Tag: Elon Musk

Categories
AI technology

OpenAI gives Google, Amazon and Apple a hard time and Elon Musk had a tough month

OpenAI's ChatGPT is an accelerating snowball: how long before people search ChatGPT first for answers to their questions and for the best deals on products? Image: ChatGPT4

With all the wrangling at OpenAI, you would almost forget, but ChatGPT just celebrated its first birthday this week. Over a hundred million people use an OpenAI service each month, and annualized revenue is over $1.3 billion, a first step toward possible market dominance. 

ChatGPT4 nicer than Google

As a subscriber to ChatGPT, these days I ask almost every question first to ChatGPT4, instead of searching on Google. 'The best day to fly between Europe and Asia, what shoe size is Shaquille O'Neal and under what three names was that movie starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt released?' Just three questions I asked ChatGPT today. But also, 'tell me about investors Vinod Khosla and Reid Hoffman,' but more about them in a moment.

Compared to Google, ChatGPT's answers seem better and I like that I don't have to click through to other websites. No doubt Google has tracked the change in search behavior through Google Chrome and the other gimmicks Google uses to capture people's behavior. This makes it all the more painful that Google, according to The Information, decided this weekend to delay the launch of OpenAI competitor Gemini until early next year.

Search and buy through ChatGPT?

One company that is also seriously threatened by OpenAI is Amazon, and it is rarely noticed. Especially in the US, Amazon has become "the Google of buying": as soon as Americans think about buying something, they search directly on Amazon. Other websites no longer play a role here.

It looks like it will be months rather than years before ChatGPT is fed sales information from the world's largest online stores. All parties that now sell through Amazon Marketplace can then directly serve their customers outside of Amazon. Of course, fulfillment then remains an issue, and in that Amazon is almost unbeatable, but the company is not worth $1.5 trillion because it is so good at shipping packages efficiently.

Amazon is so valuable because it is where buyers find their products and where transactions take place. OpenAI has a great tool with ChatGPT to take over that function, because with its Plus subscribers it already has a payment relationship that can be easily expanded. Amazon is no doubt already formulating a response to this threat.

iPhone users switch from Siri

Apple is surely following with suspicion how many people program the new "action" button on the iPhone 15 with ChatGPT. The idea was that it would allow people to launch their email or camera app faster but article after article appears urging people to get rid of Siri as if from herpes after a ski weekend with a frat house.

A headline like "Throw Siri off your phone and use ChatGPT for help" must hurt intensely at Apple. Siri never became what Apple had hoped it would, and if many people use ChatGPT as the first search function on the iPhone, heads will roll at Apple. The question has long since ceased to be whether ChatGPT has this potential, but whether the OpenAI board will become stable enough quickly to successfully introduce this kind of product.

Hoffman and Khosla, billionaires with an opinion

Viewed in this light, it was nice to see an excellent podcast on Thursday featuring legendary entrepreneurs and investors Reid Hoffman (PayPal, LinkedIn, Greylock) and Vinod Khosla (Sun Microsystems, Khosla Ventures), both investors in OpenAI.

By the way, note the almost mocking title with which Khosla describes himself on LinkedIn: "venture assistant. That's like Lionel Messi creating a LinkedIn profile with the feature "ball boy.

Hoffman was the first contributor to OpenAI from one of his private foundations, when it was still just a benevolent club of academics. After all, you don't do well as a billionaire until you have at least one foundation named after yourself, although I found this one-page website for Hoffman's other foundation, the Aphorism Foundation, amusing.

Khosla put into OpenAI double what he had previously invested in a startup: $50 million. In short, Messrs. Hoffman and Khosla are not entirely neutral (cough).

No restriction of competition, China a risk

Hoffman focused on market forces in the conversation. " Startups are not hindered right now," he explained, despite the apparent dominance of OpenAI and mega-cap tech companies such as Microsoft. Hoffman has been on Microsoft's board since he sold LinkedIn to Microsoft and doesn't think his "own companies" have too much power. "I don't think it limits competition on any level," he said, to nobody's surprise.

Khosla called the focus on existential risks of AI "nonsensical talk from academics who have nothing better to do". But he sees China as a major risk and thinks the U.S. is "in a techno-economic" war with China and should take a tougher stance. " I would ban TikTok in a nanosecond," said Khosla, in contrast to Hoffman, who had spoken with President Biden just before recording the podcast. After all, if anyone knows the value of a good network, it is LinkedIn's founder.

Khosla is firmly against open-source AI models as well due to the China risk. Bio-risk and cyber risk are real concerns too, he noted. But if China or rogue viruses don’t kill us, Khosla thinks the near-future is very bright: “I do think in 10 years we’ll have free doctors, free tutors, free lawyers” all powered by AI.

Elon Musk had a tough month

At the last minute, Tesla published this amusing video in which the new Tesla Cybertruck makes mincemeat of a Porsche 911 in a sprint. Pay special attention to the bouncer, because the Cybertruck has something hanging from the tow hook and it's not a caravan. Marques Brownlee made a whopping 40-minute review video.

Tesla Cybertruck towing a Porsche 911 is faster than ... a Porsche 911.

Not everyone is a fan of the Cybertruck, for example, Engadget writes: "Teslaa's Cybertruck is a dystopian, masturbatory fantasy. In Elon's future, the rich should be allowed to dominate (and probably run over) the poor with impunity."

Cute that a Cybertruck gets to 60 miles an hour (100 km/h) in 2.6 seconds, but I am particularly curious to see how this paintless, silver doghouse weighing over three thousand kilos (over 6,000 lbs) behaves on a mountain pass full of hairpins. Or how you park it in reverse in the parking lot of your local supermarket.

Musk chases advertisers off

Reuters puts it beautifully, "Elon Musk is keen to achieve what no business leader has done before, from mass-producing electric cars to developing reusable space rockets. Now he is blazing another trail most chief executives have avoided: the profane insult.." Not only that: gross insult to customers.

Musk said it twice to advertisers who left his social media platform X for complimenting a text with anti-Semitic content: "go fuck yourself. 

Musk felt it necessary to name one such departing advertiser, Disney CEO Bob Iger, unprovoked. Consider the weeks Musk has had behind him: on November 18, SpaceX sent the Starship into space, where it blew up, intentional or not.

The same weekend saw the leadership fiasco at OpenAI, with the fired Sam Altman and the other key players communicating with the outside world almost exclusively through Musk's platform X. That was vindication for Musk, who earlier this year saw Mark Zuckerberg's Threads becoming the fastest-growing social media platform - dying out as quickly as it emerged, but that's for another time.

Due to Musk's unprecedentedly stupid action (his own words) of complimenting anti-Semitic sewer texts, many advertisers withdrew from X and the long term consequences remain to be seen. So Musk headed to Israel, which has been an unpopular midweek destination lately.

The irony of fuck and freedom of speech

Watch the whole item at Fox. Musk looks like captain Jack Sparrow after a rough night. He, probably just back from Israel and suffering from jet lag, looks even whiter than the average Fox viewer, and despite trying to appear masculine in his leather jacket with smutty teddy collar over a too-hot-washed t-shirt, he makes a vulnerable and frustrated impression. Here sits someone trying very hard to look like someone who is not trying very hard.

