoft acquiring GitHub back in the day now looks like a really good deal. Microsoft has GitHub Copilot, which is by far the firmest entrenched with over 1.3 million paying individual and 50,000 enterprise customers as of February. While there is some debate if it is revenue generating, combined with ChatGPT it made a fairly decent combo for a while there.

Hey Everyone,

I have a pretty serious fringe interest in space-technology startups. So in the Machine Economy proper, companies like SpaceX are common and not a unique occurence. China itself will usher in many of these companies.

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For the lunar economy there will also be very specialized startups in various points of the supply-chain to make mining the Moon and having a station there viable.

One of the companies I have been watching is Interlune. We don’t know much yet, but let’s take a look at what we do know.

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Interlune actually has a pretty good founding origin story. What it’s trying to do says a lot about where civilization will be trying to go. Space-technology is intertwined with our innovations in energy, quantum computing, physics, materials discovery, construction, sustainable tech and multiple other areas simultaneously.

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Hey Everyone,

I hope you enjoyed your break and managed to get some festivities in. Today we’re going to try to wrap our heads around the best thing out of CES, 2024 which is definately Rabbit 🐇. The what?

Yeah the Rabbit r1? - A Pocket Companion. Wouldn’t it be clever if we could train AI to use our apps so we don’t have to? Kinda.

An AI-assistant that replaces your smartphone apps by Rabbit r1

On January 9th, 2024 the world came to grips with this year’s first iteration of AI’s potential iPhone moment. On Tuesday, the technology startup Rabbit unveiled its contender: a small, orange, walkie-talkie style device that, according to the company, can use “AI agents” to carry out tasks on behalf of the user.

• Preorders have opened for a second production run of the $199 ‘Large Action Model’ R1 handheld AI device after its CES 2024 debut attracted a flood of interest.

It’s a bit hard to fathom what this actually is?

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Hey Everyone,

I have the feeling that Pika Labs might lead to a Runway competitor.

The CEO of Pika Labs is Demi Guo, a PhD from Stanford. So on November 28th, 2023 they announced that it raised $55 million in a funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Homebrew, Conviction Capital, SV Angel, Ben’s Bites and notable angel investors including Quora founder Adam D’Angelo, ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Giphy co-founder Alex Chung. That’s quite an eclectic and yet somehow familiar group.

So Video marks the point where Generative A.I. really changes the internet in the future. Startups that specialize in Generative AI video content really could usher in a weird and different era.

The Information had mentioned them back in September, 2023.

Stanford University artificial intelligence PhD student Demi Guo founded Pika in late April under the name “Mellis Labs,” with fellow PhD student Chenlin Meng later joining as a cofounder.

I guess they have come out of stealth. Another computer science PhD.

Introducing Pika 1.0, the idea-to-video platform that brings your creativity to life. Create and edit your videos with AI. Rolling out to new users on web and discord, starting today. Sign up at

https://pika.art

So let’s go!

Or see the launch Tweet.

Only in 2023 can a six month old stealth startup in the spirit of Runway, raise a $35 million in a series A round to bring their total to $55 million so quickly.

Analysts and enthusiast are gushing about what this might signal for the next era of AI generated Video.

Pika emerged from stealth and coincides with the early access launch of what Pika’s calling “Pika 1.0,” a new suite of videography tools that introduces a generative AI model capable of editing videos in a range of styles, like “3D animation,” “anime” and “cinematic.”

Pika is Trending

“Video is at the heart of entertainment, yet the process of making high-quality videos to date is still complicated and resource-intensive.”

Read their Blog

So if you think of it, for 2023 this could be significant. Think about it, around a week after Stability AI announced Stable Diffusion Video, laying the groundwork for AI text-to-video generators, AI startup Pika Labs has announced that it has raised $55 million to push its competing generative video platform further.

Go big or go home, in April, 2023 Guo and Chenlin Meng, a fellow Ph.D. student, literally dropped out of Stanford to launch Pika to build an easier-to-use AI video generator.

Their AI video tool, Guo says, is not tailored for professionals: "What we’re trying to do is something more for everyday consumers — people like me and Chenlin."

So if Runway or Stability AI (likely to be acquired) miss the mark, Pika might be a step more advanced. And for innovation to occur these stealth startups need to show their cards near the end of 2023 or in early 2024. And I expect a lot of such Gen AI startups to show their light.

• Pika’s video generation tool has so far only been available through the social messaging app Discord.

• Despite being pre-release for the last six months, Pika’s roughly half a million users have generated “millions of videos per week.”

Will Generative AI of Video be a Big Deal?

In a recent report, IDC projected that generative AI investments will rise from $16 billion this year to a whopping $143 billion in 2027. While generative AI accounts for just 9% of overall AI spending in 2023, the firm expects that'll increase to 28% within five years.

How might Alpha and GenZ interact with the next iteration of Gen AI apps? You have to think Pika has ByteDance type of vibes. U.S. universities are a hot bed of Chinese born talent and for all the A.I. researchers who are of Chinese origin, you sometimes have to wonder why they don’t build startups more often in the U.S.

Nat Friedman, who has emerged as one of the leading solo investors in the AI space since he departed GitHub in 2021, first invested in Pika back in April. So a lot actually happend in 2023 that we don’t yet know fully about in Gen AI.

What can be Made with Pika Labs Today?

Pika’s has in such a short time built a proprietary AI model for video, similar to OpenAI’s text-based GPT-4 or Midjourney’s image-based models.

Full List of Series A Backers Include:

The Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. And additional investors also include Elad Gil, Adam D’Angelo (Founder and CEO of Quora), Zach (Co-Founder of Ramp), Andrej Karpathy, Clem Delangue (Co-Founder and CEO of Hugging Face and Partner at Factorial Capital), Craig Kallman (CEO of Atlantic Records), Alex Chung (Co-Founder of Giphy), Aravind Srinivas (CEO of Perplexity), Vipul Ved Prakash (CEO of Together), Mateusz Staniszewski (CEO of ElevenLabs), and Keith Peiris (CEO of Tome), as well as venture firms such as Homebrew, Conviction Partners, SV Angel, and Ben’s Bites, alongside many other esteemed industry leaders and AI experts.

So as you can see there is a snowball effect here of AI entrepreneur supporting new ones. These are Angels that have been fairly active in recent months since the advent of Generative A.I.

Pika Labs Blog

So fast forward six months the fresh Series A values Pika Labs at between $200 million and $300 million, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter.

Runway and Stability AI aren’t exactly innovating at a frantic pace here, there’s room for many competitors in this space. And it is going to be a fairly lucrative space.

What is Pika 1.0?

So they also unveiled Pika 1.0, a major product upgrade that includes a new AI model capable of generating and editing videos in diverse styles such as 3D animation, anime, cartoon and cinematic, and a new web experience that makes it easier to use. You can join the waitlist for Pika 1.0 at https://pika.art.

If you’d like to work at Pika you can check their career section here.

“One of the coolest things about Pika 1.0 is that it lets you upload your own video footage and use generative AI to edit and reimagine the scene.” - Tweet.

AI-Generated short film by Pika Labs:

Join Their Discord

Their headquarters (HQ) is based in Palo Alto, CA.

See Their Showcase Page

So we know that the product is good in comparison to how small the team is and how recently they were founded, it’s a huge sign. This team actually reminds me of Twelve Labs, which I have covered before. Twelve Labs is primarily Korean-American founders. They are also related to LLMs at the intersection of video.

It is said Guo and Meng’s rapid pace of development surprised investors — and themselves. I wonder what Adobe, STability A.I. and Runway are thinking. Competition in the space means Pika will be able to attract talent now from Meta (FAIR), Google and even OpenAI.

This is because Generative A.I. Video could be one of the hottest trends in 2024.

Meta, Google and even Stability AI haven’t done this space justice, maybe Pika and Runway will be different in 2024.

Hey Everyone,

I don’t exactly know what’s going on at Airbnb, but something is definately changing. It sounds like they are focusing more on A.I. and data management.

Short-stay rental platform Airbnb has acquired a small AI start-up as the company takes a greater focus on this type of technology, for allegedly over $200 million.

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And it’s hard to say what this is really about, but it’s something interesting. GamePlanner was co-founded by Adam Cheyer and Siamak Hodjat. Cheyer famously helped co-launch the startup Siri, which Apple acquired and whose technology became the basis for Apple’s AI-powered Siri assistant.

Airbnb’s stock is up 50%, although there has been a lot of controversy around the brand, including allegedly not paying their fair share of taxes in Italy.

