Tag: Nvidia

Categories
AI technology

Tech elite stuck in the desert at rained-out Burning Man

Burning Man 2023 wasn't a party. Image created with Midjourney.

I had a very different opening to my newsletter in mind, but the fact that the tech elite is stuck in the desert mud with their private jets at Burning Man is too much news for me to ignore. As one Burner sums it up in this sad video: Burning Man 2023 is screwed. In other news: OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, is on its way to $1 billion in revenue.

You are reading the web version of my free weekly newsletter about the technological, economic and social events that define our lives. You can subscribe for free here to receive the newsletter in your mailbox every Sunday.

Burning Man is the Coachella for the tech industry

When I was a student at San Francisco State University deep in the last century, I regularly rode my scooter from campus back home past Baker Beach and China Beach. Campfires were often lit there by homeless people, hippies or groups of hipsters. It was the first time I realized that their clothing was so similar that even up close I could not tell the difference between "hipsters or homeless."

One such beach party got so out of hand that it was banned in the early 1990s and moved to the Nevada desert. Here the concept of the "Temporary Autonomous Zone" was realized - a city built from the ground up, where the usual social norms and commercial transactions were suspended in favor of a "gift economy." Sounds wonderful.

Burning Man has grown considerably over the years, attracting more than 70,000 participants from around the world in recent editions. In recent years, the area has grown into a veritable Black Rock City, a temporary city built for the event, designed as a series of concentric circles centered on "The Man," a large wooden effigy that is burned at the end of the festival. The city also features themed camps, art installations, workshops and a series of performances.

What Coachella is to the Los Angeles entertainment industry, Burning Man became to the Silicon Valley tech industry: a few hours' drive to a long weekend of escapism in the desert. This is what it looked like from the air earlier this week.

I've never been to Burning Man because I don't like the combination of fine sand, short showers and large groups of mostly drugged people who like to hug. But everyone I know who's been there had a fantastic time and so I'm as much a fan of Burning Man as I am of moon landings: I don't quite get it and gladly don't participate in it, but from a distance I enjoy seeing so many people having fun.

Alternative protest against formerly alternative festival

Rapid growth has drawn criticism for its environmental impact. Building a temporary city of 80,000 people in the desert is actually bad for the planet, Vox reported Wednesday as climate activists headed down the road toward Burning Man:

'All together, each Burning Man generates about 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide. That's more than about 22,000 gas-powered cars produce in a year. What began as a gathering on a beach in San Francisco has become a destination for celebrities and the ultra-rich, especially tech billionaires. That's why private jets have become a problem. There are now fancy camps, meals prepared by private chefs and VIP parties. Keep in mind that all of this is built just for the week-long festival at the end of summer and everything has to be taken down and removed afterward. One of the basic principles of Burning Man is "leave no trace," but even the event organizers were baffled by how much trash was left in the desert last year.

Vox

Last Monday, a small group of climate protesters parked a 2.5-meter trailer across the road, causing miles of congestion for participants on their way to Burning Man. The protesters demanded a ban on the use of private planes, single-use plastics, unnecessary propane burning and unlimited generator use.

The protest ended when a ranger rammed through the blockade with his pickup truck and, with weapon drawn, worked a woman to the ground. Looking at these images, my thoughts wandered to those fire making hippies on Baker Beach in San Francisco; how could something so relaxed and joyous get so out of control? What once began as  counterculture has become mainstream, then a new counterculture emerges to protest it. It is tiring because of its predictability.

Chris Rock leaves Burning Man hitchhiking in the back of a pickup truck. Image; @erichamiilton

Chris Rock and Diplo are out

So the vibe wasn't there from the start, but the situation worsened when the festival grounds were closed yesterday due to heavy rain by organizers, who called for conservation of water, food and fuel. Participants may be stuck for days as vehicles are stuck in the desert that has turned to mud.

A number of participants then decided to leave the site, on which a dead person had since been found, on foot. The famous angel investor Gil Penchina walked 8 miles through the mud until he could score a ride. Dj Diplo absolutely did not want to miss a gig last night and also went for a walk, only he was lucky enough to do so in the company of Chris Rock, who confessed to also having once started out as a DJ.

Rock sighed to Diplo, hitchhiking in an open pickup truck, "If I would have known DJs would ever make money, I would have never told a joke. Brazilian DJ Lukas Ruiz, better known as Vintage Culture, is still stuck in the desert and canceled several gigs via Instagram. The organization has since launched a "Wet Playa Survival Guide. The mix of celebrities, heavy rain and a photogenic desert is irresistible to the media, so for the next 48 hours Burning Man will dominate the news.

Brief other news:

OpenAI on its way to $1 billion in revenue

The Information reported this week that OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, is well on its way to achieving one billion dollars in annual sales. That revenue is achieved primarily on companies that deploy ChatGPT and pay a license fee to OpenAI to do so. With the launch of ChatGPT Enterprise, OpenAI will be able to significantly increase revenue very quickly, because despite all the recent criticism of OpenAI, there does not seem to be a competing product on the market that can be so easily integrated by companies.

Venture capitalist Reid Hoffman downsizes role at Greylock

The LinkedIn co-founder is one of Silicon Valley's most influential AI enthusiasts. While it is not known what Hoffman will do next, the expectation is that he will delve even further into AI. This recent interview with Hoffman on AI is highly recommended. He calls AI "Amplification Intelligence," amplified intelligence.

Thousands of participants examined weaknesses in AI

For two and a half days in Las Vegas, thousands of participants - including 220 community college students and others from organizations traditionally kept out of the early stages of technological change from 18 U.S. states - engaged in leading AI models. Participants exchanged 164,208 messages in 17,469 conversations as they searched for bias, potential harm and security weaknesses in 21 challenges designed to expose the potential gaps in the trust and security of AI models. The challenge was this.

How do you talk to an AI?

Practical guide on how to achieve extraordinary results as an average person with a chatbot such as ChatGPT. Nice example: ' Ask chatbots to explain things using examples from your favorite novels. You could do the same with, say, Harry Potter or "Keeping Up With the Kardashians."

Bumble's CEO says AI will help you get more dates.

Let me know if it works, and I'll share the tips and experiences in this newsletter, with your photo and contact information if desired because I like to bring my community together.

AI fever turns Anguilla's ".ai" domain into a digital gold mine

The tiny Caribbean island may rake in 10% of its GDP from domain sales this year. Anguilla's success in selling AI domain names is bound to be viewed with great envy by the neighboring island with a less commercially attractive name to abbreviate, St. Maarten.

Back to the office or fired?

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy tells employees that it is "past time" to commit to the company's "return to office mandate" and that their jobs are at stake. I prefer remote work, but is it so strange for a company to ask employees to come to the office at least three days a week?

A venture capital firm has built an AI-powered pitch deck generator for startup founders - and is giving it away for free

I have not been able to test it yet because I am still on the waiting list, for which you can sign up here.

Spotlight 9: tech stocks are the hits of the week

It is impossible to come up with a nice chart of stocks after a picture of Chris Rock in the back of a pickup truck in the desert.

Hedge funds have record exposure to the seven largest tech stocks by market capitalization, according to data released Friday by Goldman Sachs, in a week after Nvidia shares hit an all-time high because of spectacular sales and earnings results.

"Hedge funds continue to embrace mega cap tech and the theme of artificial intelligence," Goldman Sachs' brokerage said in a note sent to a limited group of clients that was obtained by Reuters.

It is striking how last week Bitcoin and Ethereum, the main cryptoassets, fell while the rest of the market rose. Especially because they seemed to move along with the mainstream market for the rest of the year, especially that of tech stocks.

Categories
AI technology

Nvidia is the maker of golden shovels and pickaxes

Nvidia dominated the news in the technology world last week in a way reminiscent of Netscape's 1995 IPO. That legendary IPO heralded the start of the Internet era, just as the launch of the iPhone in 2007 marked the breakthrough of the smartphone. Similarly, we will one day look back on Nvidia's stunning Q2 results, which launched the world into the AI era. This was the big bang of artificial intelligence.

Compared to last year's second quarter, revenue doubled from $6.7 billion to $13.5 billion, while profits rose 843% (no typo), from $656 million to nearly $6.2 billion. The outlook for next year is even brighter. What lies behind these stunning numbers and why does the "shovel and pickaxe maker" Nvidia earn more than the digital gold diggers, the AI application makers?

He was the founder in 1993 and is still the CEO in 2023: Jensen Huang of Nvidia. Image created with Midjourney.

"A new computing era has begun. Companies worldwide are moving from general-purpose to accelerated computing and generative AI."

Jensen Huang, CEO Nvidia

"A new computing era has begun. Worldwide, companies are moving from general-purpose to accelerated computing and generative AI," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA in releasing his figures. Usually CEOs believe too much in themselves and the creation of their own success, but Huang is absolutely right.

That's why in this week's newsletter I don't pay attention to other newsworthy events, such as the announcement of chipmaker Arm's IPO that may be a precursor to a definitive revival in the technology sector after a year of mass layoffs, but try to make sense of Nvidia's development in the suddenly rapidly changing technology world.

Ghost valley

"Everyone seemed pretty gloomy, looking at each other and wondering why nothing exciting seemed to be happening in the Valley anymore." It could be a quote from sentiment in the technology sector before OpenAI launched Chat GPT late last year, but it is a quote from Netscape founder Marc Andreessen about the atmosphere he encountered when he moved to Silicon Valley in 1994.

The personal computer had broken through worldwide in the 1980s, Microsoft dominated that market in software, and there were a few big players in the traditional world of mainframe computers and networking. But nobody's heart was beating faster from companies like HP, Novell or my favorite company name, Digital. (What an inspiring brainstorming session it must have been where they came up with that name).  

The success of the free Netscape browser and subsequent IPO completely changed that sentiment. Suddenly, large companies were developing applications for the Internet and Internet startups were getting serious funding - eBay was founded less than a month after the Netscape IPO, Amazon went public two years later, and that was less than a year before Google launched, to name a few examples.

Nvidia's recent success seems to echo the Netscape IPO. At Nvidia, the sales and profits led to investor enthusiasm, but at Netscape in 1995, jubilation arose around the share price. That is a major difference... The expected introductory price was $14 but demand was so high that a last-minute decision was made to double the introductory price to $28, something that rarely, if ever, happens because the introductory price is determined after months of talks with investors worldwide.

Netscape closed the first day of trading at a price of $75, which meant that the company had left billions on the table with its still too-low introductory price and the first buyers were able to book record profits on the very first day. From Wall Street to Main Street, as it is so nicely phrased, everyone was reading in the newspaper the next day about that miraculous invisible phenomenon called the Internet. (Unfortunately, I don't have time to explain to readers under 35 what a newspaper is, but think of it as a pile of printed out homepages with very large banners that you read for free at the hairdresser's, excuse me, hair stylist's.)

Cisco no disco, but briefly the biggest

The clamor around Netscape stock quickly died down because of relatively modest revenue and profit growth, mainly due to fierce competition from Microsoft that culminated in an infamous lawsuit (in which, incidentally, to my surprise, an offer Microsoft had made me at my first company Planet Internet to switch browsers was entered into evidence by Netscape).

Meanwhile, almost unnoticed, another much less sexy company grew to become the most valuable company in the world: Cisco. Products from this maker of telecommunications equipment were used by virtually every telecom company in the world, which rushed to offer the Internet as a new service alongside telephony, as well as in corporate networks that were massively connecting to the Internet.

In March 2000, Cisco was the most valuable company in the world with a market value of more than $500 billion. Its P/E ratio was a staggering 196, meaning an investor was willing to pay $196 for $1 of the company's profits at that share price. The party did not last long, and two decades later Cisco is a fine company, but it is worth only half of that sky-high valuation of the early 2000s. By comparison, anyone who had bought Apple stock for a thousand dollars back then would now have made over a 20,000% return and makeover $200,000.

Is Nvidia the Netscape, Cisco or Apple of 2023?

The Netscape browser opened up information and commerce to a global audience. The greatest value, however, turned out to lie not in the creators of the infrastructure (Cisco) or the creators of the application layer (Netscape), but in the developers of applications on that enabling technology: first Yahoo and eBay, then Amazon and Google.

Similarly, Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram and later Tiktok benefited from the smartphone breakthrough, especially after 2010 when the iPhone 3 appeared and Android enabled good licensing versions for Samsung and Chinese smartphone makers such as Huawei. That technology, combined with globally cheaper subscriptions and data traffic bundles, led to exploding social media usage.

