Tag: Taylor Swift

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AI crypto technology

AI under fire: Elon Musk against OpenAI, EU against Microsoft and everyone against Google CEO Sundar Pichai

Normally in this newsletter I try to find some sort of common thread in the news, but so much happened this week that I don't want to leave unmentioned without turning this newsletter into a biblical epic. So apologies in advance for this week's telex style. (For younger readers, a telex was a device used by companies in the last century to slide into each other's DMs.)

Even people who don't know the difference between a pixel and a pancake are now interfering with the rapid rise of AI. The European Union, excelling at joining the resistance after the war, is investigating the deal of the world's most valuable company, Microsoft, and the former European AI darling, France's Mistral. As if Mistral has a lot to choose from and it hasn't already been clear for a long time that all the big leading AI companies come from the US, where Elon Musk filed a doomed lawsuit against OpenAI, which he co-founded. In this case Musk does seemsto have the moral right on his side, but legal experts agree he doesn't have a strong case. Meanwhile, some are calling are  for the resignation of Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet (Google's parent company) since Alphabet's $90 billion one-day drop in market value caused by controversial and poor responses from Google's AI service Gemini. Unimaginable but true: this all happened in the past week.

Elon Musk according to Google Gemini? Image created with Midjourney.

Call for Google CEO to resign

Speaking of Google, which lost a whopping $90 billion dollar market value on Monday when the controversy surrounding Google Gemini, the Silicon Valley giant's ChatGPT competitor, made its way to Wall Street. It led to calls for the CEO's resignation. (Officially, this Sundar Pichai is the CEO of Google's parent company, Alphabet, but that name has proven so meaningless that even Alphabet's ticker symbol on the Nasdaq is still GOOG.)

Pichai responded to the controversy surrounding the Gemini project on Tuesday night, in a probably intentionally leaked internal memo, calling the AI app's problematic responses to race 'unacceptable'. Pichai promised to make structural changes to fix the problem, although it is remains unclear what those changes are.

I wrote about this last week: in some cases, Gemini refused to depict white people, or added photos of women or people of a different skin color when asked to create images of Vikings, Nazis and the Pope. (I myself tried in vain to create a Viking with dreadlocks and a pregnant woman as a pope, but by then Gemini had removed its image creation service. Anyway, all jokes in this area have been obsolete since Dave Chapelle's legendary skit as a black white supremacist up: a
).

'Unclear who had worse influence, Musk or Hitler'

The controversy escalated when Gemini was also caught on highly questionable text responses, such as difficulty answering who has had a worse impact on society: Elon Musk or Adolf Hitler? Since Pichai has even less charisma than Mark Zuckerberg, the latter was suddenly adulated in some circles as an exemplary CEO who represents his company well. Engadget quickly corrected that frame,even suggesting that Zuckerberg is in a battle for survival with Meta.

The personality cult of CEOs in the media is outdated. Apple CEO Tim Cook probably isn't the greatest story teller at birthday parties, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang will be asked by many journalists at a Chinese restaurant for an extra bowl of rice, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella cannot be distinguished by 99% of the media from the players on the Indian cricket team. This is not a bad thing at all: it is completely irrelevant that the CEOs of the three most valuable tech companies in the world are neither very outspoken nor flamboyant. Their companies, with largely satisfied employees, make exceptional products at an apparently appealing price, and that's what matters.

Musk is right and wrong at the same time

Then the case of Musk vs. OpenAI. In his suit, OpenAI is accused by Musk of having traded the original non-profit mission of developing AI to help humanity for maximum money grabbing with Microsoft. The Verge argues that this is, at its core, justified criticism of OpenAI, with which Microsoft has an exclusive licensing agreement. So much for helping humanity.

Unfortunately for Musk, legal experts don't rate his chances very highly, especially since nothing of all these lofty goals and agreementswas ever written down by the OpenAI founders. It also doesn't help Musk that he has since founded a competing AI company of his own, x.ai so other motives may be in play for him.