The whole segment at Fox is an adulation of Musk as a defender of freedom of speech, which was supposedly sorely missed when X was just called Twitter. I think the nice thing is that all five panelists, with that ball room dancing teacher in the middle surrounded by four born again nymphs, don't realize that it's hilarious that they spend minutes talking about freedom of speech, but the term "fuck" used by Musk is bleeped out twice by Fox.

So no viewer knows what Musk actually said. You can guess, but you don't know, because you can't hear it. No one repeats it or comes back to it. I love that discomfort. It's a moment like when a notorious meat eater finds out that the barbecue he's generously serving for his second plate is made of vegan meat.

Musk, willingly or unwillingly, with all his absurd attempts to regulate X on the one hand and then open it up on the other, demonstrates the total insanity of American morality that he himself struggles with as a South African. Anti-Semitism? Bad for business. Saying fuck on TV? Not allowed, but you can then worship him as a champion of Fox's supposedly so desired freedom of speech.

Breakfast TV (h)honest

It reminded me of the time I gave an interview about virtual reality during Web Forum in Dublin for a BBC breakfast program. I made the unforgivable mistake of saying that in the future VR would have all sorts of wonderful applications, from news to film, music and sex. Hey ho ho no jeez Louise, stop, panicked the BBC crew: I had said sex.

That wasn't allowed in a breakfast program. Because it's early in the day, blushing kids just eating their oatmeal, well surely I understood. "Am I allowed to say machine gun or weapon of mass destruction?" I asked. It certainly was allowed. 'Bloody mass murder?' No problem at all. ' How graphically may I describe the Catholic Church's misconduct with young boys?' Um, there were no specific rules for that, so in the end I had a great morning. That the item ever aired shows the editing skill of BBC editors.

Techbros need help

Musk is not the only tech CEO struggling with freedom of speech and regulation of his social media network. I recently wrote about my own struggle with freedom of speech when subscribers to my first company Planet Internet were found to be distributing child pornography. Deciding not to distribute certain messages was easy, but determining where that boundary lay was difficult, not to mention technically complex.

Mark Zuckerberg is in deep trouble now that the Meta platforms (Facebook and Instagram in particular) seem to have become popular platforms among pedophiles. According to the Wall Street Journal, Meta has spent months trying to fix child safety issues on Instagram and Facebook, but is struggling to prevent its own systems from enabling and even promoting a vast network of pedophile accounts.

The Meta algorithms unrestrainedly promote the content the user clicks on, with dire consequences. The U.S. Congress is becoming more alert, and the European Union is also now rightly targeting Meta.

I firmly believe that the limited social gifts of people like Musk and Zuckerberg have led them to think differently, more autonomously, than us simple souls and are therefore capable of achieving more; at the same time, they have limited empathy and genuinely don't understand why the world has trouble with their policies. What makes them great as entrepreneurs keeps them small as human beings.

Special links

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Bride-to-be stands in front of the mirror, takes a picture and suddenly she looks bewitched. Pay close attention to her arms.

Tessa Coates tells in her Instagram Story what happened.
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In Europe, Viaplay is struggling; in America, Apple and Paramount are discussing a partnership.

  • DNA data should never be stored centrally

The day you knew was coming: 23andMe was hacked and highly confidential data of thousands of users was captured.

The UN climate conference COP28 has begun in Dubai, led by Abu Dhabi's oil boss. Before we get cynical, here is the good news that hard work is being done on sustainable aviation. Applause for Virgin Atlantic.

Spotlight 9: crypto week!

Bitcoin toward $40,000 and Ethereum over $2,000, party time in the crypto world.

It was a dull week for investors, unless you dare to get into cryptos because Bitcoin and Ethereum seem to be definitely back!

Categories
AI crypto technology

Elon Musk launches Grok, the first product from his new company xAI

I asked Midjourney, "make an image that symbolizes two technologies colliding: AI and crypto." I quite like the result, although I don't know who is crypto and who is AI.

Imagine you have an extremely successful startup in 2023, like Sam Altman of OpenAI, and develop products like ChatGPT that many people around the world are excited about and Microsoft and investor Marc Andreessen are pumping billions into your company. Oddly enough, you don't sleep well, knowing that any moment Elon Musk could introduce a competitor of which two things are certain; first that he can cough up or arrange enough money to invest billions and second that he has the talent and perseverance to tinker with it until it becomes something good. And oh yes, you also know that that competitor's name will be something with an X.

Because in addition to Tesla (with the model series S 3 X Y, read those letters as a word), Space X and X (formerly Twitter), among others, Musk still has time left to launch Grok this weekend, the first product of his new AI company xAI . There was a time when Musk was an investor in Sam Altman's OpenAI, today it is hatred and envy between the gentlemen.

The universe has a character?

xAI's mission is to "understand the true nature of the universe," and that kind of talk creates obligations.

Unfortunately, the first version of Grok is still only accessible to users in the US. There is a waiting list, only it is still closed to me; perhaps registration for visitors from the US will be possible.

It's hard to judge a product based on a 1-page website, but what stands out among all the rhetoric is the focus on efficiency. It seems like xAI wants to try to generate maximum output with minimal "compute," minimizing the need to invest in expensive and barely available chips from Nvidia. 

xAI does not conceal, quite in Musk's style, who it sees as its main competitors: 

"On these benchmarks, Grok-1 displayed strong results, surpassing all other models in its compute class, including ChatGPT-3.5 and Inflection-1. It is only surpassed by models that were trained with a significantly larger amount of training data and compute resources like GPT-4. This showcases the rapid progress we are making at xAI in training LLMs with exceptional efficiency.."

A little further on, Claude, from Anthropic, is also briefly roasted and with that it is clear: it is game on for xAI against OpenAI (maker of ChatGPT),  Inflection (maker of chatbot Pi) and Anthropic (maker of Claude).

Meet Grok, the AI tool that screams "people, I'm something else!

Musk will enjoy the attention on Grok, as he's been struggling lately with a lot of hassle around X, which seems to be losing as many billions in revenue as letters in the company name a year after he took over Twitter, and privately things have been rather tumultuous, to say the least. This is not entirely unexpected, as the man apparently enjoys creating companies as much as offspring (now ten or eleven Muskies, the exact number varies by website).

Excellent timing from Musk

the result seems a promise to hold more meetings."

- New Scientist on Prime Minister Sunak's AI summit

The timing of the launch of xAi's first product is no coincidence. Musk attended the first UK AI Safety Summit this week. Prime Minister Sunak scored in his homeland as he succeeded in getting China and the U.S. to come to Britain, but Vice President Kamala Harris avoided the Chinese minister, and the final outcome of the big jamboree is summed up by New Scientist in the most British way possible: "the result seems to be a promise to hold more summits."

Tomorrow, Monday, Nov. 6, OpenAI is holding its first-ever DevDay, a moment to inspire and highlight developers. For Musk, reason enough to want to ruin this celebration of OpenAI as thoroughly as possible with his launch this weekend. Unfortunately, at the time of writing this piece, it is not yet clear who is the "select few" who will get access to xAI's first product, the AI assistant Grok, but apparently priority is being given to paying subscribers of X - that other X, that is, not xAI.  