From the market value of Meta (owner of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp) of over $700 billion, as well as the over $200 billion market value of ByteDance (owner of TikTok and Lemon8), you would think that the greatest value is again in applications. Were it not for the fact that Nvidia is already worth a whopping $1.1 trillion, $1100 billion.

Share prices since Jan. 1, 2023. Nvidia shares rose a whopping 221%! That is not only extreme compared to the S&P 500 which so far rose an excellent 15% on its own, but also compared to all other dominant technology companies.

Analyst Stephen Guilfoyle says of Nvidia:

"The business is not as good as gold, but much better. Cash flows are growing at an amazing rate. Costs and expenses are under control. The balance sheet is beautiful. While growth in the data center business is beyond what I thought possible not too long ago, gaming also seems to be back on track."

Several analysts and investors have now raised their expectations for Nvidia stock to above $550 and even $600, which would mean that Nvidia will be worth more than Amazon.

There are only five

Excluding Saudi state oil drillers Aramco, Nvidia is already currently one of only five companies in the world that has reached the $1 trillion (thousand billion) market value milestone - along with Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google's owner Alphabet - and the only one that is not a household name.

Founded in 1993, Nvidia became known primarily as a maker of graphics cards for high-end gaming computers; everyone has one of those nephews in the family who would come over to give you a sweaty hand when you visited, before quickly hobbling back to the attic to continue gaming on his PC with an Nvidia GeForce graphics card. That was also the image investors had of the company for years.

Under Huang's leadership, Nvidia quietly developed into a formidable competitor to giants such as Intel. "We saw early on, about a decade ago, that this way of making software could change everything. And we changed the company from the bottom up and sideways. Every chip we made was focused on artificial intelligence," Huang told CNBC.

Anyone looking superficially at Nvidia is quick to make the mistake of concluding that the company only makes chips and is very sensitive to competing chips as already announced by Nvidia's own customers, including Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Only it turns out that the lead Nvidia has built up is far less easy to catch up with than widely thought. As the New York Times concluded, Nvidia has developed a competitive moat around AI chips.

Keith Strier, Nvidia VP Worldwide AI, explained well on LinkedIn that Nvidia makes the entire infrastructure, not just the chips, and that those components are very scarce.

Therefore, orders are being placed by various companies and even countries for years ahead; previously I wrote about orders from the Chinese Internet giants and from the Arab world. The rumor is persistent that orders are being made for billions for chips that Nvidia has not yet announced, let alone has in production.

The scarcity of components and manufacturing capacity could be an Achilles heel for Nvidia. After all, manufacturing is outsourced entirely to TSMC, but not entirely coincidentally, TSMC also makes all of Apple' s chips which seems to have a preferred position.

Conclusion: Nvidia example of completely new business form

It can be argued that Nvidia has built a better competitive position than Cisco ever had and the margins are arguably much higher. While Nvidia is an enabling technology, it is far less easy to replace than, say, Netscape once was. But it is also not an extremely scalable company like Google or even Meta because it depends on hardware production.

To understand Nvidia and the AI craze, it is interesting to see how, for example, ChatGPT uses Nvidia. The company OpenAI, whose shareholders include Microsoft, developed ChatGPT and together with Microsoft' s cloud service , Azure, and Nvidia built the cluster on which ChatGPT runs. Quickly summarized: Microsoft's cloud service Azure uses Nvidia's famous H100 chips for this particular application in a data center and the application ChatGPT uses the service.

OpenAI has licensed use of ChatGPT to Microsoft, which uses the technology in its Bing search engine, among others. But Microsoft also makes its own AI chips that will eventually compete with Nvidia.

It is like slowly finding out that your uncle on your father's side is married to your mother's sister, only on a prenuptial agreement and not in community of property.

It is crucial to understand that the AI applications we see today are almost all based on Large Language Models (LLMs), a type of artificial intelligence models designed to understand and generate human-like text from large amounts of data on which it has been trained.

The PT in ChatGPT stands for Pre-Trained: ChatGPT uses deep learning to process and produce text in a coherent and contextually relevant way. Because of its size, which includes billions of parameters, it can handle a variety of tasks, from answering questions and writing essays to generating creative content. Only, and here it comes, that pre-training, feeding the system with data, requires such extreme computing power that can currently only be provided by Nvidia.

30,000 GPUs for ChatGPT

So when Hubspot, the tool I use to create this newsletter, announces, for example, an AI module claiming to be "Powered by OpenAI," not only Hubspot but also OpenAI earns from it, obviously Microsoft (because OpenAI uses Azure) and, above all, Nvidia. This kind of value chain will become commonplace in AI: specific applications developed on horizontal AI platforms like OpenAI, from which ultimately Nvidia always earns.

To complete the example of OpenAI with ChatGPT: only those involved know exactly how the system is put together, but the claim that no less than ten thousand Nvidia GPUs were used to make ChatGPT and another twenty thousand are needed to run nicely does not sound implausible. With a purchase price of $30,000, that's an order for a whopping $900 million for Nvidia.

What is unique about Nvidia's AI technology stack is that they are no longer motherboards or graphics cards that my nephew can pull right out of his PC, but software applications specifically designed for the capabilities of, say, Nvidia's flagship H100. Because depreciation on these types of systems is spread out over many years, it will be years before Nvidia is replaced - if any new, better technology comes to market than Nvidia offers, which does not seem likely at this time.

When Jensen Huang first used ChatGPT, he asked for a poem about Nvidia. So I asked for a poem about Nvidia, the H100 and revenue potential. This is the result.

In the realm of tech, where ambitions reside,
The H100 emerges, with potential untried.
Nvidia's beacon, shining so bright,
Promises profits, reaching a new height.
Markets await, their hopes taking flight,
For with this chip, the future's so right.
Nvidia stands poised, ready to soar,
With the H100, revenue's lore is in store.

Poem by ChatGPT about Nvidia and the H100

Next week another regular installment of my newsletter. Happy Sunday!

Categories
AI crypto technology

Apple scores with Messi

This week there was no news that stood out everywhere, so I made a top 10 of things that caught my eye. The great little magician from Argentina is, of course, number one.

If Lionel Messi worked from home.
Image: Midjourney

1. Apple scores with Messi

No one will have failed to notice that Lionel Messi has been playing for Inter Miami, the club owned by Posh Spice's husband, for a few weeks now. But there is another owner, Jorge Mas, and he was retweeted (or rex-ed, what's that actually called since Twitter was renamed X?) by Apple CEO Tim Cook this week. The occasion was the doubling of subscribers to MLS League Pass, the pay subscription Apple offers worldwide to people who want to watch the U.S. soccer league.

Neither Apple nor the MLS disclose how many subscribers the service has, although as recently as last month it was suggested that the number was close to 1 million, before Messi's arrival. In any case, Apple is clearly pleased with Messi's impact on MLS Season Pass, because that's not how often Tim Cook retweets/rex-ed messages from people outside Apple.

You only have to buy Messi to be retweeted by Tim Cook

CNET analyzed Apple's strategy on streaming sports and is one of the first media outlets that seems to understand that the subscription to the MLS is an additional upsell; MLS matches and thus Messi's matches are not free for Apple TV+ subscribers. A monthly subscription to the MLS costs $12.99 or $49 for the rest of the season. It is extraordinary to read back now that as recently as April, there was laughter about the deal between Apple and the MLS.

Of course, it is odd that Messi is the only player in a team sport to benefit from the growth of subscribers to Apple TV+'s MLS subscription. The question is whether this will be replicated in other sports. Another question, of course, is how much Messi earns from each MLS subscriber and for how long; is it part of a subscriber's lifetime value or a flat fee per subscription?

There is plenty of speculation whether the Saudi league, which currently attracts any player who loves money, sand and shopping malls, will follow the same strategy as the MLS. That, of course, makes no sense: the MLS and its franchisees need money. The Saudis want to buy respect, charisma and reach and are even more likely to pay for worldwide broadcasts of their matches, rather than charge money for them.

You'll read my free weekly newsletter about the technological, economic and social events that are changing our lives. Subscribe here for free and get the full story in your mailbox every Sunday.

2. In Silicon Valley, everyone became Merlin the magician for a moment

'Forget AI. For a while, Silicon Valley was obsessed with floating bricks.' So headlined the Washington Post in a fine article about the craziness in recent weeks surrounding LK-99, the material hoped to be the room-temperature semiconductor that would change the entire world.

The article rightly states that the technology world is diligently looking for fundamental breakthroughs, such as AI, after a decade of few spectacular new applications became apparent. Hopefully, investment in companies working on carbon reduction and decarbonization will continue to increase.

Unfortunately, halfway through, the journalist briefly hits the mark: 'Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology have been through several cycles of hype, but have yet to fundamentally change any sector except crime and money laundering. Technology designed to combat climate change, such as carbon capture and storage, has made no major progress for years.'

There is zero evidence that crime and money laundering have changed because of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. Zero. On the contrary: every transaction, while anonymous, is always visible on the blockchain, so the entire trail of transactions from a wallet is forever traceable to anyone on the Internet. Try that with the old-fashioned bank accounts through tax havens (Panama Papers, remember) or with the piles of cash of Pablo Escobar and consorts.

3. California is paradise and testing ground for self-driving cars

Following a state regulatory agency ruling, San Francisco will have robot cars on its streets 24/7. Good analysis explaining that this is a pivotal moment for the auto industry. Again from the Washington Post, which has excellent coverage of technology when you would rather expect that newspaper to focus on politics.

Once again, someone completely misses the point in this article, this time a mayor. " What will happen to our workforce if AI and driverless vehicles both come online at the same time? " she says. A bigger problem, of course, is that virtually no right-thinking person wants to be in politics by 2023, so we'll be stuck with mayors who talk about self-driving cars like retarded people talked about stagecoaches in 1910.

A populist politician's phony question has been the same for hundreds of years when confronted with innovations: 'But what will happen to the employment of the (choose your own preferred profession that no longer exists) chimney sweep/miner/video store worker?'

The answer is simple and has been the same for centuries: new occupations are emerging but hopefully advancing mechanization will eliminate heavy physical work and the work week can be further shortened to more time for fun things or self-development. There are people who got time to write a newsletter that way. No one benefits from further spreading the Chinese 9-9-6 culture: 9 to 9, 6 days a week.

The hope with self-driving cars, of course, is not that everyone will have their own self-driving car, but that transportation will be on demand; it is madness that the average car sits idle 95% of the time. Fewer cars means less CO2 emissions for car production and oh my goodness, this means unemployment for all the craftsmen in factories who currently screw antennas into the roofs of cars to receive FM radio.

4. Billionaires engaged in a race for and against AI

While technology experts are sounding the alarm about the pace at which artificial intelligence is evolving, philanthropists - including established foundations and technology billionaires - have responded with an increase in donations.

In the camp of the faithful include former Google top executive Eric Schmidt and founder of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman. In the other corner of the ring, for example, is Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, along with the Ford, MacArthur and Rockefeller Foundations. For those with doubts about this topic - and those doubts are very understandable and also justified - I again recommend this piece by Marc Andreessen. But AI and crypto are not scary, just as it was not scary that humans learned to read

The first half of this excellent podcast from colleagues of the aforementioned Marc Andreessen is about how AI could benefit from crypto, and the second half about how crypto could benefit from AI - but the common thread is the tension between centralization vs. decentralization.

This again touches on the point about whether cash or crypto is worse for crime: the arguments opponents use always end up with a centralized system, without actually analyzing the problem.

The podcast also discusses where the intersection of crypto and AI can bring about things that are not possible by either alone. Together, the fields of AI and crypto have major implications for how we live our lives every day; so this episode is for anyone curious, or already building in this sector.

5. PayPal with its own stablecoin

PayPal came out with its own crypto currency that is pegged in value to the dollar. From a financial standpoint, using stablecoins is not much different from using a gift card: you can use your dollars to buy stablecoins and then use those stablecoins to buy various cryptocurrencies or make other online purchases.

Downright funny was to see the reactions. Some think the PayPal stablecoin is more important than a Bitcoin ETF arguing that PayPal is uniquely positioned to solve the huge opportunity for fiat onboarding - they have the banking relationships, regulatory framework and infrastructure to sign up millions of dollars to millions of wallets. Thestreet.com even calls PayPal the crypto leader for the next decade because it links 400 million customers to crypto. The question, of course, is how many of those 400 million ever use crypto. Those 400 million customers also have access to stamps, and how often does anyone moisten the back of such a sticky note?