French AI darling in partnership with Microsoft and IBM

It was announced Thursday that Mistral, the not-yet-year-old French company that was supposed to be ChatGPT's competitor, has signed licensing agreements with Microsoft and IBM. Under the agreement with Microsoft, Mistral's language models will be available on the Azure cloud computing platform, while Mistral's multilingual chatbot in the style of ChatGPT, will be rolled out as "Le Chat. This is to the dismay of the European Commission, which sees the last hopes of a European response to OpenAI and Gemini fading.

There will be a fuss in France over the butchering of the French language: 'Le Chat' in French simply means 'the cat' and the French word for online chat is... tchat. Microsoft could probably do little with 'Le Tchat', which only underlines that English is the working language in AI and the Americans have won the battle.

There was also good news

During Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Deutsche Telekom showed the T Phone, a collaboration of the Germans with the, of course, American Brain.AI. This phone basically replaces all the separate apps with one AI app that performs all the desired functions:

"As Brain.AI CEO Jerry Yue shows me what the T Phone can do, he tells the device to book a flight from here in Barcelona to Los Angeles on March 12 for two people in first class. The phone pauses for a minute before pulling up a list of flights, methodically arranged on the home screen. Once Yue finds the best flight, he can pay for it using his mobile payment system of choice, without having to swap to another app or service."

The instruction actually generates the interface, without having to switch between different apps. Wired is already talking about the end of apps in this regard, christening this development "the big uninstall.

From a photograph of Audrey Hepburn and the sound of a cover version of Ed Sheeran's Photograph, a video of a Photograph singing Audrey Hepburn is generated. 

EMO creates talking and singing videos from photos

Just two weeks ago, OpenAI announced Sora, the AI service that creates deceptively realistic videos based on a simple text prompt. Researchers at Alibaba's research institute have developed a similar service, Emote Portrait Alive (EMO), which, for example, can turn a portrait photo into a talking or singing video. A photo of Audrey Hepburn is combined with a cover version of Ed Sheeran's song Photograph and next thing you know,Audrey Hepburn is singing Ed Sheeran's hit song.

The Chinese, because to keep things confusing despite its name, Alibaba is a Chinese company, deal another not-so-subtle stab at OpenAI by taking an interview with OpenAI CTO Mira Murati as the basis for the second example, using Murati's voice as audio under a talking version of the lady from OpenAI's Sora video.

Spotlight 9: Dell helps Nvidia, crypto continues to rise

On Friday, Nvidia closed a trading day for the first time with a market cap above $2 trillionand seems to have definitively passed Amazon and Google in the battle for the bronze, as the third most valuable tech company in the world after Microsoft and Apple. It now seems a matter of time before Nvidia even surpasses Apple in market cap.

BBC published an excellent article on Bitcoin. Highly recommended to understand how what "whales" are buying up large numbers of Bitcoin. 

Nvidia shares rose four percent after Dell, which sells high-end servers made with Nvidia's processors, issued a positive revenue forecast on Thursday, referring to a surge in orders for Dell's AI-optimized servers. Dell's shares shot up as much as thirty-eight percent to a record high, before ending the session with a gain of thirty-two percent.

There is much to do about Super Micro (SMCI), which some analysts seem to confuse with a chip manufacturer like Nvidia and even has a higher P/E ratio (SMCI 71 versus NVDA 69). This is absurd, of course, as Nvidia has a much more defensible competitive position and more unique products.

There are two reasons why I think Super Micro will nevertheless experience tremendous sales growth in the coming years:

- with this type of server it is more difficult than is often thought to make the right trade-off between performance, power consumption and price per application used; I have the impression that Super Micro knows very well what the customers want, even better than many customers themselves, and based on that knowledge Super Micro estimates particularly cleverly whether an expensive Nvidia GPU is actually required, or whether the required performance can also be delivered with cheaper chips from Intel or AMD. Super Micro works with all three, which makes it an excellent judge of the total price/performance-ratio.

- Super Micro has apparently given purchase guarantees to Nvidia and AMD for the right chips, as it can continue to deliver for now while other customers were put on hold by Nvidia in particular.

SMCI shares closed Friday at $905 and had a high of as much as $1,077 over the past year, with a low of $87. Super Micro is a stock for investors with a strong stomach, because it could be a wild ride.