Key Executive Order President Biden on AI

Unlike Prime Minister Sunak's mediocre Davos imitation, President Biden' s presidential order on AI presented Monday was a much more concrete starting point for serious policy. I think it's a good first step, but wonder why Biden does little to protect citizens' privacy.

Who controls how AI-systems are fed data, who has access to that data and how can disinformation be removed? The U.S. clearly lacks legislation in this case like GDPR in the European Union.

Biden demands that so-called "red teams" be used by AI developers, teams of experts who mimic the attack or exploitation capabilities of a potential adversary and attempt to attack a company or system. The results of these attacks should be shared with the government. The president also proposes the introduction of an AI watermark so that users can instantly recognize AI-generated material.

It is striking how the various media analyze from their own perspective. I find the most thorough analysis to be that of Anjana Susaria, professor of information systems at Michigan State University, and Scientific American's broader perspective is also very readable. In contrast, Crunchbase obviously looks at it primarily from an investor's perspective, while Brookings lets a parade of their smartest people loose but offers no overall conclusion.

I also found it remarkable that President Obama played a role in the creation of Biden's policy, whereas presidents usually have little concern for the opinions of their predecessors.

Open source AI models are promising

That developments in AI are happening many times faster than policymakers worldwide can keep up with is evidenced by the staggering numbers in this article on the success of Llama, Meta's somewhat open-source version of AI.

Another open source variant, that of France's Mistral, has achieved appealing results, and Mistral is currently looking for money. For more than a quarter of a billion, if possible. According to The Information, it's $300 million, and according to Business Insider, they won't spit on $400 million at Mistral either, should anyone want to invest in it at a valuation of, seriously, $2 billion. For a company that is six months old. Then again, Paris is also an expensive city.

AI cares about us

The latest AI news for this week: scientific research shows that the results produced by LLMs like ChatGPT improve significantly if you indicate fear, or feel pressured, when entering the prompt. Answers become more truthful and responsible. This would imply that AI cares about our feelings ... for how long?  

The most complicated thing about Sam Bankman-Fried was his hair

Talking about truthful and responsible answers: Sam Bankman-Fried of crypto exchange FTX gave a pathetic performance in court, turning out to be a simple thief who managed to fool the world's top investors into thinking he was brilliant. There was much focus on his personal circumstances, as his parents got a lot of attention, especially from the mainstream media. Reactions to the verdict seem to indicate that more regulation of the crypto sector from Washington is on the way.

Bankman-Fried and his colleagues stole billions from FTX customer funds, which they used to invest in startups, for political donations and for loans to themselves. The fact that this was a crypto exchange is irrelevant. What was once again proven, however, is the time-honored cryptocurrency cliché: not your keys, not your coins.

In other words, if others can access your assets, they are already no longer yours. Putting crypto on a central exchange is the opposite of exactly what blockchain can be; a decentralized network without a center, like a crypto exchange.

Kraken launches $200 million crypto investment fund

Despite all the headwinds for the sector, the US crypto exchange Kraken has raised a serious investment fund. Crypto is no longer the favored sector among venture capitalists; that is, of course, AI. Investment in crypto this year is four times lower than in 2022. The timing could actually turn out to be great, because the crypto markets are rebounding strongly and appear to hold.

99-year-old Charlie Munger hates vc's

Warren Buffett's right-hand man hopes to turn 100 years old on January 1 and is no fan of venture capitalists: "you don't want to make money by screwing your investors and that's what a lot of venture capitalists do." So much for my hope that you get milder as you get older. Munger says venture capital "can be a very legitimate business, if you do it right," and if you put the "right people" in positions of power.

But that is not currently the case, he says. "The people making the most money from venture capital are a lot like investment bankers. They say what new, popular area they're going to invest in," Munger said. However, "they're not great investors - they're not great at anything." Munger has a point, as the average return on venture capital over the last 20 years was 11.8%, compared to 12% for the Nasdaq Composite.

Munger and Buffett themselves are having a nice weekend, as they announced a few hours ago that Berkshire Hathaway posted 40% more operating profit in the third quarter than a year ago and is sitting on $157 billion in cash. The old friends, and I say that respectfully, are profiting from buying short-term, high-yield government bonds.

SPOTLIGHT 9: JUBILANT WEEK ON WALL STREET

Wall Street closes its best week of the year with even more gains.

I think this is unprecedented in the 31 weeks I've been producing this newsletter: the entire Spotlight 9 is up. Wars, bombings, global tensions, investors apparently don't care as long as they think the markets will go up.

These are those weeks when every with a full savings account wonders if it was smart to put so much into it with the horrendously low interest rate, especially corrected for inflation. So Buffett and Munger prefer to put it into short-term government bonds. AP sums up all the jubilation in a short, lucid article.

IN OTHER NEWS

Categories
crypto technology

The best tech investments of the last five years were not Apple or Bitcoin, but Tesla and Ethereum

At the twenty-fifth edition of this newsletter, I want to look across this dull news week at what has been the best-yielding investment in tech over the last five years. To my surprise, it was not Apple, Bitcoin or Nvidia, but Tesla. In the crypto world, Ethereum turned out to have risen twice as much as Bitcoin. Ok, one news fact did stand out this week: Tinder is introducing a $500-a-month subscription, for real enthusiasts.

If Tesla and Ethereum made a car together, it would look like this, according to Midjourney.

Tesla and Ethereum the big winners

Tesla rose as much as 1287% and Ethereum 611% over the last five years, against Nvidia 492%, Bitcoin 305% and Apple 210%. Meanwhile, the S&P 500, the classic benchmark, did 48%. War and inflation notwithstanding, saving has still proven far more expensive than index investing.

Tesla and Elon Musk I leave to Walter Isaacson, whose book on Musk is a huge hit. Rather, I look at Ethereum, precisely because the traditional media rarely, if ever, publish a decent analysis on this underrated platform.

But before we dive into the numbers and prices, it's important to review what Ethereum does and can do and how it differs from that blockchain brother from another mother, Bitcoin. For this description, I used ChatGPT and Gert-Jan Lasterie's standard work.

Ethereum is a public workshop

Imagine that the Internet is a big city. In that city you have a market for commerce, a library for information, a bank for money matters, and so on. Bitcoin is something like a special kind of gold; valuable and you can keep it, but otherwise you can't do much with it. The exchange rate varies greatly and so you won't be using it to pay for anything anytime soon.

Ethereum is something completely different, where a group of people got together at the initiative of Vitalik Buterin and said, "instead ofjust making a new kind of money or a different kind of gold, shall we put some kind of public workshop in the city where people can build all sorts of things?"

With Ethereum, you can create "smart contracts," which sounds a bit like magic contracts, which automatically execute themselves once certain conditions are met. So suppose you want to rent a house. Normally you would go to a real estate agent or housing association, show your ID, pay and sign paperwork.

Based on Ethereum, landlord and tenant can use a smart contract that says, "Whoever pays the digital key fee will automatically get the digital key to the house." That transaction takes place on the Internet, no middleman is needed, everything happens automatically based on the smart contract.