PayPal's stablecoin is totally unimportant, says Bank of America but that name alone does not have the aura of total neutrality on this topic. He is often quoted in this newsletter and once again Michael Casey of Coindesk has the most thorough analysis: why the timing feels right.

I expect there will be great resistance from Washington to the PayPal stablecoin, because anything pegged to the dollar is, in the eyes of the average bureaucrat, not owned by the citizen, but by the state.

6. Worldcoin under increasing pressure

Speaking of citizen ownership, whose is identity? I've written about Worldcoin before because I think the idea of an anonymized affirmation of a human identity is important and fully endorsed. There is so much unnecessary fraud and deception on the Internet that an anonymized digital identity and reputation can be crucial. Suppose you buy something on eBay from someone who has done few transactions there but has an immaculate reputation on Etsy, Uber or on Airbnb, for example; then confirmation of such a good "portable" reputation would be extremely valuable for buyer and seller.

What Worldcoin is doing now is linking a human identity to an iris scan in exchange for obtaining free Worldcoin tokens. There is no useful application whatsoever as I describe above. It leads to harrowing scenes worldwide, such as in Kenya: 'Some people in line told local media they had traveled miles after friends said "free money" was being handed out. They admitted they didn't know why they had to scan their irises and where that information would go, but they just wanted the money.'

Surely someone with the intelligence of Sam Altman, the former top executive of business factory Y Combinator and founder of Open AI, should be able to couple that intelligence with the common sense to not want to do this with Worldcoin?

7. Nvidia gets $5 billion in orders from China

In June, I wrote that Nvidia's Keith Strier told the ATX Summit in Singapore that Nvidia has more orders than it can deliver, and that companies and even countries have been placing orders years in advance to ensure longer-term deliveries. Strier wrote about it himself:

'This is about compute, not just chips. AI requires a highly specialized compute infrastructure, a combination of hardware and software. Most importantly, the supply is finite. [...] NVIDIA GPUs (the chips, MF) are more than gold, they are the "rare earth elements" of AI. That is why the world's most advanced AI companies are raising capital to secure the supply of accelerated computing. Whether an enterprise or even a country, it is important to plan and budget for the computing power that will be needed to achieve and sustain leadership in AI.'

Strier was referring to this order, among others, as Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba and ByteDance (owner of TikTok and Lemon8) ordered for $5 billion, including $1 billion this year and $4 billion in 2024. There are countries and companies already trying to place orders with Nvidia for 2025 through 2028.

The Chinese companies are playing catch-up and are pulling out all the stops to continue their "old-fashioned" growth. ByteDance is trying to link TikTok with Lemon8 in an effort to boost usage of that app, and Alibaba, which along with Tencent Holdings and Baidu is responsible for the birth of China's Internet industry, is trying to persuade investors to support the policy of splitting the company into no less than six parts.

8. WeWork doesn't work, Zoom just does

Interest in WeWork has always completely passed me by; it always seemed like overpriced office space with moderately comfortable furniture. The absurd valuation to value a real estate marquee as a technology company came to a screeching halt around the failed IPO, and now the board is reporting, in part due to increased interest rates, that a bankruptcy of WeWork is not ruled out.

Meanwhile, Zoom is asking staff who live within 80 kilometers of the office to come to the office at least two days a week. A reasoned request, interpreted by the media as the end of working from home. It seems like some journalists don't speak to people; I hardly know anyone who works in an organization where working from home is possible, where the pre-pandemic work culture has been restored. It won't be every day, but working from home has become part of working.

9. The investor is on vacation

The investor is sitting on the beach.

Despite the billion-dollar order from China, Nvidia was the week's decliner, but that's not surprising after all the gains this year so far. Otherwise, it was doom and gloom for tech companies, so I thought it would be nice to look at what's happening at companies in the pre-IPO stage. This article on crowdfunding in Europe illustrates the increased interest in climate tech, in technology that combats climate change.

With the stock market climate continuing to allow few major IPOs in the coming months, it is especially interesting to follow which companies are being acquired rather than going public. With every company where a buyer knocks on the door, mild panic ensues. Therefore, this is an excellent article, explaining the steps to follow the moment a buyer comes forward.

10. A Steph Curry summer

Speaking of vacations; the summer hit of 2023 is obviously Roxy with "Anne-Fleur Vacation," but the one with the most extraordinary summer is undeniably basketball player Steph Curry. First he hit a hole in one at a charity tournament and last week he was on stage at his own Chase Center in San Francisco with the band Paramore. And the conclusion was: what a basketball this man can play.

Wishing all readers another Steph Curry summer, see you next week!

Categories
AI crypto technology

The journalist who became a billionaire as an investor, quits

This week a couple of human interest stories stood out. The richest Welshman, Sir Michael Moritz, who as a journalist at Time was once blacklisted by Steve Jobs, left Sequoia Capital after nearly 40 years. And while CEO Sam Altman traveled the earth meeting world leaders, OpenAI turned out to be led by Mira Murati, a virtually unknown 35-year-old Albanian woman.

Image: Midjourney. Prompt: man with gray hair walks away, San Francisco skyline in background.

The little kingdom

The first time I came across the name Michael Moritz was in 1992 when Frans Straver, with whom I would later found Planet Internet, and I were graduating together from the University of Amsterdam on the sexy subject of "success and failure factors of interactive media in the consumer market. At that time, only mustachioed accountants had computers and only the bigger drug dealers used cell phones.

If you were looking for a serious book about the computer industry, there was nowhere to turn but the American Book Center in Amsterdam. There we found the fantastic book, which by then was almost a decade old, by Moritz, entitled "The Little Kingdom," about how Steve Jobs developed the Mac at Apple in the early 1980s.

"So much of what has happened is connected to Apple and the story of this extraordinary company that I find that Apple's breadcrumbs have been strewn across my life's path," said Moritz, who regrets that he never settled his spat with Jobs before his death. The book planted the seed in Frans and me that it was possible for two young guys to set up a successful company in the technology world, something we had never considered until reading Moritz's book.

Of course, when I moved to America in the late 1990s for my next startup after Planet Internet, Moritz was the first investor on whose door I knocked. Tried to knock on the door actually, because I never got beyond the inbox of the intern of the assistant of the junior associate at Sequoia who kindly declined me. Later I understood that Sequoia, and Moritz in particular, received thousands of business plans a year during that dotcom boom but made only a few dozen investments.

From Airbnb to Zoom

Michael Moritz was born in Wales to Jewish parents who had fled the rise of the Nazis in Germany. He was stationed in San Francisco for many years as a Time journalist and wrote widely about the world of technology. Don Valentine, the founder of Sequoia and the man who invested in Apple, Atari, Cisco, Oracle and Electronic Arts, among others, saw something in the British journalist and offered him the chance to work as an investor.

Over the next 38 years Moritz worked for Sequoia, the investment company strung together successes. Under his reign, Sequoia invested in virtually every company whose apps we have on our phones or computers today, or which we use for work directly or indirectly, including Google, Dropbox, Linkedin, Yahoo, Airbnb, PayPal, Instagram, YouTube, Whatsapp, Nvidia, Zoom and OpenAI.

In one of his rare interviews, Moritz said:

"One of the things that is undervalued in our industry is how much you can learn from someone decades younger than you. Those are the people who might go on to do unusual things; they understand something very well, are independent thinkers and obviously smart and gifted."

Early this century, Moritz also initiated Sequoia's lucrative expansion into China. He was chairman of Sequoia from the mid-1990s until 2012, when he relinquished day-to-day management of the company due to "a rare medical condition that is treatable but incurable." Still, he remained a partner of Sequoia until his announced departure this week.

In recent years, Moritz apparently focused more on e-commerce and led Sequoia's investments in Stripe (estimated valuation $50 billion), Klarna ($6.7 billion), Instacart ($12 billion) and Getir ($6.5 billion). He will gradually transfer positions on the supervisory boards of those companies.

A hefty crank start

Forbes estimates Moritz's wealth at $5.2 billion, thanks largely to his holdings in Internet companies. Moritz and his wife donate most of it to charities, mainly through their own foundation, Crankstart. They are in quite a hurry to do so, judging by the report on the website:

"In 2022, we awarded $200 million in grants, 60 percent of which were to nonprofit organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area. The grants ranged in size from $1,000 to $18,500,000 and went to 363 organizations."

Other eye-catching donations included $20 million to the American civil rights movement ACLU, $50 million to his alma mater the University of Oxford, and no less than £75 million to the same university to spend on scholarships for children from low-income families. Moritz had not lost sight of the fact that he himself had once enjoyed a scholarship.

What I personally found remarkable was that Moritz is funding the famed literary Booker Prize through Crankstart for at least five years, after the previous sponsor pulled out. But unlike that sponsor, Moritz did not want to attach any name recognition to his donation because he and his wife believe that the Booker Prize is a prestigious award that should be associated with the name of the prize, not the name of the sponsor.

The similarities between Steve Jobs and Sir Alex Ferguson

In 2009, Moritz released a revised version of his book on Apple entitled "The Return to the Little Kingdom: Steve Jobs, the Creation of Apple and How It Changed the World. The book remains highly recommended for anyone interested in innovation and creativity.

To my surprise, Moritz, still a die-hard Manchester United fan despite having lived in San Francisco for nearly half a century, wrote a book on leadership with legendary manager Sir Alex Ferguson in 2015.

In an interview about that book, Moritz shared some observations about the similarities between Steve Jobs and Sir Alex:

"When it comes to leadership, I think there are similarities. In their own way, they are both perfectionists. With Sir Alex, I was looking for a way to explain what I think are the basic principles of good leadership. I don't think they are very different between Silicon Valley and the soccer field, and they are universally applicable. The problem with the principles of leadership is that they are pretty easy to list, but very difficult to apply.

Sir Alex, Steve, they both had the energy to consistently push, urge, persuade others toward a goal that they themselves envisioned. I think the big difference between management and leadership is that the leader can persuade people to do the impossible."

Time for a new book?

Things get even more interesting when Moritz shares his own investment criteria. "When I want to invest I start with a market opportunity, because if a company starts in a market that looks unchanging and doesn't look like it's going to grow, it's not going to be a great company. Furthermore, we are looking for people who are completely obsessed. People who love nothing more than to work on the product or service they have come up with."

In the Netherlands, many investors employ the archaic cliché "it's about the guy, not the tent"; but Moritz cites as the first criterion precisely a large market, prone to change. That's an interesting angle. A top entrepreneur in a small market is not so interesting in this view.

And that begs the question of whether Moritz, time and health permitting, would like to write a book for the first time sharing his own views on entrepreneurship, innovation and leadership, rather than writing about people like Jobs and Ferguson.

My favorite book for tech entrepreneurs is "The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a business when there are no easy answers' by former entrepreneur Ben Horowitz, now best known as co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Horowitz is an exception, because just as many former top athletes turn out to be bad coaches, few successful entrepreneurs manage to develop into good investors. Let me stick to myself: when people ask me for advice on investing, I always reply that although I worked as an investor for many years, I never said I was good at it. That's why I became an entrepreneur again.

Moritz, now knighted Sir Michael, has no entrepreneurial experience whatsoever. Apparently, that was no impediment to achieving extreme success as an investor. It is high time someone with his amazing track record, huge network and sharp pen, shared his knowledge and experience in the form of a new book.

The driving force behind OpenAI is a 35-year-old Albanian woman

Founder and CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman visited as many as 22 countries in recent weeks including Israel, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, India, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Indonesia and Australia. Altman met with students, venture capitalists and leaders including Indian Prime Minister Modi, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Israeli President Herzog. Earlier in his trip, Altman met with British Prime Minister Sunak, German Chancellor Scholz and French President Macron. (Remember, with dark brown shoes?)

The subject of all the conversations was the question: can AI be trusted, or are government measures needed? So it was instant news when Reuters saw Friday on the LinkedIn page of OpenAI's "Trust & Safety Leader" Dave Willner that he had left quietly after a year and a half. Willner talked about family reasons, which of course is possible.

But I also note that according to his LinkedIn profile, with 18 months of employment, Willner has already secured a sizable number of options in OpenAI, which at the estimated company valuation of $27 to $29 billion for OpenAI are worth enough that the Willner family's life would not be significantly improved if he stayed with the company for another year or so. After all, the difference in quality of life between earning 10,000 Euros or 20,000 Euros is far greater, than the difference between 10 million or 20 million in the bank.

Until a successor is found, Willner's team (apparently there is a Trust & Safety team at OpenAI) is managed by the CTO, Mira Murati. Who is this woman, who is still completely unknown on ChatGPT itself?