Siamak Hodjat does ring a bell - Hodjat previously worked with Cheyer at Viv Labs, a firm that Samsung bought and leveraged to launch its own AI assistant, Bixby, in 2017.

Apparently the startup will add to Airbnb's existing set of AI technologies that include large language models, computer vision models and machine learning. These guys sure seem to have a way with tech exits.

An A.I. Rental Overlord that Learns about us?

The stealth startup acquisition is Airbnb’s first since going public, which surprised me somewhat. What else I find surprising is the data mining that they are going to do on both hosts and renters.

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky has said that “generative AI” will radically change the platform and that he wants to use it as a “travel concierge” that learns about users over time and enhances their travel experiences -- for example, matching users with the right rooms or homes. 

For me that’s really pretty personal data, but perhaps in travel personalized service trumps privacy concerns?

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In the upcoming Winter Release of new features for its platform, Airbnb will introduce a new AI-powered tool for photo tours.

How businesses will usher in new AI advances in their products could be in aways that strengthen Surveillance Capitalism and its architecture without much public debate in the name of FOMO.

“AI will rapidly alter our world more than any other technology in our lifetime, but we need to ensure that it augments humanity in a positive way,” Chesky said, adding that the GamePlanner team will focus on “accelerating” select AI projects and integrating their tooling into Airbnb’s platform. “Airbnb is one of the more humanistic companies in technology, and I believe that, together with Adam and his team, we can develop some of the best interfaces and practical applications for AI.”

It’s the time to be sneaky, while everyone is doing it!

Airbnb to Accelerate Artificial Intelligence Efforts With New Acquisition

Still something feels a bit off in this acquisition, and Airbnb weird call-to-actions of late in what it considers innovation.

But think about, it might also to make Airbnb itself more sellable. This deal is Airbnb’s first acquisition since 2019 and could pique some interest on Wall Street as to whether Chesky’s M&A strategy is shifting, potentially making Airbnb a more attractive acquisition.

I have a feeling the IPO and M&A markets have to catch up in 2024 if interest rates start to go significantly lower, though it’s somewhat unclear what the new normal will be.

What exactly is Airbnb at this Stage of its Business?

(The above video was about 8 months ago)

Honestly the PR is so light that it’s baffling what Airbnb is exactly up to with this AI acquisition.

Brian Chesky can think broader with added profitability in 2023, so they will certainly do something interesting. Chesky also has had some press that he’s trying to build out the foundations of the business more.

“We never fully built the foundation,” Brian Chesky says in a revelatory interview. “It had four pillars when we needed to have 10.”

With the implosion of WeWork, Airbnb has an opportunity to reinvent itself or at least improve the product in new ways. For instance, Airbnb is revamping its Rooms feature while eyeing AI and betting on work from anywhere.

The original tagline of Airbnb, and this is like back in 2009, was “travel like a human,” so what post-pandemic and in the FOMO of A.I. can they do with it. In a weakening economy for some the challenges are serious. Guests want to spend less money and be guaranteed a better product, while hosts are worried about potential declines in bookings and their bottom lines.

Chesky, who co-founded the company in 2008, has been prone over the years to hyping up small updates as major features. So while I admit Airbnb needs a refresh I seriously wonder if the magic wand of A.I. is going to do the trick.

Probably the number one complaint at Airbnb is affordability. Prices have gone up quite considerably on Airbnb and many sites in the last three years since the beginning of the pandemic. So it’s not exactly surprising that this company is profitable, but while convenient, not necessarily a great or accessible product.

Chesky appears to think generally that the future is flexibility, how can Airbnb be more than just a high-cost rental? On Bloomberg recently he said:

Given Airbnb’s growth, it has the opportunity to become finally something more. Perhaps in 2024 we’ll find out what.

Hello Everyone,

Software engineers have been using A.I. in their work increasingly in 2023, but are their training their replacement? Layoffs at LinkedIn’s engineering and Stack Overflow are raising some eyebrows.

LinkedIn announced Monday that it cut almost 700 employees, with most coming from the engineering organization, according to their internal memo.

Read LinkedIn Press

On CNBC they were discussing the LinkedIn engineering layoffs in the light of ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot making some junior software engineering positions redundant.

According to the official statement, this is just business as usual:

The reductions come as the business-oriented social network has seen year-over-year revenue growth slow for eight consecutive quarters. It grew just 5% in the second quarter, even as membership growth has accelerated each quarter for the past two years, Microsoft said in July.

But what’s really going on? We know GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT have been making serious headway in coding productivity. Isn’t it only a matter of time before software engineers become implicated?

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After ChatGPT disruption, Stack Overflow lays off 28 percent of staff

At Stack Overflow it appears much more dramatic. It would not surprise me if in 2024 we saw patterns of layoffs suggesting AI is replacing software engineers.

And if there was nothing to it, why did CNBC commentators insinuate the LinkedIn engineering layoffs had to do with AI?

Stack Overflow’s relationship with AI is even more weird according to the Verge. The company issued a temporary ban on users generating answers with the help of an AI chatbot in December last year, but its alleged under-enforcement led to a months-long strike among moderators that was resolved in August; the ban is still in place today.

They had overhired so the layoffs aren’t entirely surprising. But I feel the LinkedIn engineering layoffs point to more ominions things from Microsoft ahead.

They said:

Talent changes are a difficult, but necessary and regular part of managing our business. The changes we shared with our team today will result in a reduction of approximately 668 roles across our engineering, product, talent and finance teams. 

Listen that’s a lot of jobs for software engineers at Microsoft.

Year of Efficiency not over?

Microsoft announced in January that it was cutting 10,000 employees (CNBC), and additional ones following in July. The slimming down comes as Microsoft’s overall revenue growth has slipped, pushing CEO Satya Nadella to lower costs across the company.

At what point does Generative A.I. start to bite the software engineers who have been asked to train these systems for their corporate overlords? And will in the future it impact demand for software engineers when a so-called productivity bump has occurred in the space. Won’t you rationally need fewer engineers to achieve the same results? Correct me if I am wrong.

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That’s three percent of LinkedIn’s entire workforce with engineering getting the brunt of the layoffs.

LinkedIn is now ramping up hiring in India, according to the person familiar with the matter.

Memo to Employees

Team,

We did not expect to share this important update with you all in the midst of such challenging times, but in the spirit of creating clarity, Tomer and I wanted to share some news regarding changes we are making to our orgs.

As we continue to execute on our FY24 plan, we need to also evolve how we work and what we prioritize so we can deliver on the key initiatives we’ve identified that will have an outsized impact in achieving our business goals. This means adapting our organizational structures to improve agility and accountability, establishing unambiguous ownership, and driving improved efficiency & transparency through reduced layering.

These decisions result in the reduction of 563 roles across R&D. Broken down there are 137 Engineering management roles and 38 Product roles being reduced. Additionally, there will be 388 role reductions across our Engineering team in an effort to better align resources to our FY24 plan, and we will open a small number of new roles to fill critical gaps in our ambitious roadmap.

For those who are directly affected by these changes, you will receive a calendar invitation within the next hour, titled “Required Attendance: R&D Role Reductions”. This meeting will provide you with detailed information on how we will support you through this transition.

If you do not receive this invitation, expect communication from your Product or Engineering Executive leader soon with specifics pertaining to your organization and how we will collectively navigate through these changes.

Tomer and I made these decisions with deep consideration towards the long-term needs of our business and with the acknowledgement that every affected individual has played a valuable role in the growth and success of Linkedin.

In the coming days, our focus will be on supporting each other and discussing the ways we will move forward, with our vision, mission, and values as our guides. Today, it is imperative that we support our colleagues navigating this transition. Let’s continue to embrace empathy and understanding through these difficult times and use these as a cornerstone for the support we provide each other.

Mohak & Tomer

Typically I think technology people think layoffs will mostly hit HR, maybe a bit of sales. So I wonder if this comes as a surprise?

AI is already linked to layoffs in the industry that created it

If Generative A.I. keeps getting better at coding, I think we will see more layoffs targeting software engineers and engineering teams in and around Silicon Valley.

You can track layoff trends and company waves at Layoffs.fyi here.

A lot of the impacted jobs are actually Engineering managers and not just junior developers.

As we found out that things like GitHub Copilot are very unprofitable for Microsoft, perhaps they feel that they need to make more cuts to compensate. Likely some of the very people that helped train these coding tools.