Despite all the attention on AI, the crypto currencies Bitcoin and Ethereum, and in their wake a range of altcoins, remain the strongest risers. Even the BBC is now analyzing crypto as a normal asset class and published this excellent article on Bitcoin and, in particular, the "whales," the big boys, who got into Bitcoin big and seem to be holding on.

Keep an eye on: carbon credits

For those who think crypto is a tricky asset class to fathom, I would like to introduce you to crypto's carbon neutral cousin: carbon credits. The medium-term (think a decade) importance of carbon credits in the transition to a carbon-neutral world is clear, see for example the twenty-one percent increase in the market for carbon credits in Singapore.

But doubts remain about the usefulness of carbon offsets, which is why the BBC explained the issue using the carbon offsets of who else but Taylor Swift. Her Swiftonomics are now almost an investment class of their own, which recently even led to friction between Singapore and some neighboring countries following the rumor that Singapore had paid heavily to Swift to be the only Asian city she performs in during her current tour - as many as six times this week.

Back to carbon credits; Wired rightly stated that much more focus should be placed on carbon removal credits, or removal of CO2 rather than compensation for emissions. Like this promising technology to remove CO2 from the oceans.

According to Morgan Stanley, the carbon credits market will be a $100 billion market by 2030, so that market size combined with the global importance and the potential breakthrough technology involved make carbon credits very interesting in my view.

In conclusion: special shots

The Dutch Drone Gods built a special drone to capture Max Verstappen's Formula One car from unique angles, which succeeded in spectacular fashion. Watch the video here and in addition to the drone, admire the drone pilot's and Max Verstappen's steering skills on a rainy Silverstone. It won't be long before Formula 1 races are captured in this way.

Very clever, 300 kilometers per hour on the straight and then neatly taking the turn. I'm talking about the drone 😉

Finally, the moment that got me laughing on social media this week: basketball legend Charles Barkley is finally on Instagram and was advised by Shaquille O'Neal to tag every photo with the hashtag #onlyfans. To which the unsuspecting Barkley replied; "Only Fans, for only fans of mine?

"Only Fans, for only fans of mine?

Enjoy your Sunday, see you next week!

Categories
technology

Notable tech news in January 2024

World's most valuable company seriously hacked

Russians hack companies, including Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard. Microsoft shrouds itself in mists about what happened: "The threat actor then used the legacy test OAuth application to grant them the Office 365 Exchange Online full_access_as_app role, which allows access to mailboxes."

That's something like describing the 9/11 WTC attacks as, "some grumpy passengers paid uninvited visits to the cockpits and then rudely parked the planes in a well-known commercial real estate property near a landmark statue."

For what Microsoft admits here, according to experts, is that the hackers had gained the same access as a system administrator and then could do anything they wanted, including reading Microsoft management's email messages. It's embarrassing for Microsoft, which was just so proud to have passed Apple as the world's most valuable company with a market capitalization of as much as $3 trillion ($3,000 billion).

Microsoft's hack at this level also shows that companies and organizations should make a special effort to store as little relevant information centrally as possible, because 100% security is a myth.

Boys play shooter games, girls are on social media

Founder of famed startup incubator Y Combinator Paul Graham shared a remarkable message: research shows that boys are becoming more conservative and girls more progressive.

Graham thinks he knows the reason: "This trend has a blandly obvious explanation. Boys and girls used to get along more. The girls made the boys more liberal, and the boys made the girls more conservative. But now the boys are sitting at home playing shooter games, and the girls are sitting at home posting on Instagram.'

To my knowledge I am childless so not an expert, but this sounds like a plausible explanation. Except that young people are mostly on TikTok and those over 25 are on Instagram. Facebook is for grandparents.

Fake nude turns out to be worse than real death

In the United States, alarm bells have been ringing since fake nude photos of celebrities such as Taylor Swift, probably created with AI, flooded social media. Of course, you wouldn't wish anyone to be put through the wringer as vulgar as TayTay, but as a European, it remains miraculous to note that while Americans are taking action against fake nudity, the most gruesome images of child corpses in war zones spread through social media hardly caused a stir.