Mira Murati? Doesn't ring a bell, ChatGPT says of its own boss.

CEO Magazine came out with a portrait of Mira Murati last week. Although, portrait; from the lack of a posed photo and the absence of literal quotes from Murati, it may be concluded that she had not collaborated on the article.

Although Murati is unknown on her own ChatGPT, the competitor, Google Bard, does have some information about her:

"Mira Murati is the Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI. She is a brilliant engineer who has worked on several AI projects, including ChatGPT, Dall-E and Codex. She is also an advocate for the regulation of AI because she believes it is important to take precautions to prevent the misuse of AI.

Murati was born in Albania and studied mechanical engineering at Dartmouth College. She then worked as an intern at Goldman Sachs and Zodiac Aerospace before joining Tesla as Senior Product Manager of the Model X. In 2016, she joined Leap Motion. In 2018, she joined OpenAI and was promoted to CTO in 2021."

There are several things remarkable about this. First, Murati's description on Bard is almost literally identical to the one in the CEO Magazine article. That raises the question of which source had the original information and which source clumsily copied it? It's fodder for lawyers in the AI world, where real and fake or original and copy seem completely interchangeable.

Second, Murati must be something of a prodigy, because it is rare for someone with the study of mechanical engineering to make a career in software so quickly. One study is about how, for example, the Tesla X is put together, the other about the software that makes the car self-driving.

Third, it appears that Murati moved to Canada from Albania at the age of 16. I asked Bard if Murati moved alone, or with her parents. Bard replied that 'Murati and her husband Sokol fled to Canada with their two children in 1993.' But in 1993, Mira Murati was five years old, which is also on the early side in Albania to have already started a family. In short; there is still a lot to improve on Google's AI activities.

Murati and Moritz: America first

There is a striking parallel in the lives of Mira Murati and Michael Moritz. Both came to America from a small European country, where they had the opportunity to expand their knowledge at excellent universities and then to exploit their potential in top companies.

I am not saying that every Ethiopian is a potential top entrepreneur or that there is a brain surgeon hiding in every refugee from Aleppo, but in the month when a cabinet falls in the Netherlands over a few thousand additional immigrants a year, I do argue for a rational immigration policy. Europe is old, so is Asia; several continents are aging rapidly. At the same time, there are people in previously unexpected places who can contribute much to the world, if only they are given the chance.

Of course, my perspective is colored, because I too once came through an exchange and scholarship from Amsterdam to a university in San Francisco, where I first saw the Internet. Moritz and Murati came to the San Francisco Bay Area from Wales and Albania. But where in Europe or Asia would they have been as welcome as there? And where would their origins play such a minor role? What European or Asian venture capitalist would give a journalist a chance as an investor, or a young Albanian woman the technical leadership of a billion-dollar company like OpenAI? That should make entrepreneurs, voters and policymakers think.

Spotlight 9: Ripple continues to amaze, but for how long?

The chart is not upside down; there were only declines among the leading investments in the tech sector except for Ripple.

It was a week full of sadness and gloom in the tech corner of the stock markets. But where I expected a correction to Ripple's huge price jump after last week's court ruling, XRP remained fairly stable while the other major crypto currencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum, both fell.

So I downloaded from Coinmarketcap the XRP price data for the last 30 days and asked OpenAI's Code Interpreter to plot the price against trading volume. From there, this interesting graph rolled out:

The red line indicates the trading volume, the blue line the price.

Trading volume in XRP has declined dramatically over the last week, following a huge spike in the days immediately following the court ruling. The falling blue line representing the price now parallels the red line of falling trading volume.

That means the price can no longer be driven by increasing demand. Investors who believe in XRP are holding on. But not enough new buyers are entering the market at the current price to offset the number of sell orders. A further correction of XRP seems inevitable.

And bad news for crypto enthusiasts: anyone who bought XRP a year ago should certainly be happy with a 105% rise. But that's still a lot less than the 160% price jump Nvidia made in the last year, driven by the AI hype that requires strong processors.

Notable links this week

The White House on Friday invited representatives of seven leading companies in the AI field and announced a covenant of sorts with them, in which the companies pledged, among other things, to add digital watermarks to their systems. (So if all goes well, we'll soon know who had copied the text from whom about Mira Murati: Bard or CEO Magazine?)

The participating companies have been regular topics in this spot in recent weeks, namely Microsoft (with Bing), Google(Bard), OpenAI(ChatGPT), Anthropic(Claude), Inflection(Pi), Amazon and Meta(LLaMA).

In effect, Meta is thereby acknowledging OpenAI's lead and, by making its technology open source, hopes to attract so many developers from outside the company that it can still catch up with LLaMA 2. A smart strategy by Meta, which is distinctive from the closed AI platforms of OpenAI and Google.

It continues to be amazing how quickly AI applications are improving. After text and photos, now it's video's turn, and Twitter user Nathan Lands shared a nice overview.

Two weeks ago, I described my doubts about Mark Zuckerberg's jubilation about his new app Threads, the AliExpress version of Twitter. Granted, because of Instagram's installed base, hundreds of millions of people will try Threads. But the app is too sloppy, boring and predictable to generate much repeated use unless improvements are made to the app quickly.

This journalist explains in great detail all the shortcomings of Threads. A good point: why is there only an app for cell phones and Threads cannot be used on a computer, if the platform is about text messages? I wonder how long it will be before the first significant updates are released by Meta, because it would be good if a serious competitor to Twitter emerges.

Christopher Nolan and Hoyte van Hoytema literally and figuratively make great films

In all the digital opulence, film writer and director Christopher Nolan is a blessing. He filmed the masterpiece Oppenheimer on 70 millimeter IMAX film and does not use Computer Generated Images (CGI) in his films. This video shows how the film is literally pasted together from fifty-three rolls of film of three minutes and twenty-four seconds each. In total, the film, which has a duration of three hours and nine seconds, is 17.7 kilometers long and weighs 272 kilograms. That's another entertainment experience than watching Love Island on your iPhone.

Nolan finds CGI "too safe, the image does not seem to contain the threat of, say, a real explosion, however small.' He shoots on film because it most closely resembles the image the human eye perceives. That and more can be seen in this video in which Robert Downey Jr and Christopher Nolan answer the most frequently asked questions on the web about them.

For those of you who are going to see Oppenheimer in theaters next week; go to the IMAX and I'd love to hear how you liked it.

Happy Sunday!

Categories
AI technology

Threads is the AliExpress version of Twitter

Threads, the intended Twitter-killer from Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, is out and I spent all of Saturday morning trying to figure out what's special about it. The answer is: nothing. With virtually unlimited resources, Mark Zuckerberg has managed to develop an extremely limited product.

Investor Fred Wilson rightly notes the importance of Twitter getting competition, and that it is positive that Threads has announced that it will support the open source protocol ActivityPub. That would mean that if a Threads user leaves Threads, it would be fairly easy to switch to another server that also supports ActivityPub, such as Mastodon - or hopefully another, more user-friendly variant than that app, which they would have been better off calling Masochist.

So in theory, a Threads user has "account portability" and is not forever stuck in the endlessly branched rabbit holes that Zuckerberg is trying to dig from Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and Threads. Only ... there is no support at all for ActivityPub in Threads yet. That's like a car manufacturer proudly announcing at the introduction of a new car that safety is paramount, but brakes won't be installed until the next model.

How fun, good or useful is Threads?

To use Threads, you must have an Instagram account. Yet every Threads user gets a number under their Instagram account with a link to the Threads account. Why? You already have a name for your Instagram account, so why do you get a number on Threads? (Leaving aside the fact that for people with any sense of history, the ostentatious display of a personal registration number evokes unpleasant associations.)

Zuckerberg likes to make human products, according to user eighty million four hundred and forty-four thousand two hundred and forty-nine

Of course, there is only one reason for this and that is that Zuckerberg wants to shout from the rooftops that you are not alone on Threads, that there are over 80 million people who have already created an account. When I created an Instagram account a week after Instagram launched in October 2010, I was already happy to see a few cute pictures made by other people. It took almost three months for Instagram to grow to one million users. For that time, that was tremendously fast.

Threads, through the roughly two billion Instagrammers, is going to get hundreds of millions of users very quickly who, like me, are going to take a look at what it is and how it works. But the question is how often and how intensively Threads will be used. The reason I am hardly active on Twitter anymore is the bickering of predictable people. Under the reign of Elon Musk, that trend only seems to be encouraged, and that leaves room for Meta to launch Threads successfully.

So, what is the experience of spending a morning on Threads?

  • Although I have already accepted my followers on Instagram, I have to do this again on Threads and then one by one. My Instagram account has been on 'open' for a while now and anyone who would like can follow me. But on Threads I have to scroll and tap my way through a blood blister because the application is only available as an app on your phone, and I even have to confirm that my own brother is allowed to follow me. Although we have confirmed each other as brothers on Facebook.
  • So what is the point of the Instagram link and the fact that Threads is part of the Meta Empire? As a user, I get little benefit from it. The integration of all data within Meta is solely to feed Meta's ad engine with additional data about users, not for better usability for average brothers.
  • There is no chronological timeline so I can get a "live" sense of what people are talking about, which is precisely Twitter's strength. On all of these crucial aspects of a good user experience, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri, also responsible for Threads, says it is being worked on. By the way, he says that on Twitter, not on Threads.
  • I haven't noticed it myself, but it's been widely complained that Threads posts in your timeline from accounts you don't follow at all. It could be that these misery 'feature' will first be tested in the U.S. before being unleashed on the world. Of course, Meta is trying to use this to keep the user hooked for longer in a way copied from TikTok.
  • Most of the posts in my timeline on Threads consist of photos. Often the same photos that the account owner has previously posted on Instagram, and since I have added everyone I follow on Instagram on Threads as well, I feel like I am watching a repeat. Not a pleasant experience.
  • Threads is currently a muddled product in which text and images are mixed in an unnatural way. This is to be expected since the vast majority of users come via Instagram, which is not a conversation or discussion platform like Twitter was in its best days.
  • Unlike Instagram, where filters can be laid over photos that smooth out wrinkles so well that even miss Piggy can look like Jessica Rabbit, there are no filters that make text messages on Twitter or Threads smarter or more fun. So it quickly becomes chatter or complaining.

Vice already concluded that Threads combines the worst of Twitter and Instagram into a hopeless product. Meta' s only selling point for Threads is that it should be a text platform not called Twitter.

The upside for Meta is that Instagram has a huge installed base and hundreds of millions of people will try Threads. The downside is that turning image-sensitive Instagram users into text-producing Threads people will be about as natural as making a shot putter run.

For now, Threads will not be a threat to Twitter in terms of usage, audience and form of communication. The number of accounts will be huge, but usage relatively infrequent. It simply adds too little.

The social media hierarchy in which there is no room for Threads

Threads chief Mosseri, by the way, claims that Threads' goal is not to replace Twitter, either. No, the noble goal, according to Mosseri, is to "create a public square for communities on Instagram that have never embraced Twitter and for communities on Twitter and other platforms that are interested in a less angry place for conversations but not all of Twitter.

Apologies, there I am again, I was away for a while; I was sitting barefoot with self-picked buttercups in my hair, connecting with the earth, while already tree-hugging, reciting a sonnet to the universe. That is how much I liked this description of "a public square" on Threads.

Zuckerberg's real goal with Threads

Let's ook at the larger problem facing Zuckerberg. The press release announcing the 2022 annual results says, among other things, this:

  • Meta has over $40 billion in the bank
  • revenue for 2022 was $116 billion
  • but... 'the average price per ad decreased by 16% year-over-year'

And there we are at the core. Because the total number of users of Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram is still growing only a few percent per year, and revenue per ad is falling many times more sharply.

With Threads, Zuckerberg has two goals: first, to create a new platform through which to sell more ad space, even though the estimated revenue of, say, Twitter this year at $3 billion is a decimal rounding for Meta. No doubt Zuckerberg thinks he can get a much higher revenue per user on Threads, than Musk does on Twitter. Advertisers are not eager to advertise next to a discussions about politics. It just doesn't sell well.

But with the wealth of new data that large scale use of Threads could provide about its users, Zuckerberg hopes to make his real move and charge higher ad rates; because with the heightened privacy requirements that Meta is facing, especially in Europe, unscrupulous selling of user privacy as in Meta's current business model is becoming increasingly difficult.