LinkedIn is just a piece Microsoft acquired, that typically destroys the companies it acquires by cannibalizing them historically in such a manner. As soon as they don’t perform, there is pain. But why would a magnificent seven company be doing this? Maybe Azure and all of this investment in OpenAI and early access to GPT-4 hasn’t quite lived up to the expectations?

Friends,

I’m a bit of an outspoken critic of Surveillance Capitalism. We used to view that about China in a negative light. But in the era of Generative A.I., I’ve noticed is suddenly cool to glorify surveillance in the glint of productivity and tracking every data point. Just slap on some blurb about being privacy-conscious.

And now, a word from our sponsor, Rewind AI.

From Humane’s AI Pin to what Rewind is building, it’s really an alarming trend.

Artificial Intelligence Learning 🤖🧠🦾

What is Humane's AI Pin Device?

Welcome, The idea of AI-devices has always been a bit far-fetched even as wearables and smart tech that we wear have been an incredibly difficult market to get right. Anyone from Humane to OpenAI basically is going up against Apple, and that rarely makes sense. Even in the nascent days of the Metaverse, it makes absolutely no sense from a startup or consumer B2C perspective…

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3 years ago · 1 like · Michael Spencer

The Pendant or the Pin? Red or Blue Pill is a False Choice

Rewind’s wearable is a pendant.

No this is not a Black Mirror episode, I’m not even joking.

Introducing the AI Pendant of Rewind

• Would you be more productive if you never forgot anything?

• Built by Dan Siroker, the co-founder and former chief executive of Optimizely, and Brett Bejcek, Rewind wants to help people with their memory.

• So do you vote for the Pin or the Pendant?

Rewind is backed by a16z among others.

Rewind’s motto feels like it was stolen from a Black Mirror episode.

Rewind Pendant is the hardware extension of “remember everything you do” on an internet where I wish I could forget better. TikTok wants me to pay for subscriptions to avoid Advertisements. If only Google gave me that choice.

Reserve for ONLY $59

https://www.rewind.ai/ (if life is too boring in technological loneliness, just press rewind)

Is your Life Ready to be Captured?

Introducing Rewind Pendant - a wearable that captures what you say and hear in the real world!

Rewind powered by truly everything you’ve seen, said, or heard

Summarize and ask any question using AI

Private by design Learn more & preorder: http://rewind.ai/pendant

I always wanted a wearable that captured everything, how thoughtful of you Dan! Such care and consideration for our privacy too.

Never lose data you encounter again! Just rewind!

The product feels like something Sam Altman wishes he came up with! Very dystopian and very productivity boosting, all rolled up into one.

AI is Now Multi-Modal and Surveillance Friendly, Rejoice!

Rewind Pendant is a wearable that captures what you say and hear in the real world and then transcribes, encrypts, and stores it entirely locally on your phone.

We take a privacy-first approach and offer features for you to ensure no one is recorded without their consent.

With Pendant, Rewind is a personalized AI powered by truly everything you’ve seen, said, or heard.

After leaving Optimizely in October 2020, Dan began looking for different ways to augment human capability. Perhaps he watched a few too many Black Mirror episodes. His buddies at a16z are up for anything!

What will the era of AI pins and pendants lead us? Probably to the same place copilots that gimmicks for productivity will lead us. AI buddies for all of us, nerds with all the data to capture profits.

How could a wearable that captures everything be privacy-first? Just ask the Venture Capital mafia of the current era:

Elad, Marc, Alexis and Sam want to augment their human intelligence, they must be right!

Can you imagine a better world?

Never forget who you are and your dreams, okay! As Generative A.I. deskills you, it will be okay.

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Use cases

1. Forget what your spouse just asked you to pick up at the grocery store?

2. At an all-day conference and want to share summaries with your co-workers?

3. Be more present in your day-to-day and bookmark moments for later.

4. Automatic todo list generation whenever you verbally commit to doing something to someone else.

5. Have an exciting idea while going for a walk or driving and want to remember it for later? Just talk to yourself.

6. Insights into your life: What are you doing when your voice sounds the most excited? When are you the most grumpy? What are most common filler words?

7. Capture the incredible things your young kids say so you can replay them later and reminisce (“Daddy, I plugged it in. Can you plug it out?”).

What will the Gods and Lords of Silicon Valley come up with next?

I especially want my chatbots to mine the data captured by my Humane and Rewind pins and pendants. Pi will know everything!

Hey Guys,

So even as Monopoly Capitalism is at its worse with the worst possible abuses happening in Generative A.I.’s centralization around the same few companies, we rarely even hear about antitrust regulation in the U.S. media or Silicon Valley’s own tech news cycle. It’s convenient.

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On Substack we are citizen journalists, we aren’t constrained over what we are or aren’t allowed to cover. There’s nobody lobbying us, owning us or controlling us.

After years of supposed cases being built, The US government finally coming after the Google’s Ad business. The Cloud-Ad-AI Cartels sometimes referred to as BigTech, are only getting stronger.

So the first big trial of the modern Big Tech antitrust movement is here and began actually yesterday: On September 12, the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Google’s search engine monopoly began. That’s not to say that the powerful lobbyists didn’t already win. About a month before the case started, a US district court judge dismissed several of the claims that the Department of Justice and a coalition of states brought against the company, including allegations that Google Search harms competing services. Very odd.

The biggest tech monopoly trial since the Department of Justice challenged Microsoft more than 20 years ago

Guilt of favoring your own products is nearly meaningless today in BigTech’s pariah culture. But don’t expect American rule of law to make free market capitalism healthy again, it’s a different era now.

The trial is expected to last 10 weeks and will feature testimony from Google boss Sundar Pichai as well as executives from Apple.

Judge Amit Mehta, who was appointed to his position on DC district court by former president Barack Obama, will decide the case - the biggest for the industry in 25 years.

The BigTech cartel can afford powerful lawyers, lobbyists and influence politicians in any number of ways. A very probable case of corruption in the U.S. legal system and the hope of there being real fair play in Silicon Valley is today pretty laughable.

At stake in this trial is the chance for the DOJ to prove it can bring a successful anti-monopoly case in the modern digital age, and for Google to preserve a long-standing business practice for its search products.

The DOJ, FTC and SEC have never felt so small and meaningless in the U.S. God won’t save American from monopoly Capitalism the likes of Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple’s power.

Google, which has been synonymous with internet search for decades of course used antitrust strategies to create a moat that was unassailable, making the internet what it is today. A broken advertising based funnel for your data.

The American Dystopian Ads Prism Legacy Internet

• A lawyer for the federal government argued that Google has illegally protected its internet search monopoly using deals struck with smartphone makers.

• Google pays off its cartel for a piece of the profits.

• The Justice Department has accused Alphabet's Google of paying $10 billion annually to device makers like Apple , wireless companies like AT&T, and browser makers like Mozilla to keep its search engine's market share at around 90%. It’s not actually a secret how the internet works.

Rule of Law Doesn’t Actually Apply to BigTech

Google’s list of offenses is long in the EU, where rule of law is still maintained and practised with due diligence. Not so much in the U.S.

Since 2017, when the European Commission fined Google a then-record $2.73 billion for self-preferencing with its comparison shopping service, the company has faced a steady drumbeat of regulators accusing it of antitrust violations.

In 2018, EU antitrust regulators fined Google $4.3 billion for requiring smartphone makers to bundle and include the company’s apps with Android.

In 2019, the EU fined Google $1.49 billion for making unfair demands of publishers that sought to use its AdSense for Search service.

With Alphabet’s Gemini coming soon and Meta’s AI Personas ready to dominate the chatbot and LLM industry, antitrust has become a bit of a joke. Still…

Big tech companies and regulators are closely watching the trial, which could force a shift in how the industry is allowed to operate. Its outcome could reshape how the public accesses and interacts with the internet, or embolden Google to pursue an even tighter grip on the market.

By the Numbers

Google, which in just 25 years has grown into a $1.7 trillion company that owns major swathes of what we do online. It was all built on that search engine, which remains Google’s biggest revenue generator even now. Search ads were nearly 60 percent of the company’s revenue in 2022, to the tune of $162.45 billion.

Ugh, late-stage Capitalism isn’t just disrupting democracy, it’s hurt the media industry, free speech and human privacy, and likely hurt social and economic inequality all the while. American have been dumbed down for quite a few decades that has led to this event. Young people don’t have much of a future in this system of Capitalism, which is as far from a meritocracy as it ever was in recent memory.

The US said Google typically pays more than $10bn a year for that privilege, securing its access to a steady gush of user data that helped maintain its hold on the market. Apple pays a similar amount to be in China, and yet U.S. sanctions on A.I. chips are is rocking the boat.