AI and crypto mining fast-growing energy guzzlers

The growth of the Internet, the AI explosion and the resurgence of crypto and associated mining are causing data center energy consumption to double in the next two years, the International Energy Agency reports in a new report. It is expected that in Ireland, for example, which is eager to reel in large data centers, as much as a third of all energy will be consumed by data centers as early as 2026.

Meta propels NVIDIA stock price upward

Mark Zuckerberg is doing his part to help global warming, he reported on Instagram that his company Meta has purchased as many as 350,000 H100 systems from NVIDIA and has stocked a total of 600,000 H100-like systems.

It will be interesting to see how Meta will link its huge reach with AI to develop new applications. It will also be interesting to see if Zuckerberg uses a make-up artist again in his next video to make him look like the reincarnation of an embalmed Lenin.

Categories
AI crypto technology

Zuck boring in 3D, U2 incredible in the Sphere and Altman and Ive with the "iPhone for AI"?

What a week in tech: Mark Zuckerberg talked with Lex Fridman in 3D, U2 was incredible in the Sphere in Las Vegas, Sam Altman and Jony Ive could be working on an "iPhone for AI," Amazon is putting billions into AI, Spotify is translating podcasts into all kinds of languages and Taylor Swift was in a football stadium. And oh, I almost forgot: French authorities raided an Nvidia office.

The Sphere: Find U2 in this concert venue that feels like you're inside a giant virtual reality headset. Source: The Sphere on Instagram.

U2 opened the Sphere - and how!

First, the most striking images from last week. U2 on Friday opened the Sphere in Las Vegas, the spectacular event space that cost a whopping $2.3 billion. With a height of 112 meters and a maximum width of 157 meters, the Sphere has a total area of 81,300 square meters, making it the largest spherical building in the world.

Visitors to U2's opening concert seem unanimously enthusiastic about the Sphere on social media. Obviously, a cell phone does not offer a good impression of the experience of seeing thousands of square feet of screen around the band in 16K resolution , but even so, the images of Where The Streets Have No Name and With Or Without You were impressive. The sound also seemed to be outstanding, quite useful at a concert and yet often overlooked. My brother was there and is so excited that he immediately bought tickets for the final concert of U2's twenty-five-concert residency at the Sphere.

Three versions of Mark Zuckerberg and all three are emotionless. Eerily realistic. Source: Lex Fridman podcast.

Zuckerberg and Fridman were not exactly winning souls for the Metaverse

Lex Fridman once again had Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg as a guest on his podcast, and this time the conversation took place in an unusual way. Both wore the Quest Pro VR headset and were not in the same room, but hundreds of miles apart. Yet the conversation looked and felt lifelike. The picture quality exceeded my expectations.

At the same time, the gentlemen's podcast painfully exposed the Achilles' heel of this technology. Spending so much effort, time and money to create a realistic avatar of someone's face and then spend an hour schmoozing with each other is the digital version of shooting a mosquito with an F-35 or putting on a princess dress to drop your kid off at kindergarten: it can be done, but it's a tad over the top.

I do not get the impression that people are so eager for higher image quality from their video calls that they are willing to put on VR glasses. Meta's technology looks like a technology in search of an application. If Steven Schnaars wrote his phenomenal book "Megamistakes: Forecasting and the Myth of Rapid Technological Change" now rather than in 1987, he would certainly devote a chapter to the Metaverse aspirations of Zuckerberg, who keeps trying to make VR a common conversational experience, rather than being happy that it already provides a brilliant experience in online games, a billion-dollar industry.

The French invasion 

There were so many developments in the AI field this week that they seemed hard to pinpoint, until it was announced that French authorities on Tuesday had raided "a maker of graphics cards." And by that they did not mean those parchment scrolls that Napoleon marched toward Moscow with, but Nvidia's highly sought-after chipsets needed for the current generation of AI applications.

The official position is that European governments are trying to control the actions of Big Tech companies in thwarting competition. And let those Big Tech companies just happen to all be American; they are Apple, Meta, Google, Amazon and Microsoft, and as of this week, Nvidia may also count itself among this list of companies suspected by Europe.

It appears the French authorities may be looking for mischief in all the wrong places. In fact, the whole AI playfield has become much more complex than it seems, with all the players smilingly shaking hands and tripping each other up at the same time.