This is also the same reason why Zuckerberg is trying to pressure the EU to adjust the regulations for Meta. And one way he is doing that is by not yet releasing Threads in EU countries, referring to the "unclear regulations on the use of data across multiple platforms.' Because that's what Zuckerberg is all about; he wants to fill each user's social and interest graph as richly as possible for his advertisers. But Europeans can rest assured: you really aren't missing anything from Threads.

Threads doesn't want discussions about news, because advertisers don't like that, so here is our puppy Nala.

$40 billion in the bank and Zuck makes the AliExpress version of Twitter

It's intensely sad. Zuckerberg still has nearly 80,000 employees after all the rounds of layoffs, including an army of talented programmers. Combine that talent with that $40 billion in the bank and there are every opportunity to develop a new, beautiful product. But what is the result of its first self-developed product in nearly two decades?

No more than a slapdash version of Twitter, which in itself is a waste of Elon Musk's talents. I still hope for once that man gets angry about Alzheimer's, cancer and mental health of humanity and uses his talents to solve those problems, for example with a biotech company. Musk has mastered development of software, hardware and mechanical innovations, how difficult would biotech be for him? That would be really fascinating to follow.

Zuckerberg stable borrowed the idea for Facebook from his friends co-founders, bought Instagram for $1 billion, Oculus for $2 billion and Whatsapp for $19 billion. Nice detail: Ukrainian Jan Koum, founder of Whatsapp, who emigrated to the U.S. at the age of 16, signed that sales deal from which he himself made just under $7 billion, for the office where he once got his food stamps received.

Zuckerberg has grown from a creative programmer to an experienced CEO. Only not from a technology company that develops its own valuable solutions, but from a private equity fund that copies or buys other people's ideas. Then all the talent from the acquired companies leaves, though that voluntary departure cost Whatsapp's Brian Acton no less than $850 million. Surely Zuckerberg must ask himself at times why such talent is so eager to leave Meta?

Instagram Stories was a total imitation of Snapchat but at least it worked fine. Threads, on the other hand, looks like a loveless, hastily made product. I hold out hope that one day Zuckerberg will rediscover himself as the leader of a team of talented developers and develop a beautiful, meaningful, original product. Threads is certainly not that; it is currently the AliExpress version of Twitter.

Talented YouTubers push boundaries

Speaking of meaningful, original products, two of my favorite YouTubers, Cleo Abram and Marques Brownlee, visited ZeroSpace in New York, a cross between a laboratory and a studio where the most extraordinary special effects are created where real and fake cannot be distinguished. What I found most extraordinary was the technique where up to six scenes can be shot simultaneously with different camera images(at 6 minute 11).

Cleo and Marques discuss a sensitive issue after Marques takes the guise of Cleo: what happens when every actor can be simulated by a computer and soon you won't know whether you are watching a real scene with fantastic acting, or a complete simulation? Will the Oscar for best actress soon go not to Meryl Streep, as it should, but to the programmer who generates the digital Meryl Streep from bits, pixels and audio clips?

Cleo's report is here and this is Marques' report. The wait is for a full movie with fake actors in a fake environment, but hopefully one with a good script because they remain difficult to write, even with AI.

Also check out this tour of Marques' $1 million studio, in which each room is set up to solve a specific video-making problem. If you have the idea that YouTubers are still making videos with a cap on backwards in their parents' attic in pajamas, be sure to check out the quarter-million-dollar robotic arm for making quick camera movements.

Midjourney update is impressive

Crunchbase summed up the bizarre first six months in terms of funding for AI companies well.Despite the billions invested in AI, the total amount invested in technology companies dropped a whopping 51% compared to 2022.

With the investment money in AI companies, extraordinary achievements are being made. Two weeks back, I wrote briefly about Photoshop's amazing "generative fill," which uses AI to add complete sections of an image in a way that is indistinguishable from the real thing.

Manu.Vision created this phenomenal combination of art and technology

As if Midjourney were not already stunning enough, that company has released an incredibly good "Zoom Out" update that enables such extraordinary images that designer Kalson Kalu has compiled a brilliant top 10 of them. This top 10 is also impressive. Here's a detailed description of how the Midjourney v5.2 update works and what else we can expect in the near future.

All Sequoia companies are working on AI

Investment firm Sequoia (Apple, Atari, Google, Instagram, Whatsapp etc) asked 33 of the portfolio companies about their developments in AI. The findings are very worth reading. As many as 65% of the companies have AI applications in production and 94% use a "foundation model API" such as Chat GPT from OpenAI to do so.

Character.ai's chatbots even lead to adventure games

Bloomberg came out Friday with this excellent article about character.ai, the maker of chatbots that was recently valued at $1 billion but whose usefulness escapes me for now. It doesn't help when the CEO then blurts out texts like "I joke that we're not going to replace Google. We're going to replace your mother".

The founders are AI experts who did very clever things at Google, so I still struck up conversations with various characters on character.ai including Einstein, a banana and Darth Vader. Copyright and other intellectual property infringement aside, one psychologist already pointed out the danger of allowing any willful leip with lots of free time to pose as a psychologist, like this chatbot.

Things got surprisingly funny after all when I struck up a conversation with SM64 Mario, the chatbot based on the Nintendo 64 Super Mario. The creator of this bot does more than chat, he asks you along on an adventure.

In my case, Super Mario said, 'help me save Princess Peach, defeat Bowser, and bring Peach back safely to her castle. We will also visit many different worlds, each with their own unique challenge.' Then the text appeared: Mario walks over to a painting, and enters the painting portal, inviting Michiel to come with him.

This implementation of a chatbot reminded me of a textual adventure, like the first MUDs thirty years ago when I was just getting into the Internet. Try it for yourself, Super Mario is waiting for you here.

Spotlight 9: Nvidia holds its own

After my longer analysis last week on the first half of what can be called a jubilant year so far for tech stocks, in crypto equally, this week was downright soporific. Everyone knows by now that Apple is worth $3 trillion and it seems like investors are banking on that exact market value.

It was a soporific week of technology trade shows

Yet the old adage "sell in May and go away, but remember to come back in September" does not hold true for the "chipmaker for the AI stars": Nvidia. Over the past month, NVDA shares rose more than 10% and its market value has increased to more than $1 trillion, to be precise, to $1,050 billion.

Right now, Amazon ($1.3 trillion) and Alphabet (Google's parent company, $1.5 trillion) are still worth a few hundred billion more than Nvidia, but if things continue like this, Nvidia could end the year as the third most valuable technology company in the world, behind Apple and Microsoft. No one could have foreseen that at the beginning of the year.

Categories
AI crypto technology

European answer to OpenAI is 4 weeks old yet raises €105 million without product 

A historic moment for a European startup, an easy-to-use crypto wallet, Apple's revolutionary interface and more understanding of Nvidia.

It was a historic round of investment: never before has a European company raised so much money in a first round of investment. Just four weeks (not years) young Mistral AI, not to be confused with the 1980s Swiss surf brand of the same name, raised €105 million this week from a group of investors from Europe and the US. After this investment, Mistral.ai is worth as much as €260 million, although the former investor in me thinks that with over 40% of the company, the founders have actually already sold too much of their shares in this first round.

From 0 to €260 million worth in a month: Arthur Mensch's Mistral.ai

The co-founder and CEO of Mistral.ai is named Arthur Mensch, has 3 years of work experience and, always fun to check out, 0 photos and 64 followers on Instagram. The other founders are Timothée Lacroix (CTO) and Guillaume Lample (Chief Scientist). The gentlemen are all early thirty-somethings and knew each other from college. Mensch worked at Google Deepmind and Lacroix and Lample are ex-Meta employees.

Up front: people with names like that I begrudge everything. This is the level of Athos, Porthos, Aramis and D'Artagnan - the four musketeers, for the culture barbarians among us. I must confess that some sense of envy came over me when I read that these noble European knights entering the AI battlefield against the foul-mouthed Americans of Open AI, Google and Microsoft, raised over 100 million with a website with no more than 40 words. This is even more remarkable than Worldcoin, which raised $100 million with a 1-page website.

There was not yet a budget for a graphic designer at Mistral.ai

Even in the wonderful world of crypto, in the good old days of say two years ago, for that kind of money you had to publish at least an eight-sheet white paper. But how can these modern-day Asterix, Obelix and Panoramix raise that kind of money without having a working product? Because the first working model is not expected until next year.

One of the gamblers, excuse investors in Mistral AI seem mostly concerned with convincing themselves that this is not a blind 'all on red' guess was:

"There is a pool of 80 to 100 people worldwide who have the level of experience that they have. Right now, for better or worse, the capital requirements in compute and top talent make [launching an AI startup] a pretty capital-intensive game."

Time will tell if this small group of high potentials has sufficient business acumen and leadership qualities.

Rishi Sunak proudly on the cover of The Economist, but Barack Obama would never pose as a mannequin from Are You Being Served

British Prime Minister Sunak proved again this week that he couples a big mouth with a limited sense of reality, always a cozy combination. He referred to the United Kingdom as the Unicorn Kingdom, the land of billion-dollar tech companies. That's like the prime minister of Belgium declaring that Disney World is a far cry from Bobbejaanland.

French President Macron, of course, was already on a stage with Mistral-CEO Mensch, and the Financial Times cooed "Europe's Got Talent. I've never worried about the talent in Europe, but I do worry about the lack of corresponding doekoe. Somehow I'm glad that European countries are calling out this kind of silliness and finally daring to invest serious sums of money in key early-stage companies.

But let's compare with the US for a moment. There, $25 billion has already been invested in AI companies this year, compared to $4 billion in Europe. Earlier I wrote that it is often forgotten that OpenAI alone has $11 billion in investment money.

The Register says it well: there is panic in Europe, there is a feeling that something must be done and this kind of buck-passing is the result. But it now feels like too little and too late. Because €105 million is Keuken Kampioen Divisie level in the AI sector, and OpenAI is playing Champions League. Still, our French friends deserve all the support they can get, because Mistral AI has announced that it is embracing open source, which would make their technology many times more accessible to developers than OpenAI, which is not closed in name only.

Meanwhile in blockchain

In all the AI violence, you would almost forget that there are some very interesting developments taking place in crypto in relative silence. Co-founder of Twitter Jack Dorsey and his company Block (formerly Square) have announced BitKey, an app that allows people to manage their own Bitcoin, in partnership with Coinbase and Cash App (a kind of expanded Tikkie). BitKey users will be able to transfer Bitcoin directly to each other on all six continents this year, without the need for a bank. This could become the model for crypto use, management and payments worldwide. You can sign up for the beta test here.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration is trying to stop the spread of crypto. The key question is whether crypto, or some of its crypto variants, are actually securities. In the famous 1946 Howey case, the court ruled that "an investment of money in a common enterprise with profits derived solely from the efforts of others," is a type of security called an investment contract.

That narrow definition of securities would make a large portion of all crypto-currencies securities and thus all crypto exchanges, such as Binance, Coinbase and Kraken, would be subject to the same laws as regular exchanges. The lawsuits against Binance and Coinbase will take years, just as the SEC's case against Ripple has dragged on for years.

The renowned American investment company Andreessen Horowitz (among others, Facebook, Airbnb, Pinterest, Slack, Instacart, Robinhood and Coinbase) is not waiting and is opening its first international branch in ... London. The main argument of this top vc is that the UK government will introduce legislation allowing decentralization. Jack Dorsey's BitKey, mentioned earlier, is an example of such a decentralized product (digital assets held in-house, rather than at a bank), as well as decentralized crypto exchanges where traders transfer directly to each other rather than through an intermediary, as is currently the case on mainstream exchanges.

Apple talks about Spatial Computing

I had started writing about why Apple never uses the words AI and virtual reality, because I hadn't read anything about them. And then yesterday, Marques Brownlee came out with this excellent video in which he explains, razor thin and better than I can, why Apple never uses words over which it has no control.

Point being, the new Apple Vision Pro is interesting not so much as a product that breaks open a whole new category, like the iPhone or the Apple Watch, but that it represents a whole new form of interacting with the computer. Users of the Apple Vision Pro can select something with their eyes and snap their fingers to "click" on it.

Sensors on the front of the glasses register what your fingers are doing. This interface is revolutionary, similar to the transition from MS-Dos and those awful text commands with green letters on a black screen, to mouse scrolling and clicking like Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows later made commonplace.

Former journalist, now investor, Om Malik says of this handling of a computer:

'Just as the "mobile computing" initiated by the iPhone eventually turned out to be just "computing," what Apple calls "spatial computing" will turn out to be the natural evolution of computing.'