It turns out BigTech works more like a drug cartel than an ecosystem for humanity. Of course what are Ads, feeds and algorithms really doing to us?

But by 2005, worried about its lead eroding, Google proposed to pay the company - later threatening to cancel payments if other firms got similar access, the government said. Eric Schmidt who is leading an A.I. Supremacy war of the U.S. against China, was CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011 and the company's executive chairman from 2011 to 2015.

U.S. dominance over China, really means the U.S. Tech Cartel can keep their power.

I’m not a historian but I plan to learn about BigTech history from this trial all that I can. Google it turns out also discouraged Apple from expanding its own search products and Samsung, which makes Android phones, from working with a company that used a different kind of search method. All of this corporate politics sounds pretty illegal.

With millions of pages of documents produced and depositions from more than 150 people, the case has finally gone to trial.

Dintzer argued the trial would show that Google maintained a monopoly over search for the past decade through exclusionary deals with device makers that cut out competitors. He also alluded to Google’s attempts to block access to documents and auto-delete internal messaging to stymie antitrust enforcement.

The BigTech Cartel have figured out how working together, they can beat the system, until they are the system. That’s nothing new in human history. The problem is when this level of corruption takes place it usually means a decline of an Empire. Democracy is also fairly less healthy since the internet has gone so unregulated in the U.S.

The crimes of Google, Meta and the Ad-players is actually pretty steep for human civilization. It might take some time for this to be revealed.

Google said it faced intense competition, not just from general search engine firms, such as Microsoft's Bing, but more specialised sites and apps that people use to find restaurants, airline flights and more. In fact, Google has taken even more marketshare from Bing, even as Microsoft pretended was an AI leader with its partnership with OpenAI.

Alphabet’s Gemini and PaLM tech will be formidable in the end, and will be able to stifle rivals even better with Generative A.I. nativity, talent, R&D and a multitude of products only someone like Google could ever accomplish. Gemini at this pace, won’t get regulated until maybe 2042. Gemini is set to launch later this Fall of 2023.

If we can’t even agree that Google has favored its own products illegally like Search or Ads, then we have a serious problem in maintaining rule of law as an internet species. The Cartel will escallate what they are able to do to us.

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Historical Precedents

Previous major antitrust trials include Microsoft, filed in 1998, and AT&T, filed in 1974. The AT&T breakup in 1982 is credited with paving the way for the modern cell phone industry, while the fight with Microsoft is credited with opening space for Google and others on the internet.

It’s not clear what Google would actually have to do if it lost this specific case.

The justice department filed its suit in 2020, but later joined in an additional suit against Google brought by attorneys general from more than three dozen states and territories. The states’ case will also be heard during the trial, with the antitrust lawyer William Cavanaugh acting as lead attorney for that lawsuit.

Google has repeatedly tried to present its search as just one part of a broader network of services such as TikTok and Amazon that people use to search for information or products. That Google favors its own products in its search is fairly obvious to anyone who has ever used the search engine, used Chrome or noticed how much of their data is being siphoned.

Back in the day, Internet Explorer was bundled with Microsoft’s Windows operating system, and Microsoft ensured it was just about impossible to remove. Microsoft hasn’t actually changed much as it tries to force me to use Bing AI or Edge in any way that it can on this sad state of Windows.

Google has engaged in a course of anticompetitive and exclusionary conduct that consisted of neutralizing or eliminating ad tech competitors through acquisitions; wielding its dominance across digital advertising markets to force more publishers and advertisers to use its products; and thwarting the ability to use competing products. In doing so, Google cemented its dominance in tools relied on by website publishers and online advertisers, as well as the digital advertising exchange that runs ad auctions.

It’s no secret. But Monopoly Capitalism has been so normalized, even on the stock market only about 10 companies really matter things have become so centralized.

Judge Amit Mehta, an Obama appointee from 2014, is presiding over the case and will decide on a ruling. There is no jury in the trial. This is what rule of law looks like in the U.S. today.

When Apple first installed Google as the default search engine in 2002, no payments were involved, prosecutors said.

But by 2005, worried about its lead eroding, Google proposed to pay the company - later threatening to cancel payments if other firms got similar access, the government said. Today BigTech bribes everyone including the CCP for access. They call it how business works. They defend each other because they rely on each other, much in the way a drug cartel does.

Top executives at Google and its corporate parent Alphabet Inc., as well as those from other powerful technology companies are expected to testify. Among them is likely to be Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, who succeeded Google co-founder Larry Page four years ago. Court documents also suggest that Eddy Cue, a high ranking Apple executive, might be called to the stand.

Google’s anticompetitive conduct has included:

• Acquiring Competitors: Engaging in a pattern of acquisitions to obtain control over key digital advertising tools used by website publishers to sell advertising space;

• Forcing Adoption of Google’s Tools: Locking in website publishers to its newly-acquired tools by restricting its unique, must-have advertiser demand to its ad exchange, and in turn, conditioning effective real-time access to its ad exchange on the use of its publisher ad server;

• Distorting Auction Competition: Limiting real-time bidding on publisher inventory to its ad exchange, and impeding rival ad exchanges’ ability to compete on the same terms as Google’s ad exchange; and

• Auction Manipulation: Manipulating auction mechanics across several of its products to insulate Google from competition, deprive rivals of scale, and halt the rise of rival technologies.

Google isn’t just an Ads machine, it’s a Monopoly Capitalism bottleneck holding us back from so much new innovation. The same Meta has done, the same Amazon is doing, and so forth down the line. Now Apple, Microsoft, Netflix and others are racing to become more powerful in digital advertising. The Cartel is growing. And the conduct and affiliations of these entities is becoming stale and corrupt, and a dystopia of Silicon Valley’s decline is emerging for anybody looking for the signs.

The government has asked for "structural relief" if it wins - which could mean the break-up of the company. Can you imagine Google Cloud or YouTube as their own companies? I cannot.

Microsoft bundles products even worse. Amazon and TikTok are growing into Advertising that will eat Meta’s lunch. But it’s hard to eat Google’s lunch, and that’s the point. Are LLMs real innovation or just new tools for Silicon Valley to maintain control? Generative A.I. might be a gigantic head-fake, and people are buying into it.

The company is also facing a federal lawsuit over its advertising business and has found itself in the crosshairs in Europe, where it has been fined billions in monopoly cases. Up until now and since Microsoft in the 90s, antitrust regulation in American has been pretty dysfunctional and the health of Capitalism has deteriorate significantly. Young people no longer really believe in it, including algorithmic democracy, where social media Ads help win campaigns.

This is the world Silicon Valley optimism 30 years ago has built, this is what the world has to inherit. It’s not U.S. leadership, it’s American corruption. It’s cartels in the forms of technology.

History shows us that justice is rarely served in such cases. Think about it, Mehta will probably take months before ultimately making a decision in the case, with a ruling expected early next year. It is unclear what punitive measures Google would face if found guilty of violating antitrust law. The case has drawn comparisons to the justice department’s 1998 antitrust suit against Microsoft, which resulted in a marquee trial that ended with a judge ordering Microsoft be broken up into separate companies. That order was later overturned, with the government and Microsoft later agreeing to a watered-down settlement.

America is a corrupt state, and pretending otherwise is sort of foolhardy and naive at this point. The Justice Department filed its antitrust lawsuit against Google nearly three years ago during the Trump administration, alleging that the company has used its internet search dominance to gain an unfair advantage against competitors. By the time this is all finished, Donald Trump might be president again. Since 2020, the BigTech cartel has gotten a lot stronger.

The end of Silicon Valley has resulted in a winner-takes-all scenario. And Generative A.I. and AGI could be the beginning of a dark age of dystopia.

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I have found it amusing and troubling that a low quality publication claiming OpenAI will go bankrupt has been copy-pasta-ed into an entire movement this week. This shows you the level of Indian journalism too where the writers quote “a report”.

Analytics India Magazine has highlighted a consistent decrease in users on the ChatGPT website during the first half of this year.

ChatGPT Is Losing Users Fast

OpenAI’s flagship product ChatGPT has been getting a lot less traffic of late to be sure.

ChatGPT harnessed the power of AI and gave us a chatbot that could reply to queries in the form of a natural conversation that’s more acceptable to humans but it seems that initial amazement is over, and the product is not very sticky.

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This human looks like a good actor, sure.

Hey Everyone,

I hope you are having a good summer. I recently came across one of the more outrageous quotes I’ve seen in the era of Generative A.I. It’s a great LinkedIn threadbois sort of topic.