In AI you compete your customer and supplier to death

Seen from the "bottom up," AI is a whole separate industry. Nvidia is the undisputed king of shovels and pickaxes: Microsoft, Google and Amazon all buy billions worth of Nvidia chips for their cloud services.

But since those companies announced they wanted to reduce their dependence on Nvidia and are developing their own AI chips, Nvidia has begun investing in AI startups that compete directly with Microsoft, Google and Amazon. Nvidia is doing so partly with money and partly by putting these startups at the top of the customer list for its sought-after and scarce AI chips.

Nvidia's hope is that these startups, such as Coreweave and Lambda Lambs, take market share away from the big three so that Nvidia can continue to supply as many chips to this sector as possible.

Those who now think that Nvidia and, say, Google can drink each other's blood will have watched with raised eyebrows as Nvidia and Google recently jubilantly announced a new collaboration to improve Google Cloud.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai even said less than three weeks ago that Google and Nvidia will still be working together a decade from now. Partnerships in AI are sort of like open marriages where you express that you love each other immensely, but leave your profile open on Tinder, always ready for the swipe.

The key question before European authorities is whether it is illegal for Nvidia to try to make their current customers' competitors more powerful. Expensively paid anti-trust lawyers are rubbing their manicured hands with delight.

It continues to rain AI billions

Amazon announced that it is investing as much as $4 billion in Anthropic for a minority stake, with the intention that Anthropic will use the cloud services of Amazon's AWS, the world's largest cloud provider. It's buying market share in a disguised way, but in a potentially smart way, because it's not out of the question that Amazon is going to make hefty profits on the shares in Anthropic.

Character.AI, a startup that offers chatbots that can mimic virtually anyone (one popular bot is Super Mario, including a very sad version of an Italian dialect), is in the process of raising hundreds of millions of dollars in new funding round that could value the company at more than $5 billion, according to insiders. Usually, those anonymous sources are the founders themselves, who thus put pressure on investors and semi-openly shop the deal around.

That $4 billion in Anthropic and $5 billion valuation of Character.ai are small beer for market leader OpenAI, which is seeking a $90 billion valuation in a deal in which executives sell some of their shares. This valuation is as much as three times higher than ... six months ago, when OpenAI raised $300 million on a valuation of $29 billion.

Entirely coincidentally, Mistral is launching its first model

I find it a bit suspicious that the raid by French authorities on Nvidia occurs the week that the French pride in AI, Mistral, presented its first model claiming that it outperformed one of Meta's smaller models, the Llama 2 13B. (By the way, can't anyone at Meta come up with better names than Llama 2 13B? Maybe Zuckerberg can ask someone on Fiverr for help.)

Naturally, Meta could not just let that happen and spread the word that Llama 2 Long AI (another delicious name) outperformed OpenAI's GPT 3.5 Turbo and Claude 2, Anthropic's product that just raised that $4 billion from Amazon.

'The AI race is weird'

The Information rightly concluded; "It makes me wonder what race all these companies think they are running. So far, it seems to be mostly about money and distribution. Technology seems to be coming together more and more, meaning that the winners are not necessarily those with the best technology, but those who figure out how to get the most money out of it.

And that race will certainly favor incumbents such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta, whose existing products already make billions. No wonder OpenAI is seriously considering building a device. If it continues like this, it will take a new wedge to really open the battle."

The "iPhone for AI"?

Indeed, the Financial Times reported Thursday that ChatGPT maker OpenAI is in advanced talks with legendary former Apple designer Jony Ive and SoftBank's Masayoshi Son to build the "iPhone of artificial intelligence," backed by more than $1 billion in funding from the Japanese conglomerate.

Jony Ive was Steve Jobs' favorite designer, spent more than two decades at Apple and led the design of the brightly colored iMacs that helped Apple rise from a near-death experience in the 1990s, as well as the design of the iPhone.

The news of the possible collaboration between Ive and Altman, funded by Son, was widely reported worldwide, but I missed reflections on what kind of device an "AI hardware device" should be. I can't imagine it, because smartphones have already become so powerful and have an installed base of billions.

ChatGPT more current and learning to see, listen and speak

In all the financial news, you would almost forget that major improvements to products are being introduced at lightning speed.