But it doesn't stop there. Ethereum is used to build so-called "decentralized applications," called dApps. These are programs that do not run on one central computer but are spread across many computers worldwide. This often makes them more secure and less susceptible to fraud or censorship.

The magic word is decentralized

There is also "DeFi" ("DieFai"), which stands for "Decentralized Finance. These are financial services such as loans or insurance that work on Ethereum through smart contracts, without the involvement of banks or other financial institutions. The 2021 NFT boom was also built on the Ethereum platform.

Unlike Bitcoin and Ripple, Ethereum is technically not a currency, but an open-source software platform for blockchain applications - with Ether (ETH) being the cryptocurrency used within the Ethereum network.

In short, Ethereum is special because it is much more than just a digital currency. It is a complete digital world where you can enter into all kinds of transactions and agreements without the need for anyone else.

It's like a new, smarter layer of the Internet. To join you only need ETH as a means of payment, similar to buying a festival coin when you go to festivals because that coin is accepted as the only means of payment.

Why is Ethereum risky from an investment standpoint?

So much for the utopian vision: a world computer with smart contracts. There is nothing wrong with that, and as an entrepreneur, I am a big fan of access to a development platform like Ethereum. I won't even rule out Ethereum's creators getting a Nobel Prize in economics one day.

But from an investment standpoint, let's look at a fundamental economic principle: scarcity - or in the case of Ethereum, the lack thereof. Every right-thinking person supports Ethereum's expansive vision. It wants to be the oil that drives the gears of Web3. But the oil supply is finite; Ethereum is not.

Bitcoin has its own counter-story. It is limited to twenty-one million Bitcoins, which means built-in scarcity. You don't have to be an economist to understand that scarcity drives demand, which in turn drives up the price.

But Ethereum is like a never-ending digital oil well. Great for powering the network and ensuring there is always enough, but not so great for the fundamental principle of supply and demand. If ETH becomes too abundant, its value may decline, causing the price per coin to fall. The infinite supply means that ETH becomes as common as tap water in developed countries: of course you need it, but you're not going to pay a premium for it.

Thus, the lack of a supply limit for Ethereum can be the Achilles heel for a stable developing price. Therefore, keep a sharp eye on it if you are considering investing in Ethereum after the following paragraphs, because the lack of a supply limit is not icing on the cake; it could be the whole cake, or even the whole pastry - in a country full of diabetics.

Spotlight 9: TSLA phenomenal, ETH rises twice as fast as Bitcoin

With 1287% increase in five years, Tesla deserves a spot in Spotlight 9.

The idea behind Spotlight 9, a name coined by ChatGPT for this column, was to briefly track weekly how the major tech investments were doing compared to the benchmark, the S&P 500. It remains simple: if an investment does not outperform the S&P 500 over the long term, why invest in it and not the S&P? Amazon is such a setback, up only 29% over the last five years versus +48% for the S&P 500.

Stock market sentiment is important because when it rains there, it trickles down throughout the tech world to the youngest startups. If there are no exits, no IPOs, that means less investment in larger tech companies that are not yet publicly traded and it affects the entire tech sector. Ultimately, it limits new innovations.

Meta out, Tesla in

Tesla was not in my Spotlight 9 list because I follow the five biggest tech companies weekly, ranked by market value. Those are Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft and Meta (Facebook). Tesla falls just outside that, but it gets interesting: Meta is currently worth $769 billion and Tesla ... $767 billion.

Based on its performance over the last five years, I threw Meta out of Spotlight 9 and Tesla is in it as of today. Zuckerberg must be devastated and in Musk's house, Elon and the little x's are certainly running an algorithmically calculated polonaise. Let's hope Musk doesn't disappoint with Tesla or I'll have to make another picture.

No master forecasters

In addition to the five largest tech companies by market value, I also follow the two largest crypto currencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum. There is so little coverage of crypto in the traditional media, and I myself have so little interest in daily prices, that I had completely missed the fact that after all the highly exposed price declines of the last two years, Ethereum and Bitcoin have still proven to be very good investments for people who look a little further than a week, a month or a year.

There is hatred and envy in the crypto world between Bitcoin maximalists and altcoin lovers. That's something like a metalhead explaining to a rapper why his music is better. They are incomparable giants, with Bitcoin, as mentioned, being somewhat comparable to a popular, digital version of gold, while Ethereum is a widely used building block of Web3.

Both have some utility, but how that will be reflected in the price is a total guess. As far as I know, at least in September 2018, no one was predicting that Ethereum (+611%) would appreciate twice as much as Bitcoin (+305%).

Tinder's $500-a-month subscription plan

'Hate the game, don't hate the players' thought Tinder and introduced a $500 subscription. Per month.

I read this article and I could not read it without hearing a translation from Amsterdam-West in my head every five sentences. I translate those below back into language that will keep this email from ending up in your spam filter.

Let's start with this passage: "We know that there is a subset of highly engaged and active users who prioritize more effective and efficient ways to find connections," said Tinder Chief Product Officer Mark Van Ryswyk, "which is why we have been conducting extensive testing with this audience recently."

Translation: "We know that there is a horde of horny panters willing to pay unlimited money to us, as long as they have new victims be able to find loves."

Going forward: "The new plan announced Friday, called Tinder Select, was only offered to less than 1% of Tinder users who are among the app's most active, the company said. For nearly $6,000 a year, users will get access to new features, such as 'VIP' search, matching and conversation, that are not currently available with existing paid subscriptions."

Translation: "We don't know exactly how to do it legally yet, but we are going to give this group of addicts a chance to get their victims target audience, at the expense of then those customers of ours who only pay a few tens."

Another gem from the article: "Tinder parent company Match Group Inc. has experience with expensive subscriptions. In 2022, it bought The League, an invitation-only dating app aimed at "ambitious, career-oriented singles. The League has a VIP subscription that costs $1,000 a week. The company previously said the success of The League's expensive subscription caused Match Group to reconsider how it could appeal to "high-intention users on its other apps such as Tinder."

Conclusion: it is heartening that people today have the opportunity to find more potential partners and/or playmates than they used to find at the bus stop to the office or at the billiard bar. Butreh... "high intention users? We used to have very different designations for that kind of low-level guys and girls.

In conclusion

YouTuber and postdoctoral researcher Rob ter Horst of the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine in Vienna tested the new Apple watches and made this fun and informative, science-based video about them. According to his resume, Ter Horst is "designer and research subject at the same time of an extensive N=1 study in the field of computational chemistry and bioinformatics.

Maybe nice if Ter Horst unleashed his scientific expertise and N=1 approach on that $500 subscription, went wild on Tinder for a month and published all the findings of his scientific research on YouTube?

Categories
AI crypto NFTs technology

Two Dutch startups with a global market

I don't normally write about my own work, preferring to try to share background, tips and insights that I hope will be of use to you as a reader. But because it is often asked for, this time I like to tell you about two investments I am excited about. Of course, I also cover notable things in the tech world, such as the jubilant crypto world about Ripple, Elon Musk's new AI company, traffic jam dodging by drone and Lionel Messi's deal with Apple. But now first, iXora and Unveil.