Mostaque was speaking at a show hosted by author Peter H Diamandis when he made the startling revelation.

The credibility of this founder was already on shaky legs. Stability A.I. has been struggling to get funding to keep up with its peers.

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The famous “quote” occured about 10 days ago, you can listen to it here:

Peter Diamandis is also one of those Silicon Valley transhumanists who is always hyping up the future in the traditional VC-bro “let’s live forever” manner. It’s all very Singularity University.

But at what point does marketing and PR reach a toxic sort of misinformation point? While coders are embracing A.I. tools and things like GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT and maybe even OpenAI’s Code Interpreter, why would there be no coders in five years?

If that’s true, incompetent and false-promising CEOs might also be replaced. Part of the job of a CEO is to be a salesperson, but should that including lying about our resume or making huge promises about the field? And do I care about having ChatGPT on my phone without the internet? WTF.

The problem with the Generative A.I. hype is its a shareholder stock boom sort of bubble. Some believe hyping up the field is for their own benefit, that there is ROI in pretending LLMs will magically change the world for the better.

Peter Diamandis is no stranger to exaggerating the future. But no coders in 5 years?

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See you around? Maybe?

Hey Guys,

Many of you reading this are software engineers, data scientists, data engineers and Cloud tech workers. The future of work is starting to concern me a bit more as I curate A.I. news and think about the “studies” coming out.

Over 300,000 tech workers gone in the first half of 2023. Facing an uncertain global economy and slowing revenue growth, technology companies have picked up the pace of layoffs in 2023, with total staff cuts now greater than all tech company job losses last year. However, educational companies are reporting they are likely to be disrupted by ChatGPT as well.

IBM says it might (read: will likely soon) around 7,800 humans with A.I. Why are we praising that which might disrupt us? Are we masochists or something?

Findings from the World Economic Forum, which on Sunday published a report based on surveys of more than 800 companies, have some potential implications we can discuss.

The World Economic Forum

🤖 Nearly one in four jobs are set to change over the next five years as a result of trends including artificial intelligence, digitization, the green energy transition and supply chain-reshoring, according to a new report from the World Economic Form.

The report, which is based on a survey of over 800 employers, also said global job markets are set for a "new era of turbulence" as clerical work declines and employment growth shifts to areas such as big data analytics, management technologies and cybersecurity.

• Employers expect to create 69 million new jobs by 2027 and eliminate 83 million positions, with a net loss of 14 million jobs, it said.

• Up to 26 million jobs in record-keeping and administrative positions will be eliminated as roughly 75% of surveyed companies said they expect to adopt AI technologies over the next five years.

• Slower economic growth, supply shortages and inflation remain a bigger threat to jobs than AI for now, the report said.

I will be cover this topic in a future post on A.I. Supremacy (fresh layout).

If you are curious to read the report, here it is:

Future of Jobs Report 2023

So why does this headline concern me and why should it maybe concern you?

Nearly 25% of jobs are set to be disrupted in the next five years — and A.I. could play a key role: World Economic Forum

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It’s the way in which the WEC obtained the data of these projections that’s salient.

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Welcome Back,

I’m finally back from my Visa trip to Singapore, so regular posts should be resuming this or next week.

After a day when ChatGPT went down and people could see the histories of other users, we needed a refresh.

From Tuesday users can join waiting list for access to technology that firm hopes will rival Bing Chat and ChatGPT.

Meet Bard

Google has been working on Big Bard, it’s upgraded version of Bard, one of the chatbots along with DeepMind’s sparrow that is seen as a direct competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

After a week when GPT-4 and Claude launched, as well as Midjourney V5 and other spectacular Generative A.I. tools, we come to this.

As much time as Google took to train and test Bard, these Conversational AIs will be far from free from hallucinations. Google’s LaMDA and PaLM really will be the basis for so many things. The latest ChatGPT outage comes amid increasing concern over the damage that artificial intelligence could do to artists and other industries.

I found this Bard vs. Bing video somewhat illustrative of just how many chatbots we are now being bombarded with.

While some journalists seem primed to push yet another chatbot to the brink, I have more faith in Google’s Bard and Sparrow and PaLM based tools than a host of the other Conversational AIs and tools, outside of Anthropic AI’s Claude, which seems built for trust and safety first.

There is something poetic about the battle of the text-to-image generators and Conversational AIs, it’s early days but the competition appears healthy. BigTech is now basically funding the top startups in the domain around their Cloud services with Microsoft, Google and even Amazon well represented.

There is also something eventful about Microsoft trying to take on Google in search, for however much of the Search Ad market that’s worth. And trained with human feedback? Google CEO Sundar Pichai told employees in a memo on Tuesday that user feedback will be critical to its chatbot (Bard’s) success. 80,000 employees participated in testing Bard, Pichai wrote.

If Ron DeSantis says Google must be broken up, the reality is its A.I. products are just getting started. Corporations too powerful? You haven’t seen anything yet. Google plans around twenty A.I. related products in 2023 and 2024.

Until now, Google’s chatbot was only available to what it’s called “trusted testers”. The ChatGPT glitch really is the perfect week to give Bard a bigger audience. You can interact with Bard to ask questions and refine the answer with follow-up queries.

Read Google's Blog about Bard

You can use Bard to boost your productivity, accelerate your ideas and fuel your curiosity. You might ask Bard to give you tips to reach your goal of reading more books this year or about what to do as you travel. It’s nice to know that we aren’t locked into spending $20 on ChatGPT, there are so many alternatives.

Just keep in mind that data you feed into these Chatbots will be used for data collective and personalized Advertising purposes and maybe even more sinister profiling. As someone who is moderately privacy conscious I cannot quite imagine how gullible people are to share very personal information with corporations so easily.

Give it to me straight Generative A.I., let me see where your Conversational A.I. is at.

Thanks for reading!

I’ll be traveling to Singapore soon so I’m not sure how active I’ll be writing wise in the next week, just a heads up.

There is so much hype about Generative A.I. now in 2023, it cannot possibly live up to the impossible expectations set forth in the false-advertising internet we have today around the capabilities or adoption of A.I.

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While I think multimodal large language models (MLLMs) will improve drastically in the mid 2020s, we are nowhere near AGI. I find myself obsessed with Microsoft’s KOSMOS-1 this weekend and its implications on the video A.I. of GPT-4 about to hit the mainstream.

I come across more articles just in ChatGPT in a day than I could possibly read, but to assume that AGI is near or just around the corner by OpenAI. But is that even close to the truth? I grow increasingly skeptical of the rhetoric even as the Venture Capital bank of Silicon Valley has suddenly imploded and Billionaires are asking the Government to bail it out.

We haven’t even created a truthful or honest internet guys. How could we regulate or keep it safe if we let an AGI lose into the world? While we ponder what’s next in LLMs, can we truly say GPT-4 will bring us a better world?

AGI is a dangerous goal for Silicon Valley, who can barely regulate itself or protect their own. The push toward humanlike artificial general intelligence (AGI) however will require equipping such models with additional capabilities — and multimodal perception is an essential next step. But as robots themselves develop these capabilities, are we building the foundations for dystopia?

To embody MLLMs into the world, is to set a dangerous momentum of consequences we cannot even imagine in 2023. Perhaps we should stop to consider what we are doing with A.I., before it’s too late to reverse the exponential fever of funding that will build more and better. I cannot help but sense I’m living through an end-of-times moment, that is, the beginning of dystopia. The middle class is being crushed by inflation and debt, and A.I. is the supposed savior? How do those sci-fi novels usually end up?

I enjoy writing about A.I., but what will be the cost of the world we are creating with it increasingly at the helm? What will stop Google, OpenAI, Tesla or Microsoft from placing MLLMs inside of robots at scale? And what might that do to humanity if a general purpose robot becomes cheaper to make than it is to hire a person? Is that really the utopia we want for our children?

Progress doesn’t always bring the outcome we had hoped. Smart phones aren’t doing us any favors for our mental health or the most important thing in well-being, real social connectivity. But the machine demands our attention, and so does the cash-cow of digital advertising. Now those funds will be used to develop A.I. systems of further enhancement and entrapment, whatever the brain-computer-interface turns out to be. Likely a neuro-mesh with A.I. itself.

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As techno-optimistic as I try to be, I can’t help feeling we might be letting our descendants down with how we are building the future of A.I. We are heralding the tools of automation and wealth-inequality at such a scale I don’t believe our democracies or our versions of capitalism will survive it. The rise of Generative A.I. and the fall of Silicon Valley Bank colliding in 2023, is not a coincidence that’s lost on me. And Silicon Valley is telling us to bail out its favorite bank.

