Elon Musk single-handedly provides enough interesting material each week for a newsletter of his own, but last week was almost impossible to describe with a pen. Still, I make an attempt.
Tesla troubles
The stock fell again and is now worth almost a third less than on Jan. 1, while by comparison the S&P 500 is already up ten percent this year. Over eight hundred environmental activists protested in Berlin against the expansion of the Tesla factory and the mining of lithium in South America. It is unclear whether the environmental activists see the irony of protesting an electric car manufacturer, unless they see the electric cargo bike as the vehicle of the future.
Tesla competitor Waymo, owned by Google parent Alphabet, says the company now runs fifty thousand paid rides a week as a robot cab in Phoenix, San Francisco and Los Angeles. If this trend continues, it will be an interesting calculation when it becomes cheaper to take a robot cab, rather than one's own car.
Especially if the Chinese electric car manufacturers become as successful as they seem to be at the moment. Zeekr successfully went public in New York with an increase of as much as 35% on the first day, Nio is coming out with a low-cost competitor to the Tesla Y and BYD is supplying batteries for a new brand called Onvo.
Once Chinese automakers manage to develop good self-driving cars, public transportation worldwide will enter a whole new phase, just on the basis of lower costs than traditional public transportation. Just imagine: it means the end of the bus stop, instead a self-driving car will always stop at your door on demand and you get in the back seat nicely.
Musk sharp about AI
Musk was razor-sharp about AI at the Milken conference. He emphasized that generative AI, as we now know from OpenAI, Google Gemini and Anthropic, has very many limitations because they are always pre-trained language models. In fact, Musk said that today's LLMs should be seen as very smart participants in a pub quiz.
The funny thing about this observation by Musk is that just last week he raised billions for his own AI company, X.ai, which is now valued at eighteen billion dollars - that's two billion more than last week and four billion more than in mid-April.
Australia vs. Musk
"Elon Musk is an arrogant billionaire who thinks he is above the law," saidAustralian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. The men are embroiled in a dispute over a country's authority to demand the removal of content on social media. Musk refuses to pull images from X showing a bishop being stabbed by a 16-year-old boy. Musk wants the images removed exclusively in Australia, but believes the country has no say in the display in other countries. He may be legally right about that, but it's not tasteful.
Starlink suffers from storm
One would almost forget that Musk also owns Starlink, the company that owns sixty percent of the estimated seventy-five hundred satellites circling the earth. Due to a geomagnetic storm, the largest since 2003, Starlink is experiencing technical difficulties. Musk is not worried yet and is already looking ahead optimistically to SpaceX's next launch. Elon Musk never has a week with only good news or only bad news. He does too much for that.
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 ).
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
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
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.
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 😉
At last, Google's response to ChatGPT's OpenAI appeared this week, highlighted by a video of Gemini, the intended OpenAI killer. The response was moderately positive; until Friday, when it was revealed that Google had manipulated some crucial segments of the introductory video. The subsequent reactions were scathing.
Google makes a video, fake 1. Er, take 1. (Image created with Dall-E)
Google was showered with scorn and the first lawsuits should be imminent. A publicly traded company cannot randomly provide misinformation that could affect its stock price. Google is clearly in panic and feels attacked by OpenAI at the heart of the company: making information accessible.
Google under great pressure
It was bound to happen. CEO Sundar Pichai of Alphabet Inc, Google's parent company, went viral earlier this year with this brilliant montage of his speech at the Google I/O event in which he uttered the word AI no less than twenty-three times in fifteen minutes. The entire event lasted two hours, during which the term AI fell over one hundred and forty times. The message was clear: Google sees AI as an elementary technology.
Meanwhile, Google's AI service Bard continued to fall short of market leader OpenAI's ChatGPT in every way. Then when Microsoft continued to invest in OpenAI, running up the investment tab to a whopping $13 billion while OpenAI casually reported that it was on its way to annual sales of more than a billion dollars, all alarm bells went off at Google.