Ede-based iXora has developed a form of liquid cooling technology(immersion cooling) that allows data centers to save more than 30% in energy and space, because it eliminates the need for fans as with the usual air cooling of computers. And the latest generation of chips gets so hot that air cooling becomes too inefficient and expensive, but also socially unacceptable given the CO2 emissions. That makes the market potential of iXora huge worldwide.

Amsterdam-based Unveil links top photographers to collectors through its own marketplace based on blockchain technology. Through a careful curation process, collectors worldwide find new high-quality work in a user-friendly way. Collectors can buy the physical work, a print, a digital version in the form of an NFT, or both. Unveil can play a crucial role in the explosion of AI-generated fakes; it guarantees authenticity.

I have previously worked with these entrepreneurs with great pleasure and success, their companies are forerunners in fast growing global markets and sustainability is an important part of their proposition. And not unimportantly, there is also an opportunity for you to participate as an investor even with a small amount, whereas this is usually reserved only for vc funds with very deep pockets.

Please note that this is not an advertisement for investing in these companies. I explain what my considerations were for investing, but I want to emphasize that investing in startups has the very highest form of risk. Simply put, my advice is: only do it with money you could lose. And above all, do it because you support the companies' goals.

Why does Warren Buffett store in the Veluwe?

Earlier this year at CES in Las Vegas, iXora signed a licensing deal with the American company Lubrizol, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, the investment company of the legendary Warren Buffett. Why would such a global player license technology from a Dutch startup?

Hypotherm Rack Management (HRM) from iXora. Server in and done. Crucial: fits into a standard 19-inch rack, the standard in data centers worldwide.

The answer is that huge demand for energy-saving solutions has accelerated worldwide since de Russia's invasion of Ukraine the helmeted Russian neighbor visit. On top of that, energy consumption in data centers plays an extremely large role, because next to real estate and equipment, energy costs are the biggest expense. Data centers are still full of energy-guzzling fans, which will become obsolete with iXora's liquid cooling.

When using the iXora solution, a data center can accommodate more servers per square foot, with lower energy costs and therefore a reduced carbon footprint. Add to this the huge increase to cloud and streaming services in recent years and the current explosion of AI applications, making it irreversible that heavy server-intensive applications will dominate the market. Conclusion: immersion cooling is hot.

Own experience with data centers

My personal experience with data centers goes way back, for example, I was a very satisfied customer with Flabber and 925 for many years with the innovative hosting company True. (Jort Kelder and I even shot a lightly humorous movie in their data center 15 years ago.) So when True founder Vincent Houwert, after selling True and some wanderings in the Caribbean, couldn't resist getting back into business and started iXora, I was immediately interested.

With Planet Internet, I have been a customer and reseller of data center services for many years, and in the process I have experienced, through trial and error, how complex data centers operate. Although it is a multi-billion dollar business, it is one in which every dime is turned over. I always compare data centers to drinking water from the tap: everyone needs it and uses it, but every penny spent on it is a penny too much so the margins are thin.

Data center owners hate risks and opaque investments. This is precisely why I find iXora so interesting: it is the only party in the world that enables immersion cooling in the existing infrastructure of a data center.

In a billion-dollar market, of course, there are plenty of competitors, but they either only cool the chip, leaving the rest of the motherboard to give off heat and fans remain necessary, or their solutions require the installation of entire jacuzzis into which the servers are submerged.

But I know from experience that data center owners have a huge aversion to this kind of geekiness, because there is a chance of leaking fluids into their data centers where miles of cables run under the raised floors. And no one wants to use robotic arms to hoist a server out of such a bathtub, which is necessary just to replace a simple hard drive.

iXora's solution is deliberately designed for easy installation and maintenance. Nothing robotic arm or bathtub: an iXora chassis fits into the globally common 19-inch rack, and anyone who can lift a computer can slide a server into an iXora HRM.

The team knows the customer

That simplicity in the solution is rooted in the experience of the iXora team, which has literally and figuratively grown up in data centers. Besides inventor Vincent Houwert, who previously founded hosting company True, iXora's founders are CEO Job Witteman, previously founder and 17-year CEO of the Amsterdam Internet Exchange AMS-IX, and CCO Vincent Beek, who has decades of commercial experience in the international technology world. And Erwin Bleeker joined iXora in February as Compute Specialist after spending a few years at Dell explaining how a data center works ;-).

iXora webinar Thursday, June 20

More information about the opportunity to participate in iXora is in this two-page summary. Investing is possible from as little as €5,000 and depending on your contribution there is a bonus of up to 30%. If you want to know more about iXora, I recommend watching the webinar next Thursday, July 20 at 8 p.m. in which CEO Job Witteman explains what iXora does with immersion cooling. why it is important for the world and how you can contribute to .

The Manhattan Project by Andrea Camiolo. Unveil guarantees the creator and the number of copies, in this case a series of three.

Unveil cures what is real, in the age of fake

I write a lot about AI because it is the market in which the most progress is currently being made, with the largest potential market, which is virtually every earthling. At the same time, I worry about how AI will make it possible to manipulate all forms of sight and sound.

As you may know, I have a great love for photography, a passion that unfortunately comes with a commensurate lack of talent. My former colleague Alexander Sporre with whom I worked at business site 925, though, is a talented photographer. But Alexander is also a talented entrepreneur, and he and a number of partners have jumped into a big hole in the market with Unveil.

I believe in Unveil's proposition, in the explosion of AI-generated photos, to act as a beacon and marketplace of originality and authenticity.

What makes Unveil unique?

The developments in the field of AI are so rapid that there is a huge need worldwide for an independent party to guarantee the authenticity of digital work. Without such an independent party as Unveil, it is already no longer possible to tell whether a photo is real, or generated with AI.

Third generation marketplace

I see Unveil as a third-generation marketplace. In the first form, marketplaces were generic, think Marktplaats in the Netherlands and Craigslist in America, with a large unfiltered supply. (Both, by the way, bought by eBay for hundreds of millions.) The second generation marketplaces were a curated part of a large generic offering, think Uber Black and Airbnb Plus, or the Dutch Catawiki, effectively a curated version of eBay. 

In the latest generation of marketplaces, of which Unveil is a forerunner, you will only see a carefully curated, high-level offering with a select small group of providers, who are often exclusively affiliated with a platform. Unveil has already attracted over 1,500 photographers, including a large number of top international photographers such as Bastiaan Woudt and Paul Cupido.

Global market, always traceable

Unveil connects digital art with physical prints on the blockchain, making art photography traceable as a globally tradable product, with the goal of providing royalties to the creator on the one hand and guaranteeing to the collector that the work purchased is authentic, with guarantees about the number produced. This solves a huge problem worldwide.

Proven business model: marketplace

From a financial perspective, it is crucial that the business model of a marketplace is proven and highly profitable, especially in this market, based on a 12.5% commission. Such a solid commission combined with the prices that renowned photographers receive for their work offers very good prospects for Unveil.