Legendary investor Fred Wilson (Twitter, Kickstarter, Etsy) sees a combination of AI, blockchain and spatial computing emerging:

"The combination of advances in computer science in machine learning (MF: AI), decentralized systems (blockchains) and new forms of interaction with computers (chat interfaces, heads-up displays, voice, etc.) represents the most powerful cocktail of innovation I have ever seen.

Not entirely coincidentally, AI, blockchain and spatial computing are the three topics in this newsletter today. I am a big fan of Wilson's irregularly published newsletter and hereby recommend it again.

Notable links

  • 7 Chat GPT plug ins you need to know, or not? I looked at them but I don't get excited about them. What am I missing? And which Chat GPT plug ins are better? I'd love to hear it, email your suggestions!
  • Reddit in trouble Why it can be dangerous as a business to depend too much on volunteers and the much-vaunted 'community' around your platform.
  • Bill Gates does tea with Xi Jinping It is good to keep an open line of communication with a rival, so now that the U.S.-China relationship has fallen below freezing, there is nothing wrong with Bill Gates having tea with his friend Xi Jinping. Notable point in the Reuters article: Among other things, Gates was praised by Xi Jinping for sending $5 million to China to help fight Covid, even though China did have enough money to spend 1.7% of GDP, a sloppy $230 billion, on the armed forces. It's just where your priorities lie.

Spotlight 9: BlackRock with Bitcoin ETF and Nvidia deserves better analysis

A fine week in the tech world, with Nvidia once again the standout.

It was a positive but calm week in the stock markets for tech stocks.

It was a positive but calm week in the stock markets for tech stocks. It seemed surprising that Bitcoin did not fall, despite the SEC continuing to repeat that the entire crypto sector is not playing by the rules. This is arguably nonsense, as even a deaf-blind illiterate can see the difference in policy between, say, Coinbase and Binance when it comes to fighting money laundering and unregulated trading.

The news that the world's largest asset manager BlackRock, with just under $10 trillion (10,000 times a billion) under management, is about to apply to the SEC for a license for an investment product in Bitcoin led to a slight rise in Bitcoin and great enthusiasm among Bitcoin believers. Technically, the trust BlackRock is setting up is not an ETF, but the effect is the same: investors, if approved by the SEC, which has so far rejected all ETF applications, can buy an investment product from BlackRock that shadows the price of Bitcoin, without having to go through all the hassle of a normal purchase of Bitcoin.

So you don't have to create an account on a crypto exchange, buy hardware wallet, manage 24 passwords for your seed phrase etc, unless you are brave enough/moral enough to let someone else manage your Bitcoin. If BlackRock gets approval for this investment product, investors worldwide, from small to large (think pension funds) will buy it, which will bring a sharp rise in Bitcoin. But it is still a long way off.

According to Bloomberg's ETF specialist Eric Balchunas, at least statistically, BlackRock has a very good chance of getting approval from the SEC, as it previously saw 575 applications approved and only one rejected. Coindesk studied the application in detail and saw that BlackRock included a "surveillance-sharing agreement" between exchanges, which could avoid market manipulation, a major problem in Bitcoin trading.

Meanwhile, there is already a parody account on Twitter of the BlackRock Bitcoin ETF and whoever the creator of this account is, this person is patently an insider because extremely knowledgeable about all the regulation. Frequently repeated disclaimer: I have great appreciation for the decentralized aspect of Bitcoin and think the only eight-page Bitcoin white paper is genius, but do not own Bitcoin and think it is too technically outdated because unnecessarily carbon-producing. That said, Bitcoin's impact on the global economy is similar to the oil business: you don't have to be a fan of it to realize it's important.

Nvidia is years ahead

Ever since newsletter reader Boudewijn Jansen of iXora pointed me to Nvidia a few months ago, I started following the company more closely, and as of last week, Nvidia has even secured a permanent spot in my completely arbitrary Spotlight 9, the nine investments that determine economic sentiment in the tech world, based on market value.

At the Asian Tech Summit last week in Singapore, I had the pleasure of joining the other speakers for lunch with Nvidia's Keith Strier, responsible for AI partnerships. Annabelle Droulers of Bloomberg and I were trying to better understand why Nvidia plays such a crucial role within all AI developments and how big a lead Nvidia actually has, that the company is worth a P/E ratio of over 200 (!).

Strier explained in detail what he already briefly described here. The core lies in the fact that Nvidia makes not just the chips, but the entire infrastructure required to develop AI applications. Chip companies that want to compete effectively with Nvidia must not only build a similar AI chip, but also develop a software ecosystem around the chip that speeds up the application development process for developers.

And the components for that infrastructure are finite, which is why Nvidia is already receiving orders for deliveries 5 years from now:

'This is about compute, not just chips. AI requires a highly specialized compute infrastructure, a combination of hardware and software. Most importantly, the supply is finite. [...] NVIDIA GPUs (the chips, MF) are more than gold, they are the "rare earth elements" of AI.

Therefore, the world's most advanced AI companies are raising capital to secure the delivery of accelerated computing. Whether an enterprise or even a country, it is important to plan and budget for the computing power that will be needed to achieve and sustain leadership in AI.'

Strier is referring to the fact that Nvidia has more orders than it can deliver and that companies and even countries have been placing orders years in advance to ensure longer-term deliveries.

Meanwhile, Nvidia's lead does not seem to be limited to their "stack" of hardware (especially the GPUs) and software, but the company provides complete data center solutions, making it even more difficult for competitors to catch up.

The day before yesterday, Morgan Stanley announced it was selling shares of chipmaker AMD and raising its price target for Nvidia from $450 to $500. NVDA's closing share price Friday was $427.

It seems as if, despite all European efforts, the AI world of hardware, software and applications will be dominated by the Americans for at least the next few years.

Categories
AI crypto technology

'Minister' makes the Netherlands look utterly ridiculous in Asia

Asia Tech Summit 2023 in Singapore

'Be curious, not judgmental.' That's the message of my favorite Ted Lasso series. Mindful of that credo, I attended the Asia Tech Summit in Singapore this week, followed the launch of the Apple Vision Pro, the magic glasses of glasses, and tried to get to the bottom of the lawsuit filed by U.S. authorities against crypto exchanges Binance and Coinbase. Unfortunately, things already went wrong during the first hour of the Asia Tech Summit, in which Secretary of State Van Huffelen was overcome by an overdose of unfounded self-confidence. 

Dutch pride abroad, 'minister' of digitization Alexandra van Huffelen

The Asia Tech Summit is particularly interesting because it brings together business and government institutions, with the idea that both sides develop an understanding of the challenges facing the other. Singapore Finance Minister and incoming Prime Minister Lawrence Wong provided the kickoff, after which Kaja Kallas (Estonia's first female prime minister) and Jacinda Ardern (New Zealand's youngest ever prime minister) paved the way for the first substantive panel, on the opportunities and threats of AI. Participating in this was State Secretary Van Huffelen, along with the president of Microsoft Asia and Nvidia's board member who deals with AI.

As the only other Dutch speaker, I was above average in my interest in Ms. Van Huffelen, and Google learned that she had a typical resume for a Dutch administrator: having been an alderman (sustainability in Rotterdam), director of a semi-governmental body (GVB in Amsterdam) and as State Secretary of Finance, she had inherited the Supplement affair, from which it is difficult to judge from a distance how adequately she had handled this painful dossier.

Nothing wrong with that, I thought, in the spirit of Ted Lasso, stay positive! After all, with the Supplements affair still in the back of her mind, hopefully she had taken a ride in Singapore on the phenomenal subway (clean, fast, cheap and safe, only resembles the GVB subway from very distant places because it is also transportation on rails) and would surely show some humility and modesty? So I expected and hoped, but nothing could be further from the truth. The state, which for incomprehensible reasons is heralded abroad as Minister of Kingdom Relations and Digitalization, went in with a straight leg almost from the kickoff.

Strategic action plan

For those with a strong stomach, the entire session can be watched back here, but the gist is that Van Huffelen sees mostly threats in AI and noted disappointment at the very beginning that nothing more has been heard of the idea of stopping AI development for six months. This is especially strange because the Dutch cabinet produced a policy paper as early as 2019 under state secretary Keijzer of EZ, which mostly sang the praises of AI. Participating in that cabinet was D66, Van Huffelen's party, and she even joined it as state secretary in 2020. There is a NL AI Coalition(NL AIC), in which government, business and knowledge institutions work together, and there is an AINed foundation that may spend 204.5 million Euros of government money to stimulate AI in the Netherlands.

In 2019, a policymaker thought a baby wearing VR glasses from Lidl had something to do with AI

Van Huffelen did not say a word about this and pretended that AI is viewed exclusively with a critical eye in the Netherlands. Her substantive contribution can be summarized as a series of clichés that the citizen comes first (gosh) and should not be forgotten (boy) and that there is more to life than making a profit; the latter she must have learned from the tens of thousands of victims of the Supplements affair.

For me, the moment at the very beginning was crucial, when it became apparent that Van Huffelen is either particularly ignorant or particularly underhanded. A combination of the two I would not rule out after her performance. After 1 minute 50, Van Huffelen literally said:

" We have seen many problems with AI, I have seen that in my country, even the AI that the government used turned out to be very biased."

state secretary Alexandra van Huffelen

Excuse me, to dismiss the Supplements affair, which has ruined the lives of tens of thousands of people, in which over 2,000 children were placed out of their homes and on which the cabinet fell in which Van Huffelen, nota bene, was himself responsible for this dossier, as a result of AI, is downright disgraceful.

Therefore, this brief refresher for Ms. Van Huffelen, who seems to have no active memory of the Supplements affair:

  • until 2019, dual citizenship was a selection rule in the Tax Department. That is a policy decision made by *people*. These victims were extra checked, for years, without knowing it, and could not appeal the inclusion in this group of extra checked. This was Kafka for anyone with a foreign last name.
  • The Personal Data Authority concluded that the Tax Authority's processing was "unlawful, discriminatory and therefore improper" which constituted a serious violation of the AVG. The Dutch Tax Authority itself violated Dutch law! (It is therefore downright bizarre that as recently as January 17 of this year, this article was published on the Belastingdienst's site, reporting that everything went perfectly by the book).
  • Officials at the top of the Inland Revenue stopped benefits from people even though they knew they were entitled to them. Up to the highest level, it was decided to continue this unlawful approach for years .
  • Inland Revenue officials demanded punishment for executives, but none were punished.

In short, the Surcharge Affair is an accumulation of wrong and evil policy instructions. It has nothing, but nothing, to do with AI. Because AI is precisely about machine learning, computer programs that get smarter as more data is added to them. Whether the Surcharge Affair was in part due to institutional racism or racial profiling I leave to sociologists and activists, but in any case it was "just" the work of incompetent and scummy people.

Ms. Van Huffelen apparently wanted to score with party colleagues tens of thousands of miles away. Perhaps the next D66 newsletter will contain a glowing passage about how their state lectured the big bad Microsoft. In any case, it will be bonus points in certain circles if Van Huffelen aspires to a job in Brussels and wants to further profile herself as a fighter for civil rights against tech capitalism. After all, she certainly wanted to profile herself.

Ready steward at the Evening Walk

Each speaker received in advance an explanation of the dress code, "business casual (for gentlemen: suit, no tie). I don't know what her letter said, but I'm sure it wasn't "ready steward at the Evening Four. Van Huffelen's yellow dress and particularly ungainly appearance by Asian standards stood out more than her substantive contribution.

If someone in Asia makes a comment on a panel with which you disagree, you don't say, especially as a representative of a country, 'that is not true.' Then you say, for example, 'I have a different viewpoint.' Or: 'another way of looking at this, is xyz'. In the audience, people wondered aloud whether Van Huffelen was wearing a beach dress and whether she had confused her islands, because 'the yellow of Cory Aquino was in the Philippines, not Singapore.' An ill-mannered Dame Edna is not what you want to portray as the Netherlands in one of the largest global markets.

The most embarrassing moment, although I wonder if Ms. Van Huffelen caught it, was when a real minister, Josephine Teo of Singapore's Ministry of Communications and Information, announced the creation of the AI Verify Foundation. Not a policy paper without clear goals, but a foundation in which business and government jointly establish tests that companies and governments worldwide can use to test AI applications. Teo emphasized that AI is so important especially for small countries like Singapore because it can increase a country's efficiency and production without additional human labor. No question.