The two departments working on AI at Google, called DeepMind and Google Brain - there was clearly no shortage of self-confidence among the chief nerds - were forced to merge and this combined brain power should have culminated in the ultimate answer to ChatGPT, codenamed Gemini. With no less than seventeen(!) videos, Google introduced this intended ChatGPT killer.
Fake Google video
Wharton professor Ethan Mollick soon expressed doubts about the quality of Gemini. Bloomberg journalist Parmy Olson also smelled something fishy and published a thorough analysis.
The challenged Gemini video
Watch this clip from Gemini's now infamous introduction video, in which Gemini seems to know which cup to lift. Moments later, Gemini seems even more intelligent, as it immediately recognizes "rock, paper, scissors" when someone makes hand gestures. Unfortunately, this turns out to be total nonsense.
Although a blog post explained how the fascinating video was put together, hardly anyone who watched the YouTube video will click through to that apparently accompanying explanation. It appears from the blog post that Gemini was informed via a text prompt that it is a game, with the clue: "Hint: it's a game."
This undermines the whole "wow effect" of the video. The fascination we initially have as viewers has its roots in our hope that a computer will one day truly understand us; as humans, with our own form of communication, without a mouse or keyboard. What Gemini does may still be mind-blowing, but it does not conform to the expectation that was raised in the video.
It's like having a date arranged for you with that very famous Cindy, that American icon of the 1990s, and as you're all dressed up in your lucky sweater waiting for Cindy Crawford, it's Cindy Lauper who slides in across from you. It's awesome and cozy and sure you take that selfie together, but it's still different.
"At one point, the user (the Google employee) places down a world map and asks the AI,"Based on what you see, come up with a game idea ... and use emojis." The AI responds by seemingly inventing a game called "guess the country," in which it gives clues, such as a kangaroo and koala, and responds to a correct guess by the user pointing to a country, in this case Australia.
But in reality, according to Google's blog post, Gemini did not invent this game at all. Instead, the following instructions were given to the AI: "Let's play a game. Think of a country and give me a clue. The clue must be specific enough that there is only one correct country. I will try to point to the country on a map," the instructions read.
That is not the same as claiming that the AI invented the game. Google's AI model is impressive regardless of its use of still images and text-based prompts - but those facts mean that its capabilities are very similar to those of OpenAI's GPT-4.'
With that typical British understatement, the BBC disqualifies the PR circus that Google tried to set up. Google's intention was to give OpenAI a huge blow, but in reality Google shot itself in the foot. Several Google employees expressed their displeasure on internal forums. That's not helpful for Google in the job market competition for AI talent.
Because in these very weeks when OpenAI appeared to be even worse run than an amateur soccer club, Google could have made the difference by offering calm, considerate and, above all, factual information through Gemini.
Trust in Google damaged
Instead, it launched a desperate attack. I'm frankly disappointed that Google faked such an intricate video, when to the simple question "give me a six-letter French word," Gemini still answers with "amour, the French word for love. That's five letters, Gemini.
The brains at Google who fed Gemini with data have apparently rarely been to France, or they could have given the correct answer: 'putain, the French word for any situation.'
Google's brand equity and market leadership are based on the trust and credibility it has built by trying to honestly provide answers to our search questions. The company whose mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible, needs to be much more careful about how it tries to unlock that information.
Techcrunch sums it up succinctly, "Google's new Gemini AI model is getting a mixed reception after its big debut yesterday, but users may have less confidence in the company's technology or integrity after finding out that Gemini's most impressive demo was largely staged."
Right now, Google is still playing cute with rock-paper-scissors, but once Gemini is fully available it is expected to provide relevant answers to questions such as, I'll name a few, who can legitimately claim Gaza, Crimea or the South China Sea. After this week, who has confidence that Gemini can provide meaningful answers to these questions?
Hey Google, you're on the front page of the newspaper. True story (Image created with Dall-E).
How many billion ican OpenAI snatch rom Google?
The reason Google is reacting so desperately to the success of OpenAI is obviously because it feels it is being threatened there were it hurts: the crown jewels. In the third quarter of 2023, Alphabet Inc. the parent company of Google reported total revenue of seventy-seven billion dollars.