The team

Besides Chief Product Officer Alexander Sporre (ex-Richemont, co-founder Stories, art photographer), Unveil's founders are also Chief Commercial Officer Titus de Jong (ex-Salesforce, ex-HP) and Chief Creative Officer Julian Mollema (award winning designer, Ex-Build in Amsterdam). All entrepreneurs with a solid track record in their respective fields. Crucially, there is also a lot of interest in Unveil from the art world. For example, the Head of Photography at Sotheby's EMEA has joined Unveil's Advisory Board.

Participating in Unveil

More information about the opportunity to invest in Unveil is in this two-page summary. If you would like to learn more about Unveil, I would be happy to put you in touch with the founders.

Spotlight 9: Judge finds XRP is, oh no it's not, an investment

Every week in this column, I go over the highs and lows of the most important assets in technology. Never before has the financial world been so dominated by crypto news as it was Thursday, when an early global happy hour erupted in the cryptoscene following a U.S. judge's incomprehensible ruling in the case brought by the SEC against Ripple Labs.

Imagine if XRP had won the case outright....

The judge ruled that Ripple Labs' sale of the XRP cryptocurrency to institutional investors violated securities laws. But, the judge said, there was nothing illegal about the sale of XRP by Ripple Labs to individual traders on crypto exchanges. As if professional investors need information, transparency and protection but consumers don't?

This schizophrenic statement was not understood outside the crypto world. "Securities laws are designed specifically to protect individual investors, based on the idea that they cannot stand up for themselves," James Carlson, an adjunct professor of securities regulation at New York University, told The Information. "Large institutional investors don't need the protection of securities laws. This ruling effectively turns that philosophy on its head," Carlson said.

"Securities laws are designed specifically to protect individual investors, based on the idea that they cannot advocate for themselves. Large institutional investors don't need the protection of securities laws. This ruling effectively turns that philosophy on its head."

James Carlson, New York University

Chance of 'boiler room' fraud

The implications of this part of the ruling are troubling. As Carlson said, "The potential for 'bucket shop' or 'boiler room' fraud is alarming." Think of the Wolf of Wall Street in a black crypto t-shirt. Carlson outlined a scenario in which a crypto company issues tokens to large institutional investors, who are given detailed information required by securities laws, but then resells them through crypto exchanges to individual traders, who are not given this information. The decision is likely to be appealed, so this may not be the end of the story. 

XRP rose nearly 80% within a day, gave back some of the gains over the weekend but still rose nearly 50% in the last week.

It remains a madhouse in AI

It had been coming for a while: Elon Musk has entered the AI battlefield with x.AI and has become CEO of his third company, in addition to Tesla and SpaceX, Musk's space company that was valued at a whopping $150 billion in a private sale last week. The man may have driven on a few blocks past the "eccentric" exit, but it's still mind-boggling how he combines it all. The goal of x.AI is "to understand the true nature of the universe." Musk talked more on Twitter about the goals and possible collaboration with Tesla, shared few details. To be continued, no doubt.

That doesn't head nicely, but with Code Interpreter, ChatGPT can analyze data, create graphs, solve math problems and edit files, among other things. It also supports file uploading and downloading, which previously was not possible in ChatGPT. Wharton professor Ethan Mollick, author of an excellent newsletter by the way, says Code Interpreter can do things he used to spend an unimaginable amount of time on.

I did a little test by downloading a .csv file of XRP price data on Friday and asking Code Interpreter to display the key information from it in a graph. I found the result amazing, especially since Chat GPT is text-based and until recently the output was also limited to text. So not anymore because Code Interpreter spit out three relevant graphs within seconds!

Code Interpreter from ChatGPT generated these graphs from a .csv file I had uploaded. Saves a lot of time and effort!

Anthropic, which raised just under half a billion dollars from investors in May, launched a new version of their Chat GPT competitor Claude.ai. Decrypt makes a good comparison between Claude.AI, ChatGPT and Google Bard. Officially, Claude is only available in the US and UK, but with a good VPN it works fine. I'd love to hear who experiences major differences between ChatGPT and Claude, personally I see little difference in quality.

In conclusion

My favorite guru Gary Vaynerchuk doesn't think Threads is a Twitter-killer either, but points out that it could attract a new audience. Just try it, he advises. For now, my feed on Threads is still filled with second-hand posts from Instagram.

In 2014, I got to know Taco Carlier of VanMoof when we spent a week together walking around SXSW. Apart from being an incredibly nice guy with whom I have a pleasant contact to this day, I find the news about a possible bankruptcy of VanMoof very sad because the company was the big booster of the e-bike as a replacement for the car.

In my experience, integration of all components into a hardware product is extremely complex, Taco and I talked about that several times. He mentioned Tesla as an example of almost complete vertical integration. But crucially, what do you do at the moment when a product continuously fails and you experience quality problems to such an extent that customers become dissatisfied and the service department is overwhelmed. I won't bore you with stories from the old box about the woes called ISDN that I had to contend with, in the transition era between modems and broadband, but sometimes you have to dare to kill a product to survive as a company. Hopefully Vanmoof will survive the current malaise.  

In other electric transport news, it was noticed that Lee Soo Man, founder of Korean K-pop institution SM Entertainment, invested $23 million with partners in passenger transport via drones. The EH216 can carry two passengers and flies without a pilot, leading to extraordinary videos. Just too bad about that bombastic music, therefore here, from SM Entertainment's stable, Red Velvet with Future, theme song from the popular Korean series Start-Up - yes, about Internet startups.

The high-quality sports site The Athletic (acquired last year by the New York Times, which last week dissolved its entire sports editorial staff) produced a nice long read about Lionel Messi's transfer to Miami, made possible by Apple. It remains extraordinary that Messi is the only player to benefit from the growth of subscribers to Apple TV+'s MLS subscription. The question looms as to when Apple will move more seriously into sports entertainment and move to acquire more sports rights, such as the Premier League, the NFL and the Olympics. And whether there will be more athletes then who will directly share in subscriptions to streaming services, separate of their clubs or leagues.

I want to reiterate that investing in startups carries the very highest form of risk. However, I did want to share my considerations for investing in iXora and Unveil. But simply put, my advice is: always do it only with money you can afford to lose and only in companies whose mission you support, then you will enjoy it the most. Profits remain uncertain.

I can't resist playing with MidJourney. This image is a combination of a photo I had uploaded, with an image generated by MidJourney.
Result of the prompt in MidJourney to put an iXora HRM in a room like the final scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Looks more like a Transformer on steroids.
Categories
AI technology

Google unexpectedly rewarded, Twitter's velvet hammer and vc's step into climate tech

First of all, happy Mother's Day! All love wished to all mothers. It's been a strange week in tech. To summarize: the media world that relies mostly on advertising revenue is heading hard toward the abyss, Twitter has a velvet hammer, venture capital funding of startups is changing and Google is unexpectedly rewarded.

Google has been surpassed in terms of success with AI by OpenAI and its licensee and shareholder Microsoft, but Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai thought he could mask this by mouthing the word AI dozens of times during the Google IO event received with little enthusiasm. It led to this hilarious video.

AI gives us this King Chuck, without misso, with stogie

Deconstruction in the media world

In the traditional media, Charles' coronation took center stage, put into perspective by the popular Australian YouTube comedian Ozzyman who, during his commentary, referred to "Chuck and the misso in the king mobile.