ChatGPT reported last week, "Voice and image give you more ways to use ChatGPT in your life. Snap a picture of a landmark while traveling and have a live conversation about what’s interesting about it. When you’re home, snap pictures of your fridge and pantry to figure out what’s for dinner (and ask follow up questions for a step by step recipe). After dinner, help your child with a math problem by taking a photo, circling the problem set, and having it share hints with both of you."

(I conclude from this that ChatGPT is not yet trained in the life of a childless man living in Singapore and Bali, where hawker centers, warungs and food delivery services dominate daily life.)

A major objection to ChatGPT was the lack of current data, as the model had previously only been trained with data through September 2021. It was announced this week that ChatGPT will become topical, meaning that some premium users will be able to ask the chatbot questions about current affairs and access news. OpenAI said the feature would soon be available to all users.

At the time of writing, Oct. 1, none of the listed features are available to me and ChatGPT's training data ends in January 2022. Hopefully this will change soon.

Spotlight 9: Ethereum wins again and is Microsoft underrated?

A volatile picture this week: Amazon, Apple and the S&P 500 fell, while Nvidia and Ethereum rose sharply.

It is downright striking how little serious coverage is given to the important blockchain development platform Ethereum, especially compared to the panting coverage of AI companies.

With all the hubbub surrounding AI, it does make sense that Wall Street is finally starting to see that Microsoft's stake in OpenAI could affect Microsoft stock.

For two reasons: first, purely financial, because if Microsoft actually owns 49% of OpenAI's shares, that stake currently represents a value of $44 billion. Out of Microsoft's $2.35 trillion ($2,350 billion) market value, that's less than 2%, but there are days when yours truly doesn't have it lying around.

In addition, OpenAI uses Microsoft's Azure platform so that, with OpenAI's billion-dollar spending on these cloud services, Microsoft is also earning heavily from OpenAI again.

Fortune reported in January that in exchange for the $10 billion investment in OpenAI, Microsoft also obtained the right to 75% of OpenAI's profits until it recouped those $10 billion; plus an additional $3 billion it had already invested in the company in previous years. Don't let the French authorities hear it or they'll be invading Microsoft's office for a morning coffee too - with croissant.

Quick takes on other news

Spotify is going to clone and translate podcasters' voices

The results are surprisingly good. For example, this is Lex Fridman in Spanish talking to Yuval Noah Harari, who suddenly sounds more like a Spanish flamenco dancer rather than an Israeli historian.

Crypto startup school A16Z open for spring

Renowned investment fund Andreessen Horowitz is opening the Crypto Startup School (CSS), a 12-week acceleration program in London for startups that offers expert guidance, capital and resources tailored to crypto founders.

Strange interview with the new Twitter CEO

Linda Yaccarino seemed frustrated and upset during an interview that was at times strange, uncertain and confrontational. Someday I'll get used to the fact that Twitter is now called X, but not yet.

Asian Games gold ticket: South Korea's Esports stars aim for medal success

With a gold medal in Street Fighter or FIFA, South Korean men have a chance to be exempted from military service. I searched to see if exemption was also given to winners of Grand Theft Auto, but alas. It would be a bit absurd if you could avoid military service by committing high-speed casualties in a mall in GTA.

A revelation about trees calls climate calculations into question

Scientists are learning more about "sesquiterpenes," vapors from trees that could make clouds, cooling the earth. "It's a feedback loop, the climate affects cloud formation, and the clouds affect the climate."

Skiff is an email service and collaboration tool with end-to-end encryption

A very striking, privacy-sensitive version of Google Cloud, with the best privacy statement I've seen: in plain human and lawyer language.

Taylor Swift knows a football player

If social media is to be believed, football player Travis Kelce is said to be reaping huge rewards from his liaison with La TayTay; Taylor Swift. I looked on his Instagram and Tiktok and saw an increase from less than half a million followers to 3.6 million, so it's not too wild. By comparison, Swift has 273 million followers. Funny, though: the meme where wives filmed their husbands telling hubby with a serious face that it was so sweet of Swift that she had put Superbowl winner "Kelce on the map". This man's dismay, combined with his self-control, is commendable.