Quantum computing near, threatens cryptography

There were more interesting announcements at the Asian Tech Summit. First, Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat reported the creation of the National Quantum-Safe Network Plus (NQSN+). That's a mouthful and requires some explanation, this site reports:

'The National Quantum-Safe Network (NQSN+) focuses on establishing a national platform and testbed for a systematic build-out of quantum-safe communication technologies, by evaluating security and demonstrating the integration of quantum-safe applications, best practices and use cases.

The main goal is to deploy commercial quantum-secure technologies for trials with government agencies and private companies; to conduct in-depth evaluations of security systems; and to develop guidelines to support companies in adopting such technologies.'

Singapore aims to secure the crucial banking sector for the long term, hence the creation of this quantum-secure network. Indeed, the importance of quantum computing will grow rapidly in the coming years. The most engaging moment during the panel I participated in, on the future of Web 3.0, was when IBM Fellow Ray Harishankar explained (starting at 25.30) why quantum computing is crossing the path of the modern Internet and will be able to retroactively crack current cryptography.

Harishankar expects that between 2030 and 2035 quantum computers suitable for specific applications will become available. His message is as simple as it is ominous: to be ready for quantum computing in 2030, organizations must have their cryptography in order now because no password will soon be safe.

Singapore is collaborating on security and standardization with South Korea, which last month announced as much as $2.6 billion dollars to invest in quantum technology research. I already can't wait to hear what Secretary of State Van Huffelen has against quantum technology. 

Apple Vision Pro better device than expected, but for what?

What woman spends $3499 on ski goggles that mess up heur hair?

Apple finally announced the Apple Vision Pro, the first step toward a completely new form of computing. Marques Brownlee explained in this particularly good video what the Vision Pro excels at and where the challenges lie for Apple. I was surprised that the introductory price is still $500 higher than expected: $3499 is not the price buster of the month. For that, though, the Vision Pro is packed with high-quality sensors.

As an Apple fanboy, I was pleasantly surprised by the all-new interface: nothing keyboard and mouse, but delicate eye-tracking. Look at something and the glasses see it. Blinking becomes the new buying 😉 Even though it will probably take a decade for Apple headsets to generate a significant portion (more than 10%) of sales, it's great to see that Apple is finally trying something big and hard again and not spending billions on stock buybacks.

Zuckerberg responds

Mark Zuckerberg was smart enough to take extensive time (nearly 3 hours!) right after Apple's announcement to comment with Lex Fridman. He had a strong argument that the Apple Vision Pro seems to be made for solitary use and not for communication with others. For the Apple Vision Pro and its successors, that indeed seems like the next step, as users of the iPhone but even the Apple Watch use their devices primarily to communicate, in the case of the Apple Watch as a receiver.

The complete integration of the Apple ecosystem between Mac, iPhone, Apple watch and Vision Pro will be fascinating to follow. Over the next few years, it will be interesting to see what applications Apple develops to try to make the Vision Pro a mass-market product. I remain convinced that the biggest obstacle will be getting women excited about putting on a device that messes up their hair and makeup. Then the utility or fun of an Apple Vision Pro would have to be enormous.

Zuckerberg himself, meanwhile, has the greatest possible difficulty motivating and enthusing his people. The Washington Post reported that even before the latest round of layoffs in May, which brought the total number of layoffs at Meta to as many as 21,000 jobs, confidence in his leadership among staff had fallen to 26%. Even for a Dutch politician, that would be pathetically low.

Notable links

First, two reading tips for any person interested in AI and for "Minister" Van Huffelen:

  • Why AI will save the world. Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, particularly successful as an investor this century, explains in a lucid speech why AI has mostly positive aspects.

Further:

  • Interesting video in which Twitter founder Ev Williams talks about how he feels about Twitter under Elon Musk. An interview that gives the impression that the demise of his brainchild really hurts him.

Spotlight 9: The SEC goes wild on crypto exchanges

Sleepless week on stock markets, except for crypto exchanges

It was a soporific week in the stock markets, with the old school S&P 500 outperforming the tech funds. All the negativity about Bitcoin was apparently already priced in, as BTC barely dropped amid all the uproar over the announcement that the U.S. SEC has filed charges against Binance.

Last year I wrote about Binance's lack of commitment to combating money laundering. More surprising is the charge against Coinbase that the company sold shares without having the necessary licenses. In doing so, the SEC takes the position that at least some cryptocurrencies should be considered shares.

At the same time, it is not conclusively established that the SEC has the authority to pursue charges if elected representatives of the people are drafting legislation in the area the SEC is just now moving into. Former Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Casey, now the editorial boss at Coindesk, wrote a comprehensive analysis of the legal battle unfolding in the U.S. at the intersection of crypto and politics.

The shadow that the FTX debacle cast over the crypto sector has global repercussions. Also in Singapore, where unlike the Netherlands, failures do have consequences. Employees of sovereign wealth fund Temasek who invested in FTX and lost $275 million dollars (still less than one percent of invested assets) saw their salaries cut.

How much was not disclosed, but although investigations showed that all procedures had been followed, the fraud and theft by Bankman-Fried and consorts, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund managers was severely punished. I find this heavily punished, because in the end Bankman-Fried simply stole from his investors and customers, but maybe I am too Dutch and used to incompetent souls rolling from one cabinet to another.

Categories
AI technology

Does AI mean the end of the world for Do-It-Yourselfers?

'Reducing the risk of extinction from apple pie should be a global priority, alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear wars.'

If this had been apple pie and not AI, the Journal would have opened with it.

Had that been the one-line statement made public last Tuesday by dozens of leaders in the field of AI (artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence), it would have been bigger world news than it is now. Only it did not mention apple pie as a threat to the world, but AI. That made the statement a lot harder for journalists to interpret, because AI is a kind of water of technology: it can be used to give people drinks, or waterboard them. The line between those is clear: It's about who decides to stop drinking.

The fear is that in the case of AI, the software itself decides when something happens. Or stops. I once started blogging and nowadays write this newsletter because it forces me to keep up with my field and then organize my thoughts publicly. So herewith my immodest attempt to put the latest developments in AI into a broader perspective.

Who are these people?

First, that statement last Tuesday, issued by the Center for AI Safety (CAIS, pronounced Kees) whose mission is "to reduce the risks of artificial intelligence on a societal scale. We learned from the Watergate scandal that the first thing you do is follow the flow of money, so where does Kees get the money? The Open Philanthropy Foundation donated over $5 million and is in turn funded by former Wall Street Journal reporter Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz, one of the founders of Facebook. (You can guess for yourself whose piggy bank of that couple was turned over the most for this donation. Oh well, at least the money Facebook makes from selling out its users' privacy will be spent on something useful).

In Europe, tricky dossiers usually involve a covenant between government, industry and a party that policymakers describe as ''civil society'' in those kinds of papers that nobody reads. America is the land of the one-liner, so there they arrived at this chunky phrase: ''Reducing the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority, alongside other social-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear wars.''

And that was it, that's all there is in the 22-word statement. It led to rather vacuous media reports from which you can almost read the reporter's despair. Like "my goodness, do I now have to explain to what extent this statement is similar to Robert Oppenheimer's on the danger of nuclear weapons, or shall I just list the list of signatories? It became mostly the latter, of course, and you will recognize most of the names from previous newsletters. CNN bravely lists, "The statement was signed by prominent industry officials, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman; the so-called "godfather" of AI, Geoffrey Hinton; top executives and researchers at Google DeepMind and Anthropic; Kevin Scott, chief technology officer of Microsoft; Bruce Schneier, the pioneer of Internet security and cryptography; climate advocate Bill McKibben; and musician Grimes.

Who didn't sign?

The latter is kind of funny, because Grimes is the baby mama of as far as we know the youngest son of Elon Musk, who is even named X Æ A-Xii because it is the elven spelling of the term AI. (Read that last sentence again and realize that this is a defenseless child.) The very name Elon Musk was missing from the signatories. Other people who conspicuously did not sign the statement, and whose names it seems to me would have made sense if CNN had inquired why, are Jeff Bezos (founder and chairman of Amazon's Supervisory Board), Sundar Pichai (CEO of Alphabet, Google's parent company, man of this brilliant speech), Andreessen Horowitz (the leading investor in technology companies), Mark Zuckerberg (CEO Meta, formerly known as Facebook, buyer of former competitors like Instagram and Whatsapp) and Peter Thiel (financier of, among others, LinkedIn, Yelp, Facebook and Palantir and through his Founders Fund also Airbn and Space X). And further missing are just about all players in the technology field from India, South Korea, Japan and China.  

All of these parties have the knowledge, clout and motivation to become a major player in the global market for AI applications. And they have not signed the no doubt well-intentioned declaration to take care that the world does not perish to AI. Of course, that doesn't mean that the chief bosses of the tech world will try to destroy the world with AI; after all, killing off the world's population would be bad for their quarterly numbers.

What about Bill Gates?

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates publicly hopes that Amazon and Google will lose out to AI. Furthermore, he has little influence on the public debate about AI; it is no coincidence that CNN did not even mention Gates in the list of signatories and even Elon Musk's ex did. I place little value on the predictions about technology from the man who, in his November 1995 book The Road Ahead, called the Internet not the future, but a dirt road compared to the information super highway he himself would build in the form of MSN.

It remains incomprehensible to me that Gates does not provide more analysis on the business aspects of technology, but continues to muse on the social implications. Because precisely as an entrepreneur, he remains, in my view, unparalleled. His vision is brilliant when measured over say 24 months, not 24 years.

Remember from Bill Gates especially these two achievements:

  • IBM was looking for an operating system for their new product, the personal computer, in 1981; Gates had nothing on hand but bought the obscure Quick and Dirty Operating System (QDOS) from a small software maker for seventy-five thousand dollars, changed the name to MS-DOS (because the spotless IBM could not do anything with the word Dirty) and did not sell the software, but licensed it to IBM on a non-exclusive basis. That form of licensing was virtually unknown in the software world. Primarily on the basis of this one deal, Microsoft became the most valuable company and Gates the richest man in the world.
  • In 1995, Microsoft was the most powerful company in the technology world and Gates the world's richest man. Only, the whole image of Microsoft and Gates was focused on a world where computers barely worked together, let alone communicated together or enabled transactions. While Jeff Bezos was a few miles away building Amazon into an e-commerce machine and would follow in Gates' footsteps as the world's richest man, Gates wrote a memo to the top of Microsoft that would become known as "the Internet tidal wave. In fact, Gates said, "I was wrong. We need to make all our products Internet-capable.' I had never seen a CEO confess his own mistakes in such a way and have the entire corporation turned around and focused, in such a short time. Admitting that he had overlooked the Internet struck me as great. (And I was relieved, because my brainchild was called Planet Internet and it's not good to wake up every day thinking the world's richest man is saying your product sucks.)

His book The Road Ahead would come out six months later and already be dated upon publication. It was especially odd because Gates had so strongly emphasized the importance of the Internet in his memo. The Internet, Gates orated in his book, was built on antiquated technology and therefore too limited to transmit information, communications and transactions over it on a large scale.

What happened next was as hilarious as it was symbolic, because his book required a second version as quickly as his software did: just a month after the book was published, Gates began work on a second version, which appeared in October 1996 and was no less than 20,000 words longer, just as his software counted more and more lines of code. In the second version of the book, Gates made the Internet much more central.

The only thing I liked about The Road Ahead was that Gates had written it with then Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold, a former world barbecue champion who had studied under Stephen Hawking. From Myhrvold, I would have liked to have read more.

Bill Gates is like a nerd version of Marco van Basten: a top player who is phenomenal as an analyst, but failing as a coach. I sincerely hope Bill Gates will write about applications of AI, about business models, opportunities and threats; about everything except what it will mean for society. And full disclosure: my opinion of Gates is independent of my own experiences with him and Microsoft in the browser war.

Impact, a Belgian employment agency for technicians, came up with this nice advertisement

Why is AI so promising and so dangerous?

Far more important than Gates' opinion on AI, I found this article about an officer in the U.S. Air Force who gave a reflection on a drone that went wild because of AI and wanted to kill its own driver. The first gasp was that this actually happened, but apparently it was just a scenario being discussed in the U.S. military. Thank goodness, because it is the ultimate Terminator nightmare when the monopoly of violence falls to computers.

While a huge technological achievement, even Nvidia's new supercomputer, which I wrote about last week, will not lead to a mass breakthrough of AI applications. Such computers are so expensive and complex that only a small number of companies have the capabilities to use them properly. Of course, it is a huge revenue generator for Nvidia, as Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Google will gladly stock this computer en masse, but it is precisely open source AI that seems to be the definitive breakthrough of AI.