In the Internet world, the former queen of online advertising suddenly surfaced after a three-year absence: Marissa Mayer, former boss of Google Search and ex-CEO of Yahoo, was given plenty of space to promote her new startup Sunshine. Sunshine has the same claim as its (how is it possible?) even more boringly named competitor Contacts+: improving your address book and contact management. Both companies praise their smart contacts but Mayer is smart enough to tout her Sunshine Smart Contacts with ... AI. Coming up: "Sunshine Smart Contacts uses AI and other sophisticated technology. Just in case we thought they made the app with quill, bottle mail and wax crayons.

It is no coincidence that Mayer chose to skip advertising as a revenue source at Sunshine, even though it made up the majority of her revenue during her time at Google and Yahoo. It became clear once again last week that over-reliance on advertising revenue is the death knell for any media company not named Google or Meta when the impending bankruptcy of former media crown prince Vice came out.

The hipster shack where you couldn't get a job as an intern without a facial tattoo and coke addiction is for sale for $400 million while it was once valued at nearly $6 billion. Still, it's nice to read how someone who worked there for nearly a decade looks back fondly on his time at Vice.

David Pakman explained simply to the outstanding podcaster Lex Fridman why the McDonald's of the news media, Fox News, relies much less on advertising revenue: each cable company pays a per-connection fee for retransmission of the sewer channel.

That's the dream for Twitter from Elon Musk, who had high hopes for revenue potential from user revenue but got stuck in the blue checkmark fiasco. Given the mediocre revenue results from online advertising and Twitter in particular, it was surprising that he found Twitter's new CEO in the advertising world. 'Elon & and the problem for the velvet hammer' sounds like a Suske & Wiske title, but 'the velvet hammer' is Linda Yaccarino's nickname. One can already bet how many days it will take for the velvet hammer to give way under Musk's hard knocks.

Musk is trying to follow the example of Facebook, where for years the golden rule was that Zuck built the product and Sheryl Sandberg provided the revenue. Those who worked at Facebook ended up being on either team. That worked fine until last year, when results were disappointing and Meta shares completely collapsed. Sandberg had switched to the SB just before that.

Dutch VCs happily continued to invest in 2022

NFX partner James Currier briefly summarized for Techcrunch what three forms of defensible elements successful startups have in common:

  1. Network effects: your product becomes more valuable the more people use it.
  2. Embedding: Integrate your services so deeply that customers "can't rip them out."
  3. Data loops: Collect, process and act on real-time data.

Assuming Currier is right, it would be interesting to see which Dutch startups meet these criteria. According to De Nederlandse Vereniging van Participatiemaatschappijen (NVP), last year around 1 billion euros was invested in 411 Dutch startups. Only in 2021 was this amount higher, at 1.8 billion Euros. But that was an exceptional year in which Mollie, MessageBird and Bunq, among others, raised hundreds of million. The upward trend of recent years, especially in the number of investments, continued in 2022. From what I hear in the corridors, investments by Dutch VCs are falling sharply this year, but no research is available to show that.

It would be fascinating to study whether all the incubators of recent years in the Netherlands have led to more successful startups. The Techleap support platform is too short-lived and has too vague goals to be measurable, but I hear a lot of positive things about it from tech entrepreneurs. I was thinking about the role of incubators when it was announced that the Dutch company Instruqt raised as much as $15 million in its first round of investment after operating on its own for 5 years. Instruqt did not emerge from an incubator and this entire round was done by Blossom, a foreign vc. Kudos and Godspeed to Instruqt!

The largest IPOs of the past 10 years all below first-day price

source: Crunchbase

Meanwhile, the market is so bad that the biggest IPOs of the last 10 years have all underperformed after their first trading strike. Top investor Elad Gil says things are about to get much worse. Perhaps that's why it's not a miracle, but a natural progression, that a ChatGPT-based fictional investment fund is out performing Britain's most popular mutual funds. Perhaps investing is not a people business?

To create the fund, ChatGPT was asked to put together a portfolio of stocks that followed a set of investment principles drawn from leading funds. Despite two warnings that it "cannot give specific investment advice," this was quickly circumvented by saying this was just a theoretical exercise. ChatGPT ended up picking 38 stocks, with the top performers in the fund so far being Meta, up nearly 30%, Microsoft, up 20%, and Intel, up nearly 18%. But as I wrote last month, Meta stock is scoring relatively so high this year because it experienced a historic price drop last year. 

One sector that VCs do warm to is "climate prediction tech. It's not that KNMI will be the next unicorn, because it's about companies that develop technology that can make better climate predictions.

KNMI, the new unicorn?

Unfortunately, the very technology that the world needs most, carbon capture, is proving extraordinarily complex and therefore will not attract sufficient investors quickly enough. This is sad because it is clear that governments will fail to take meaningful action that will limit global warming in time. Carbon capture technology removes CO2 from the atmosphere.

Notable links:

  • Nearly a quarter million Apple - Goldman Sachs savings accounts opened in the first week, at this rate Apple will be America's largest savings bank within a year.
  • Rats in an experiment moved VR objects only with their minds. 
  • The highly informative newsletter from McKinsey's boardroom consultants is now online and available for free.

Spotlight 9: The winner of the week is ... Google?

Having the CEO call AI very often apparently has an effect on investors

I never pretend to understand anything about investing and look at tech prices like the Eredivisie: the level remains mediocre, but sometimes there are outliers among them and you still faithfully follow your own clubbie. This week, for example, Apple did not seem to exist, as the stock moved 0.048%. Not so. Google is under great pressure on every revenue source, especially the search engine may be totally outflanked by ChatGPT within a year, just as Google itself once overthrew Altavista and Excite. And ... Alphabet shares are rewarded with an 11.7% rise. It's as strange as Feyenoord becoming champions. Just kidding, congratulations 010! Very well deserved. 

Happy Mother's Day!

Categories
AI crypto

Elon Musk and his exes. And Apple CEO Tim Cook lost AI top talent to Google, but strikes blow with savings accounts

This week, almost all tech news seemed to be about artificial intelligence. After all, major innovations in AI capture the imagination and are recognizable to all, whereas a breakthrough in biotechnology, for example, is often literally visible only through a microscope to a limited group of experts.

Why do you need $300 million when you just raised $10 billion?

When $300 million dollars is paid by top investors for just over one (1) percent of OpenAI, the company that is the creator of ChatGPT, it deserves extensive attention. Especially considering that Microsoft invested $10 billion (!) in OpenAI less than three months ago, having already put a billion into the company in 2019. That 11 billion surely hasn't run out yet, so the question arises as to why OpenAI held this additional round of investment.

The main reason OpenAI wants to have a strong relationship with some of the biggest tech investors in the world is the burgeoning battle for the AI market. The time is approaching when really big money is needed, think billions rather than millions, for a company to join the battle of giants such as Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon who are all competing in this market. After all, AI is too important for all players to ignore. In fact, for Google, the success of OpenAI is life-threatening. With shareholders behind it like Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive, K2 Global and Founders Fund (from Peter Thiel, the legendary investor in Facebook and Palantir, among others), OpenAI can now operate independently of partner Microsoft. With an estimated market value of $27 billion to $29 billion, OpenAI is already worth more right now than, to name a crossroad, companies like Spotify and vaccine maker BioNTech, companies that have also successfully capitalized on major developments.