Meanwhile OpenAI is shrouded in secrecy and heralding AGI as if this is good for society, humanity and free-will? If I cannot even prompt ChatGPT (and it’s dozens of clones) well, I’m actually at a significant disadvantage to even keep up. I don’t even believe in the capability of this being empowering A.I. The woke left-leaning biased foundational models are a funnel of supposedly good information.

Microsoft Germany CTO, Andreas Braun, confirmed that GPT-4 is coming within a week of March 9, 2023 and that it will be multimodal. Will multimodal Artificial Generative Intelligence (MAGI) be good for monopoly Capitalism, or will it just enable companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Apple to become even more powerful crushing all that opposes them? Even as LinkedIn becomes some cringe version of the TikTok of business professional posts. Do I now want GPT-4 generated videos on LinkedIn to improve my productivity?

LLMs with multimodal perception will be better equipped to acquire commonsense knowledge beyond the information they glean from text alone; and that this perception enrichment will facilitate LLM applications in new domains such as robotics and document intelligence. Do I want to live in a world full of robots, chatbots and potentially even an AGI to thwart, compete with and serve me? Smarter than my cat and only bound to get even more capable in the ever more sophisticated machine driven economy?

GPT-4 might be the biggest step towards AGI we’ve had in many decades, but that doesn’t mean that it will lead to a better world. In fact, the Ukraine war and the response to the pandemic has shown humanity isn’t ready for more dangerous tools less a lot of people will get seriously hurt.

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Hey Everyone,

So before Google’s event Microsoft tried to one-up-them with its own emergency announcement (which we already knew was coming). The CEO of Scale AI, recently said in a tweet something interesting:

Google’s $15B deal with Apple to be the default search on iPhone will be re-negotiated and be a bidding war between MSFT/Bing and Google. It will become at least $25B, if not more. If MSFT is willing to spend $10B on OpenAI, they’ll spend even more here. - Alexandr Wang

So the Search Advertising industry has some complex shifting that is indeed possible here.

On one side you want to cheer on someone breaking up the Search Ad monopoly, on the other hand you wish it wasn’t just Microsoft. People like the Verge, a tad more dramatic about it all:

AI is coming for your browser, your social media, and your operating system, too.

But will Bing, Edge even with “more powerful” ChatGPT be an interface we will actually use more? I find it hard to believe.

Especially if Google Bard can replicate ChatGPT’s utility. Google is now going after investing more into AnthropicAI and Cohere, so it’s not a good sign for Microsoft who just gambled on OpenAI.

I’ll get this Newsletter back on track with more data engineering and data science stuff, but in the meantime just trying to follow this A.I. positioning and repositioning has kept me a bit busy and a lot of good side plots.

Bing says “Ask me anything”, but that’s just the thing, I’ve never wanted to ask it anything.

I’m having trouble being excited about the OpenAI deal:

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Microsoft announced that the next version of the Bing search engine would be powered by OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT. There’s also a new version of the Edge web browser with OpenAI chat tech in a window that can help you browse and understand web pages. 

Yes we know, but give us more info about GPT-4 if you please.

Microsoft is revamping its search products with more artificial intelligence, using technology behind the wildly popular ChatGPT, as tech companies race to take advantage of increasingly powerful AI tools.

If Search advertising is the big deal, then I actually expect Amazon and ByteDance to begin to take marketshare away from Google, not Microsoft, no matter how good Bing is, it’s just not tied to anything relevant.

ChatGPT type experiences will be everywhere in a mere six months. What is the unique value proposition? To use it inside Outlook, Edge, Excel or Teams? To use it with Sales Navigator (an expensive LinkedIn paid product) or in tandem with GitHub Copilot?

“This technology is going to reshape pretty much every software category,” said Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft, in a briefing for reporters at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington.

Translation TL;DR: We think it can improve our advertising revenue.

All this means is Microsoft is getting more into advertising, getting more ambitious and more greedy, as we can witness with the Activision deal, which would be horrible for the future of gaming.

Microsoft tries to brute-force me to use its products, so what’s new?

Microsoft defaults? Windows already thinks it owns me! LinkedIn exploits my labor for its own Ad network, without even giving me ownership of my Email list!

Microsoft’s Prometheus Model

Underpinning the search engine is a new proprietary technology Microsoft is calling the Prometheus Model. Among the benefits of Prometheus are more relevant search results. Microsoft claims the model will also make using Bing safer and allow the company to update search results more quickly. 

the next release of Bing will feature a new next-generation large language model the company claims is "much more powerful" than ChatGPT and designed specifically to excel at search. 

• I think it means GPT-4 integrated with real-time web data.

• But more powerful and better optimized for humans than LaMDA and Bard?

• That is after all, the real question.

Microsoft is Trying to Reinvent Itself with OpenAI Paint

Microsoft played a good game of “digital transformation” during the pandemic, and scaled Teams and other things rather well. But now it’s once again coming into anti-competitive territory.

LLMs and Transformers impact everything, not just Microsoft software, search, web browsers or current subscription products.

I understand this is like a $14 Billion investment for them, but what gives?

Radically More Productive Professionals

The in-depth presentation showed how OpenAI running in Bing and Edge could radically increase your productivity. They demo’d it making a travel itinerary, posting to LinkedIn, and rewriting code to work in a different programming language.

It sounds a bit like Google Duplex on Bing.

Bing, specifically, is getting a large update that allows you to chat with it to get more detailed answers to search queries. You can ask Bing to plan a trip, for example, and then ask it how much that trip will cost. Are they going to charge for Bing now, I don’t get it.

Yusuf Mehdi did say something interesting however:

There are 10 billion search queries a day, but we estimate half of them go unanswered. That’s because people are using search to do things it wasn’t originally designed to do. It’s great for finding a website, but for more complex questions or tasks too often it falls short. - Yusuf Mehdi

Can Bing deliver more value than Google? That is the question.

Satya Nadella has been overly bullish on A.I. and that to me means Azure really isn’t growing as fast, they need another shiny thing they can parade around. The problem here is it’s not just Google with Bard and Sparrow (and 18 other A.I. products waiting to release), it’s the entire world and dozens of A.I. labs and startups who are hot on their heels.

More Powerful than ChatGPT

Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s consumer chief marketing officer, said at the briefing that the Bing search engine would be powered by AI and run on a new, next-generation “large language model” that is more powerful than ChatGPT.

Making claims like these doesn’t exactly help to give them credibility either.

Even Reuters had a clickbait title: Microsoft packs Bing search engine, Edge browser with AI in big challenge to Google

Is there any proof at all that this is true? Is ChatGPT demo access the KPI we are supposed to believe? The 100 million users in two months stat?

So is Edge or Bing supposed to be the place we do our Prometheus Model thing? Or is the entire OS supposed to be smart just because it has ChatGPT and GPT-4 integration? And will it really make me more productive (which I highly doubt)?

A chatbot will help users refine queries more easily, give more relevant, up-to-date results and even make shopping easier. Shopping on Edge or Bing? Don’t we mostly skip these things and go straight to Amazon or TikTok?

Prometheus is supposed to be like my new “Copilot” to the web:

The new Bing and Edge – Your copilot for the web

We have brought together search, browsing and chat into one unified experience you can invoke from anywhere on the web, delivering:

• Better search. The new Bing gives you an improved version of the familiar search experience, providing more relevant results for simple things like sports scores, stock prices and weather, along with a new sidebar that shows more comprehensive answers if you want them.

• Complete answers. Bing reviews results from across the web to find and summarize the answer you’re looking for. For example, you can get detailed instructions for how to substitute eggs for another ingredient in a cake you are baking right in that moment, without scrolling through multiple results.

• A new chat experience. For more complex searches – such as for planning a detailed trip itinerary or researching what TV to buy – the new Bing offers new, interactive chat. The chat experience empowers you to refine your search until you get the complete answer you are looking for by asking for more details, clarity and ideas – with links available so you can immediately act on your decisions.

• A creative spark. There are times when you need more than an answer – you need inspiration. The new Bing can generate the content to help you. It can help you write an email, create a 5-day itinerary for a dream vacation to Hawaii, with links to book your travel and accommodations, prep for a job interview or create a quiz for trivia night. The new Bing also cites all its sources, so you’re able to see links to the web content it references.