These are not my words, but this is according to a leaked internal Google document. According to the leaked document, the open source AI community is so active and highly developed, that as soon as more accessible development capabilities emerge, both OpenAI and Google are hopeless. While OpenAI and Google use "proprietary" LLMs (Large Language Models), the models in open source are actually ready for public use. This makes the group of global developers larger than the OpenAI and Google staffs, the thinking goes.

Hooray for QLoRA?

And now it appears those cheaper tools will be available within a year! Because it seems to be possible to develop AI applications on some out of the box gaming PCs. LLMs used to develop generative AI applications can normally only run on enormously powerful computers. That is the reason for the explosive price increases of the makers of such devices such as Nvidia and Marvell, which I wrote about last week. As one reader sent, "QLoRA completely changes the landscape. You can use the same 8x80GB on a single 48GB card. From an $8x15K piece of kit to a souped-up PC.'

Translated into slightly more normal Dutch: the fact that you can cram 96 billion 4-bit weights into 48GB (which is huge) means that AI development is now available to hobbyists. What normally costs a ton of equipment can now be done for a few thousand Euros. For enthusiasts: here the scientific article. And here the tweet predicting that within a year these computers will be commonplace.

AI for Do-It-Yourselfers

The question is what applications will be built if hobbyists, enthusiasts and rogues will have the ability to create AI applications. And the follow-up question is how to monitor and regulate this, if at all possible.

Finally for this piece on AI:

Notable links:

  • Artifact, from the founders of Instagram, is a personal news reader. Just downloaded, but not yet tested, with the slogan: "Finally, an AI-driven news feed with you in control. Because no startup can do without the word AI in its slogan in 2023. I'd love to hear readers' opinions, anonymity guaranteed.
  • Bold: a detailed forecast of the development of AI Singularity through 2029. Someone should check this annually for accuracy; I certainly forget.
  • Meta (Facebook's) wants every employee assigned to a particular branch to show up at the office at least three days a week starting in September. Unfortunately, it is not clear what percentage of employees this will apply to. It remains to be seen whether this will cause many talented employees to leave, as as many as 150,000 jobs were lost in the US tech sector this year alone.

Event of the week: ATxSummit Singapore

A not-so-subtle humblebrag: the creator of your Sunday tech newsletter is participating Tuesday in a panel on Web 3.0 beautifully titled "Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. It's part of the ATxSummit in Singapore, where "governments, businesses and knowledge centers gather to discuss the role of technology in our shared digital future.

27 recipients of an email about a panel in Singapore with four participants

People often ask what working in Singapore is like, and I usually answer that question with "intense. Everyone is professional, from a receptionist to a minister, focused and dedicated. At the same time, I worry about whether people are relaxing enough and not working too hard. See above screenshot of an email about the preliminary online meeting on our panel, which consists of only four participants and yet went out to 27 people. You'd think this would lead to a huge bureaucracy, but officials, for example, answer email inquiries substantively within three business days. Sometimes I begrudge everyone in Singapore a daddy or mommy day a week.

Since I will have access to a make-up artist, something that has been at the top of my wish list for years, I expect there will be a livestream that I will share through my accounts on Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. The panel will take place from 9 a.m. to 9:45 a.m. Dutch time. Advance warning: it's only for the connoisseur/lover of concepts like "participatory data" and "decentralization of identity.

Topping the Spotlight 9 inside: Nvidia

For years, the technology sector has been talking about a handful of dominant players: Alphabet (Google's parent company), Amazon, Apple, Facebook (now Meta) and Microsoft. Since this week, we can count Nvidia among them, which passed Meta in market value. For a while, Nvidia was even "a trillion dollar company," or worth more than a trillion: a thousand times a billion. (A billion in English is a billion and a trillion in English is a trillion. They are not the inventors of the useless inch and driving on the left for nothing).

Meta past in market value, 175% increase this year: Nvidia belongs in Spotlight 9

Therefore, in my completely arbitrary survey of key economic indicators for the tech world, my Spotlight 9, I threw out the Dow Jones Index and replaced it with Nvidia. After all, for the overall market, the S&P 500 is already in the list, for crypto the tokens Bitcoin and Ethereum, and that leaves no fewer than six indicators of stock market sentiment for the tech sector.

But beware: anyone who buys a share of Nvidia now does so at a P/E ratio of over 200! Compare that to Apple, with a P/E ratio of 30, and then I dare say it is unrealistic to expect Nvidia to grow more than six times as fast as Apple. In other words, Nvidia stock is extremely expensive, regardless of that AI-driven demand for GPUs and the new Nvidia supercomputer.

Speaking of Apple, I wrote, to the annoyance of a number of Apple employees who I thought I could count among my circle of friends until that article, about the long-awaited Apple mixed reality headset, probably called the Apple Reality Pro. This device, the first all-new device since the Apple Watch in 2015, is expected to be unveiled at WWDC on Monday. If it really is something special, I will write an extra edition of this newsletter on Tuesday morning. If not, thanks for your interest and see you next week.

Categories
AI crypto technology

$115 million for a 1-page website

The news in the tech world is completely dominated by AI, in a way that recalls the breakthrough of the World Wide Web in 1993 after the launch of the Mosaic browser and the period 15 years ago after the first iPhones and Android phones were introduced. The latter two (smartphones and the Internet) are the carrier for today's technological revolution, for that is what we must now call AI. And yet I found something else more striking last week: that OpenAI founder Sam Altman, with his other company Tools for Humanity, raised a whopping $115 million for the Worldcoin project. Because as a tech entrepreneur, since Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, you don't count with one billion-dollar company; you have to have at least two. And you meet with world leaders, apparently in brown shoes.

Lovely casual: jacket off for President Macron and Sam Altman wearing brown shoes under a dark suit. source: Twitter Macron

It is remarkable, to say the least, that Tools for Humanity, which presents itself on its 1-page website with the slogan "a technology company committed to a more just economic system," is raising as much as $115 million for the Worldcoin project. Because Worldcoin is an open-source protocol, or platform whose use is open to all, while further scrimping on funding startups in the crypto world. What does Worldcoin do?

"We seek universal access to the global economy, regardless of country or background, and accelerate the transition to an economic future that welcomes and benefits everyone on earth," according to the slogan on Worldcoin's website.

That's still pretty vague, but Alex Blania, CEO and co-founder of Tools for Humanity and Worldcoin project leader, clarifies it somewhat in the press release, "As we enter the era of AI, it is imperative that individuals be able to maintain their personal privacy while proving their humanity. In this way, we can ensure that everyone can realize the financial benefits of AI."

So AI again after all ... there's no escaping it. But Blania definitely has an important point: it is important that people can prove to be human in all kinds of transactions, without having to share personally identifiable data. At Worldcoin, verification of being human is ensured through the use of an Orb, a sphere: a biometric iris scanner. 

$115 million, but then you have something.

When Worldcoin was launched, it was not Worldcoin's intention to create its own hardware, but earlier this year it explained that there was no other way to prove that you were dealing with a living human being other than through the use of biometric measurement devices. Those interested in learning more about the reason for the large investment in Worldcoin can hear about it in this podcast with Spencer Bogart of Blockchain Capital. Those who want to download the Worldcoin app, click here.

Sam Altman on tour

Sam Altman is not only co-founder and chairman of the Supervisory Board of Tools for Humanity, the company behind Worldcoin, but most importantly founder and CEO of OpenAI, maker of the wildly popular ChatGPT and the company that raised $300 million for ... 1 percent of the company. In that role, Altman toured Europe last week, with President Macron, who has never seen a mirror he didn't like, being quick to invite Altman to the Elysee.

Once Macron vowed that France and Europe would not once again fall behind in new technology, but meanwhile Europe hardly plays a role in the AI battlefield. Europe is nice as an outlet, and Altman was savvy enough to mention that OpenAI will obediently abide by all European rules. Meanwhile, I wonder why the English establishment is still so fanatically against brown shoes under dark suits that the Guardian devoted an article to it.

Everything is AI right now

OK, so I tried this week; to not just write about AI. But it's not easy. Not only does Worldcoin appear to have been created primarily to prove humanity in the age of AI, but major crypto funds are removing the word crypto from their websites and suddenly focusing on AI as well. For example, Paradigm has been saying this since the beginning of this month: 'Paradigm is a research-driven technology investment firm.' Nothing wrong with that. But they used to say this: 'Paradigm backs disruptive crypto/Web3 companies.' That's akin to the cousin who introduced himself as a crypto expert and life coach at your aunt's birthday last year, but appeared on Mother's Day the other day in a t-shirt with ChatGPT on it and bragged around that he's been fistful of AI for years.

While investments in the technology world continue to decline globally, the AI sector is a magnet (or a bottomless pit?) for big money. Crunchbase counted as much as $20 billion in AI investments. Early last week, investors put $700 million into two AI startups - Builder.ai ($250 million) and Anthropic (a whopping $450 million) - and mid-week another $105 million into AI marketing platform Insider. In which I noticed that QIA, Qatar's state fund, invested in both Builder (from London) and Insider (from Istanbul). That won't sit well with Macron.

Among all the raving press releases about the millions being invested in AI, it is important to keep looking at applications of AI. Michiel Schoonhoven of NXTLI pointed me to this fascinating presentation by Sal Khan on TED, about how AI will not destroy education, but rather save it. And Microsoft announced that Windows 11 will be brimming with AI because Bing Chat will be integrated. I got flashbacks to Clippy, that talking yellow paperclip.

Notable links:

  • JP Morgan, it says, is introducing a ChatGPT-like service with investment tips, perhaps called IndexGPT. This service could make the personal investment advisor obsolete, but it is unimaginably difficult to get the right information into the system so automated good buy and sell advice generation will be a challenge for JP Morgan. This is going to be fascinating.
  • According to GeekWire, venture capital investments around Seattle, home to Microsoft and Amazon, among others, have dropped by as much as 79%. In the Netherlands, the drop would be only a third, and the suspicion is that this downward trend will continue sharply.
  • The Economist reports on mass layoffs in the tech sector, with an estimated, 120,000 people losing their jobs.
  • The Information came up with a map of cafes where investors often sit so you can attack them with a bad story during their almond milk cappu. Replace the word "investors" in that sentence with "young women" and it becomes clear how creepy these kinds of articles are.
  • Amazon has abandoned a significant part of its climate pledge and removed the blog post announcing the "Shipment Zero" initiative. Companies like to score with press releases, but in practice short-term profits are often preferred over a livable planet for the next generation.

Spotlight 9: GPU makers are winners of the week, maybe of the year?

The most important acronym in the tech and business world today is AI, but another acronym - GPU - is not far behind. GPU stands for Graphics Processing Units, the type of chips needed for AI applications. GPUs are optimized for training models for artificial intelligence and deep learning because they can perform multiple calculations simultaneously. The profit forecast of chip designer Nvidia, which makes GPUs for ChatGPT and the like, shows the rising demand for these types of chips , according to the Wall Street Journal.

'Nvidia said it expects to generate about $11 billion in revenue in the current fiscal quarter ending in July, up 64% from the same period last year. That figure, which CEO Jensen Huang said will be driven by demand for artificial intelligence software, would be $2.5 billion higher than Nvidia's previous record for quarterly revenue. Then there's the expected increase in earnings: Nvidia said gross margins will rise nearly 4 percentage points in the July quarter. Analysts expect the company's earnings per share to rise 30% over the next 12 months, compared with 6% for a basket of 11 other chip companies.'

And Nvidia's smaller competitor, Marvell, also benefited from investors' attempt to get their grabby hands on some of the AI fortune. Marvell's CEO came up with a striking prediction:

'Given the speed at which AI infrastructure is evolving, the technology is renewed within 18 to 24 months, compared to more than four years with standard infrastructure.'

In other words, we're going to earn ourselves crazy from this technology because it's going to be written off much faster by the customer.

7.6% price gain for Bitcoin is a joke compared to Marvell's 45% and Nvidia's 26% rise. It's still investing for those with a strong stomach.

Marvell shares rose as much as 45% over the past week, even more than Nvidia, which climbed 26%. Since January 1, Nvidia shares rose as much as 176%, compared to 25% for the Nasdaq. The GPU makers' results are especially extreme when compared to my 'traditional' Spotlight 9, which includes the largest tech companies, the two dominant crypto stocks and the Dow Jones and S&P 500 as representative of the largest companies. Even Bitcoin rose 'only' 7.6% this week. Plenty of Bitcoin fanatics will gloat that their favorite currency is not called BitcAIn.