This 'photo' was generated entirely with Midjourney and is eerily real

CEOs Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai fight over AI talent

Meanwhile, in the race for the best AI technology, Apple with Siri and Amazon with Alexa are far behind OpenAI. The Information reported this week that three of Apple's top programmers therefore made the move to Google, despite attempts by Apple CEO Tim Cook to retain them. The personal offer from Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, who is committed to catching up with OpenAI, was apparently irresistible. Would any CEO of a European publicly traded company ever have made a personal effort to attract programmers, or to retain them, as Cook and Pichai are doing? I suspect the European gentry, for they are almost all men, feel too big for that.

How difficult it is to make a good AI application proved Snapchat, which received a 1 for the "My AI" feature from users, urging them to remove it from the app. It was not Snap's week, which saw revenue drop after which the stock slumped 17%. Dropbox announced it was laying off 16% of its staff while investing heavily in attracting new AI developers. This indicates that it is difficult, if not impossible, to retrain programmers to become AI developers.

Elon Musk, his X's and his ex

The wait is on for Elon Musk to get involved in the AI war with a company, but he seems too busy trying to ruin Twitter. He does constantly criticize OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman since he sold his stake in OpenAI to Microsoft. It is remarkable, to say the least, that Musk, in an open letter, called for a sort of six-month moratorium in AI development, but in the meantime continues to work on funding his own AI startup, which he alternately calls TruthGPT (as with now unemployed chief Tucker Carlson) or X-AI. That X should normally be in there from Musk; he previously started X.com and, of course, SpaceX. It's lucky it's Tesla and not Texla. His latest son is named X Æ A-Xii (call sign: Bert). And the Æ is in the poor kid's name because it is the elven spelling of the term AI. Musk's baby mama, Canadian artist Grimes, stood out this week by giving permission to use her voice in AI-generated music: "I'll split 50% royalties on any successful AI generated song that uses my voice. Same deal as I would with any artist i collab with. Feel free to use my voice without penalty.' This is especially notable because there is concern that AI will make the entire profession of voice actors obsolete. It will be interesting to follow what the implications will be for singers.

The Apple Card with rounded corners, Steve Jobs wouldn't have wanted it any other way

Finally: Apple is going to make mincemeat of the banks and does it with ... Goldman Sachs?

It had been expected for years and last week it was here: Apple made its entrance into the banking world. Remarkable remains the choice of Goldman Sachs as a partner, because Apple hardly uses the Goldman brand but uses the prestigious bank mainly for the banking license and as a colorless and odorless handler of savings transactions, as a kind of white label. While Apple rarely, if ever, buys market share based on price, when it comes to savings accounts the high interest rate actually stands out: 4.15%, as much as 10 times higher than the US national average. 

What is typical of Apple, however, is its great ease of use. The first step is to apply for an Apple Card, a credit card, which unfortunately is only available in the US for now. All spending via that card will default to 1% to 3% of the purchase amount in the form of what Apple has called "Daily Cash," a balance that is calculated and credited daily. Those who then open a savings account from the Apple Wallet and link it to the Apple Card, an action of no more than a few clicks, will see Daily Cash credited to the savings account daily and automatically receive the high interest rate of 4.15%. The savings account is free, there is no minimum deposit and there are no penalties if balances are withdrawn from the savings account. It is also possible to transfer funds from other banks to the Apple-Goldman savings account.

And precisely the latter is a nightmare for traditional banks. Because while there are other, lesser-known banks, giving even higher savings rates, they are not trusted brands like Apple. The combination of Apple Card with Apple Pay and the Apple Wallet is so seamless and simple that it will be difficult for banks to compete. It seems plausible that European banks will launch a hefty lobby in Brussels, combined with legal action, to make it difficult for Apple to enter the European market in the same way it does in the US.

Event: Consensus 2023

Nearly fifteen thousand people attended the leading crypto event Consensus in Austin, Texas last week, and that doesn't include the types who are too stingy to buy a conference ticket because they think they already know everything and want to tell you that the best networking happens in the pub. The sounds from Austin were universally positive, especially about the quality of the projects that survived the crypto winter. I found the most notable contribution to Consensus, viewed from a distance because I wasn't there myself, to be the interview with journalist Brady Dale, whose book about Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX will soon be published. Dale emphatically points to decentralized finance, DeFi, as the main solution against fraud and mismanagement, precisely where there is no central party like a stock exchange like FTX. I also found it striking that Dale specifically mentions memecoin Dogecoin as a relevant crypto alongside Bitcoin and Ethereum:

'To me, Dogecoin is the chain that said, A story, a character, a concept can have a value, and if a community believes in that character and works together in a distributed way to make the idea bigger, the value of the concept will grow and so will its currency. Dogecoin has really made that clear. It's not just about DOGE, it's about that whole idea of collaboration around a concept, and that's why I'm betting Dogecoin will be the comeback kid of blockchains, again and again, in the near future.

- Brady Dale

Good links

  • Check out this link to some particularly practical prompts to use yourself at ChatGPT.
  • Startup funding is under severe pressure. These four charts show that, and in Miami, investment in startups actually fell more than 90%. Partly a result of the focus in that region on crypto startups, which were struggling.
  • In the Netherlands, more and more investors are asking startup founders not to pay themselves a salary. Here are five reasons why they should.
  • Unknown identifies nearly 1,000 Bitcoin wallets belonging to Russian secret services. Very clever.
  • The U.S. government is about to take over First Republic Bank. I wrote earlier this month about what kind of bank First Republic is. Or was?

Spotlight 9: Meta and Microsoft the big winners of the week

Meta and Microsoft as outliers after good quarterly results

Reader Raoul Kuiper rightly asked me why I did include Bitcoin in this portfolio when I don't own it myself because of its energy consumption and associated carbon emissions. By way of explanation, I created this fictitious Spotlight 9 portfolio to track sentiment in the tech world on a weekly basis. I think when, as happened last week, virtually all major tech companies plus the Dow Jones and S&P 500 are all in the minus, that is relevant to the entire world of technology and innovation. Bitcoin and Ethereum I included because those are the most widely held assets of the hundreds of millions of people investing in crypto worldwide. Of the Spotlight 9, I personally find Microsoft, Apple and Ethereum interesting. The projects and companies I find otherwise fascinating, such as Polygon (MATIC), are usually too small to have an impact on stock market sentiment and the economy and therefore not included in the Spotlight 9.

Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft and Meta published good quarterly earnings this week, and Microsoft and Meta in particular benefited. Microsoft is expected to benefit greatly from the integration of AI, based in part on technology from OpenAI, into various products and services. Zuckerberg explained to investors that Meta uses a lot of AI to better target their TikTok competitor Instagram Reels, and that struck a chord: Meta shares rose nearly 13% in the last 5 days.

It was, in short, in every way the week of AI.