• New Microsoft Edge experience. We’ve updated the Edge browser with new AI capabilities and a new look, and we’ve added two new functionalities: Chat and compose. With the Edge Sidebar, you can ask for a summary of a lengthy financial report to get the key takeaways – and then use the chat function to ask for a comparison to a competing company’s financials and automatically put it in a table. You can also ask Edge to help you compose content, such as a LinkedIn post, by giving it a few prompts to get you started. After that, you can ask it to help you update the tone, format and length of the post. Edge can understand the web page you’re on and adapts accordingly.

Haha nice try Microsoft. I’ll do anything not to use your products personally. But there’s no alternatives to windows, LinkedIn and so forth. An Internet without alternatives is really not a good thing.

The in-depth presentation showed how OpenAI running in Bing and Edge could radically increase your productivity.

Travel is one of the biggest Search Ad funnels for Google, so Prometheus thinks that’s a good place for disruption to occur. (see above). Just Google Duplex (2018) for Travel. Not exactly mind blowing.

Bing and Edge and Teams just aren’t products that make me feel like I want to use them. So how does the Prometheus Model change my relationship to this corporations that’s always trying to force itself on me?

Can a Microsoft Mobile app version of Bing with ChatGPT save it? It can maybe increase its marketshare a bit?

The company said a waitlist will be available for the full version and said it will be available to millions of people in the coming weeks. Microsoft also plans a mobile version of Bing.

Microsoft is now aiming to market OpenAI’s technology, including ChatGPT, to its cloud customers and add the same power to its suite of products.

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Hey Everyone,

So OpenAI had a good demo with ChatGPT, they got tons of data for free to optimize their RLHF for GPT-4 (coming out in May, 2023).

The WSJ has reported internally they are valuing themselves at $29 Billion, even in a global economic climate that is showing significant Earnings and margins compression.

This is like Sam Altman putting on his SBF face. (see image above).

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I understand how A.I. hype works, but this isn’t ethical. The 7 year old startup is in talks to sell existing shares in a tender offer that would value the company at around $29 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, making it one of the most valuable U.S. startups on paper despite generating little revenue.

This is also to strong-arm a bigger amount from Microsoft for less share. But there’s no real indication ChatGPT will enable Microsoft Bing to take on Google anytime soon, in spite of plans to roll it out around March, 2023.

Basically OpenAI has burned through cash very quickly I speculate, and the startup is in panic mode but pretending it’s all good due to the PR manufactured hype created by the ChatGPT demo event in December, 2022.

If you have followed the ChatGPT coverage closely, Twitter and LinkedIn appear to have been complicit into helping to generate the hype. Elon Musk was a cofounder of OpenAI and Microsoft is a sponsor, major conflicts of interesting.

Venture-capital firms Thrive Capital and Founders Fund are in talks to invest in the deal, which would total at least $300 million in share sales, the people said. The deal is structured as a tender offer, with the investors buying shares from existing shareholders such as employees, the people said.

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It’s a pit of shady Venture Capital startup politics at work, where the transaction is structured as a tender offer, where investor buy shares from existing holders.

Now I thought the valuation of Open at $20 Billion was ridiculous, but nearly $30 Billion? It’s beyond comprehension. It’s pure greed, considering how far from democratizing A.I. OpenAI has become as a closed company, totally against the spirit in which it was originally founded.

The new deal would roughly double OpenAI’s valuation from a prior tender offer completed in 2021, when OpenAI was valued at about $14 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported.

But how profitable is the fledgling startup? As influential as GPT has been for A.I. as a whole, it’s not exactly with a considerable moat and what revenue? OpenAI has generated just tens of millions of dollars in revenue, in part from selling its AI software to developers, but some investors have expressed skepticism that the company can generate meaningful revenue from the technology. Skepticism? It’s A.I. hype robbery.

It’s A.I. kool-aid of the worst kind, the unprofitable kind. The $29 billion valuation for OpenAI would be about double the $14 billion valuation the company was valued at in 2021, when it last completed a tender offer, according to the WSJ.

This is all somewhat internal or a planned leak to try to boost its value artificially. In the real world, this shows very poor leadership and integrity. No final deal has been reached and terms could change, the people said. OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Listen OpenAI has been a trail-blazer but things are moving fast and it’s just one startup. OpenAI released a series of artificial intelligence-based products last year that captured the public’s attention, including the image-generation program Dall-E 2 and chatbot ChatGPT. Now there is Stability.AI and so many other A.I. labs and Google competing directly with them with LaMDA likely as mature as ChatGPT in the first place.

Where is their moat? What is their unique value proposition besides starting a trend of A.I labs selling out to BigTech for access to their supercomputers? It’s actually a disgrace that could dangerously lead to a more centralized A.I. innovation hub ruled by the Cloud such as Azure, AWS and Google Cloud.

Listen I enjoy the reporting by the WSJ, but it’s horrible news. Microsoft Corp. has also been in advanced talks to increase its investment in OpenAI, the Journal reported. In 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI and became its preferred partner for commercializing new technologies for services like search engine Bing and design app Microsoft Design.

It’s positively dystopian how A.I. hype can be manipulated via Twitter and other channels just for a startup to pretend it’s worth more than it is. PaLM with RLHF is open-source, OpenAI’s servitude of the goals of Microsoft is actually a red alert for anti-trust violations in the A.I. and Cloud space. Generative A.I. was supposed to be about a democratization of A.I.

What do you think?

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Could Bing Disrupt Google with ChatGPT?

Hey Everyone,

I’ve made a Poll debating this question here.

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This is a breaking story. According to the Information, Bing will release its Search with ChatGPT as soon as March, 2023. Share this story on Reddit.

👀 ChatGPT has prompted some to proclaim that AI chat will kill traditional search engines. Google is said to be at “code red” over the technology, while a new report today says Microsoft is “preparing to launch a version of its Bing search engine that uses the artificial intelligence behind ChatGPT to answer some search queries.”

If this story is true, then the Chatbot wars of 2023 will be happening sooner than some of us thought. GPT-4 is cited as coming out in the Spring.

The idea here is that Microsoft could soon get a return on its $1 billion investment in OpenAI, creator of the ChatGPT chatbot, which gives humanlike text answers to questions.

ChatGPT’s demo in December, 2022 was fairly popular, if the Bing version is even better, could it begin to challenge and encroach on Google? Google has been more careful and cautious testing out its LaMDA internally and with many iterations. Executives there appear to fear its brand reputation damage if things go poorly.

👁️‍🗨️ Microsoft already announced plans for integrating Dall-E 2 into Bing Image Creator where you can issue a descriptive text prompt and AI artwork is generated.

Microsoft is preparing to launch a version of its Bing search engine that uses the artificial intelligence behind ChatGPT to answer some search queries rather than just showing a list of links, according to two people with direct knowledge of the plans.

This is not speculative, according to The Information this is happening.

However, “Bing will still rely on its own technology to produce most search results” as GPT isn’t meant to “continuously scrape the web or provide real-time information like a search engine does.” Meanwhile, it remains to be seen how Bing will ensure the accuracy of answers. 

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Will Chatbots Disrupt Search /or Complement Them?

It remains to be seen if 2023 can herald significant advances in Conversational A.I. and HER (the 2013 movie like) smart answers for a significant diversity of queries that are safe and helpful.

As much as RLHF is making progress, there still seems to be a lot of meaningful work to do. The error, fact-misinformation and hallucation rate still seems rather higher in the ChatGPT demo, would a Bing product be so vastly different after just four months?

We are living in an era where search engines are painstakingly faster when offering the most relevant piece of information with utmost precision — but at what cost? Some users were using ChatGPT in its demo more or instead of Google. This meant Search could be disrupted in the 2020s, depending on what occurs.

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Hey Guys,

I think a lot about the Modern data stack and companies like Snowflake and Databricks. Snowflake still has an incredible market cap of $46 billion and I’ve always wondered what Databricks would do on the public markets.

Seattle Data Guy (I think Ben now lives in Denver) has covered Databricks pretty well in 2022. I wanted to feature his YouTubes on this topic because I really admire creators that are doing consulting, YouTube and Newsletters as diversified self-employed entrepreneurs.

Mehdi Ouazza (Berlin) recently started a Newsletter too. This new trend of data engineering folk being also creators on YouTube and Substack is not going to slow down in 2023.

Mehdio's Tech (Data) Corner

data engineering, tech, career and coding ‍💻

By mehdio

The Difference Between Databricks and Snowflake

TechCrunch provides some context:

A historical tour of Databricks’ valuation multiples

Pulling from our February and April coverage, a historical rundown of Databricks’ valuation and fundraising:

• Q3 2019: $200 million run rate, $6.2 billion valuation — 31x run-rate multiple.

• End of 2020: $425 million ARR, $28 billion valuation — 66x ARR multiple.

• August 2021: $600 million ARR, $38 billion valuation — 63x ARR multiple.

• End of 2021: $800 million+ ARR, $38 billion valuation — 47.5x ARR multiple.

If you consider IPOs that are maybe expected in 2023, I think you have to count Databricks as one of the bigger ones among this list:

Here are the 6 monster IPOs to look forward to in 2023:

• ByteDance

• Databricks

• Versa Networks

• Flexport

• Stripe (2024 imho)

• Arm

• Reddit

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Hey Guys,

Midjourney is incredible, it’s maybe one of the most accessible and well performing text-to-image generators. The reason these LLMs are controversial though is also about how they scrape the internet.

David Holz, creator of the now very popular and also controversial AI image rendering platform Midjourney. But is it really that controversial, hey everyone is doing it!

I respect him actually for admitting the obvious, that his company never received any consent for the use of hundreds of millions of images it used. These were fed to its AI for the sake of training it at image generation.

I’m not sure why it matters, but somehow a Tweet went viral. The revelation by Holz was first made public virally by Twitter users who shared an interview (Forbes Paywalled) with the entrepreneur conducted by Forbes Magazine in September of this year.

During the Q&A with the famous business magazine, the Midjourney founder is at one point asked if he sought consent from living artists or owners of work still under copyright for his AI training.

Holz bluntly answered, “No. There isn’t really a way to get a hundred million images and know where they’re coming from.” This of course should have been obvious.

Everything from ChatGPT, to GitHub Copilot to DALL-E 2 just scrapes the internet. And we are talking about the infinite incredible A.I. of 2022? It’s just funny. These companies laugh in the face of copyright under a “fair use” argument. They claim that gaining permission from the creators of so many different photos and other visuals would indeed have been extraordinarily difficult if not impossible.

Everyone is cutting corners. I wonder what Lensa A.I. did to get to that platinum selling app and profile pictures made to “augment” your profile pictures? To be honest, it’s legitimizing deepfake culture and an anonymous internet culture that’s even more difficult to moderate. It’s obviously degrading to women. Prisma Labs is basically made by a bunch of scheming Russians. They they made $Billions on the back of Generative A.I. hype in 2022, is the sad state of A.I. today.

I have much more respect for Stability A.I. and Midjourney. The Midjourney creator further elaborated, “It would be cool if images had metadata embedded in them about the copyright owner or something. But that’s not a thing; there’s not a registry.”

In scraping our internet, and transforming it with LLMs, are we building something actually good or useful or engaging? There’s no regulation of internet culture, so it’s the wild-wild west of rule of law, monetization reigns supreme. These are really poor incentives for A.I. to evolve with. The commercialization of Generative A.I. could result in major harms, foundationals bias and use that like algorithmic feeds, might damage people in a mental health or undermine free speech, democracy and increase civil unrest, even instigate conditions whereby civil wars become more probable.

And yet, it’s business as normal? That’s not a healthy version of Capitalism.

He also said that “There’s no way to find a picture on the internet, and then automatically trace it to an owner and then have any way of doing anything to authenticate it.” So while You.Com seeks to add a ChatGPT competitor with citations, and others play around with the idea, we’re mostly going blind and riding a virus unleashed into the wild.

Yet people are finding ways to utilize ChatGPT and Midjourney together in novel ways:

The Generative A.I. hype isn’t necessarily innovative, it’s mostly degrading rule of law, normalizing deepfake culture and stimulating a less human internet. ChatGPT hype is a wave for commercial profit, and everyone wants in on the game. Of course if you’ve studied Silicon Valley and its VC system, you’ve seen many such hype cycles before (and know how they usually turn out).

PetalPixel notes: Holz’s words have resurfaced in interviews of outraged Twitter users, partly due to an artist protest against AI images. I’ve been thinking in my “end of year” ruminations about how Anti-AI protests are getting shut down, barely covered by the mainstream media and more or less suppressed. This will tempt Substack provocative narrative builders to build a BigTech revolut movement. I expect it to be born in 2023 or 2024. The A.I. ethics concern, is a growing concerns and every indication I’ve seen means 2023 is worse for potential outcomes for the health and well-being of the internet.

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OpenAI for not being open has started a trend, some even speculate this will become the norm:

This means 2023 could usher in a dark era of the commercialization of A.I. without rules or ethics or any much rule of law. I won’t speculate on the harm ChatGPT “hallucinations” could cause people but suffice to say it was enough to ban it on Stack Overflow.

Guys this is not A.I. Utopia. Also in the interview, Holz says that Midjourney’s dataset was built from “a big scrape of the internet.” This is basically just A.I. learning to copy the world of people. Is that A.I. for Good at work? If GitHub can replace some of your coders with a tool that makes software engineers more productive, necessarily a good thing? Hey only $19 for an enterprise account!

“What baffles me is that David Holz blatantly admits to theft and copyright infringement in this article! His attitude is, ‘yeah, we stole from you to build a platform that we make a profit from, what are you going to do about it,'” says artist Dave Lung.

Standing on the Shoulders of Monopoly Capitalists

People like David Holz and Sam Altman make these various disclaims on Twitter, also for their own self-interests. It makes them look more transparent. It’s all just a VC game to them in the end. Their entire job is to maximize profit with the least legal liability. And if any lawsuits came, we know in America that would be at least a decade in the future. Such is the obscene corrupt of Silicon Valley as it relates to Congress and Washington, lobbying and Senators on the take.

Facebook and Google have led with mafia tactics, so why should we expect anything different from mere startups? Even if such a registry did indeed exist for so many photos, the sheer quantity of them, likely in the hundreds of millions, would make actually seeking consent from each image’s creator into a task worthy of the pyramid builders.

Creating pyramid schemes and walled gardens, from Bitcoin to Facebook or Google, is what Silicon Valley does. It’s a lawless aristocracy of white men in Venture Capital calling the shots. Didn’t you know?

We cannot expect Midjourney to behave otherwise. Stability AI announced it would allow artists to remove their work from the training dataset for an upcoming Stable Diffusion 3.0 release. The move comes as an artist advocacy group called Spawning tweeted that Stability AI would honor opt-out requests collected on its Have I Been Trained website. The details of how the plan will be implemented remain incomplete and unclear, however.

How would we even implement this at scale? It makes no sense. These startups don’t want to do any heavy lifting for citations, so it all rests on the artists? It’s practically criminal.

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Generative A.I. is not all hype and app monetization. There is a darks side to Generative A.I. The internet is about to become even less trustworthy with even more spam, with even less ability for A.I. to help moderate content that’s already letting in a lot of fake content and misinformation. The internet has become more about sales, spam, PR and online personas that have little to do with actual people. The flood of content from Generative A.I., won’t’ be doing it any favors.

There’s already been an exodus from legacy social media. This might actually make it worse.

Despite the implicit logistics hurdles, the artistic Twitter backlash from some corners against this admission by Holz shouldn’t have surprised anyone. It’s hurting real people, even if they are limited in their ability to advocate for their own online human rights.

There is not a great deal of poetic justice, when Silicon Valley comes knocking on your craft with roses and cheap knock-offs:

So what we going to do? Mostly nothing. 2023 will be a chaos-spawn of more infringement on humans and their creative work thanks to A.I. fit on a pedestal pushed by rich men. Silicon Valley and the CCP are now more and more able to manipulate the internet as a whole, as evidenced by Elon Musk Buying Twitter for $44 Billion. LinkedIn itself has this PayPal Mafia vibe all over it, even do this day.

And we’re supposed to trust the internet? Find entertainment in these tools and products? Is this all that humanity is capable of?

What’s more, this backlash comes right on the heels of an earlier but still ongoing protest against the art sale platform ArtStation because this latter site is now allowing AI-rendered images to be sold on it. Art Station recently decided to ban anti-AI images.

So to protect the Generative A.I. swag now, we are now censoring anti-AI images and online protests? That’s super ghetto and dystopian folks.

While the majority of uproar in recent days has come from digital artists, it’s something that affects photographers exactly the same. It affects more professionals than we care to realize, I recently wrote a Letter about it I’m about to publish on A.I. Supremacy Newsletter.

While we praise the tools, let’s also admit the dangers and point out the A.I ethics issues involved here. It’s not all for the good of Microsoft and more subscription services you know. WE are steering the internet down a dark alley, and it’s straight out of a dark dystopian Sci-fi fiction novel I may have read in the 1990s.

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