A whopping 78% of that was generated from Google's advertising business, which amounts to nearly sixty billion dollars. Note: in one quarter. Google sells close to seven hundred million dollars in advertising per day and is on track to rake in thirty million dollars - per hour.
ChatGPT reached over a hundred million users within two months of its launch, and it is not inconceivable that OpenAI will halve Google's reach with ChatGPT within a few years. Everyone I know who uses ChatGPT, especially those with paid subscriptions, of which there are already millions of users, says they already rarely use Google.
Google has far more reach than it can sell so decrease in reach does not equate to a proportional decrease in revenue; but it is only a matter of time before ChatGPT manages to link a good form of advertising to the specific search queries. I mean: there's a company that makes millions per hour selling blue links above answers...
Falling stock market value means exodus of talent
Google could then quickly drop from being one of the world's most valuable companies with a market capitalization of $1.7 trillion (1,700 billion) to, say, half - and then be worth about as much as Google's hated, loathed competitor in the advertising market: Meta, the creator of in Google's eyes simple, tacky social media like Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. Oh, the horror.
This is especially important because in this scenario, the workforce, which in the tech sector never perks up from declines in the value of their options, is much more likely to move to companies that do rapidly increase in value. Such as OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.
Spotlight 9: the most hated stock market rally
'The most hated rally,' says Meltem Demirors: the rise of Bitcoin and Ethereum continues.
'The most hated rally,' is how crypto oracle Meltem Demirors aptly describes the situation in the crypto sector. ' Everyone is tired of hearing about crypto, but baby, we're back!'
After all the scandals in the crypto sector, the resignation of Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, CZ for people who want to pretend they used to play in the sandbox with him, seems to have been the signal to push the market upward. I wrote last March about the problems at Binance in meeting the most basic forms of compliance.
According to Demirors, macroeconomic factors play a bigger role, such as expected interest rate declines and the rising U.S. budget deficit. The possible adoption of Bitcoin ETFs is already priced in and the wait is on for institutional investors to get into crypto. Consumers already seem to be slowly returning. Crypto investors, meanwhile, seem more likely to hold Ethereum alongside Bitcoin.
Investing and giving birth
I continue to be confirmed in my conviction that professional investors understand as much about technology as men understand about childbirth: of course there are difficult studies and wonderful theoretical reflections on it, but from what I hear from experts in the field of childbirth (mothers) it turns out to be a crucial difference whether you are standing next to a delivery, puffing along, or bringing new life into this world yourself. There is a similar difference in investing in technology or developing it.
I don't think there is a person working in the tech sector who, after reading through the reactions to Google's Gemini announcement, thought, "that looks great, I need to buy some Alphabet shares soon.
But what did Reuters report, almost cheerfully: "Alphabet shares ended 5.3% higher Thursday, as Wall Street cheers the arrival of Gemini, saying the new artificial intelligence model could help close the gap in the race with Microsoft-backed OpenAI."
Ken Mahoney, CEO of Mahoney Asset Management (I detect a family relationship) said "There are different ways to grow your business, but one of the best ways is with the same customer base by giving them more solutions or more offers and that's what I believe this (Gemini) is doing for Google."
The problem with people who believe something is that they often do so without any factual basis. By the way, Bitcoin and Ethereum rose more than Alphabet (Google) last week.
It's great that Google founder Sergey Brin is back to programming at Google out of pure passion. The Wall Street Journal caught onto it this summer. Curious what Brin thinks of the marketing efforts of Gemini, which he himself is working on.
Elon Musk's AI company, x.AI, is looking for some start-up capital and with a billion, they can at least keep going for a few months. Which does immediately raise the question of why Musk accepts outside meddling and doesn't take the round himself. Perhaps he already expects to have to make a substantial contribution to x.com, the former Twitter.
Mistral, the French AI hope in difficult days for the European tech scene, didn't make a video, not even a whitepaper or blog post, but it linked in a tweet to a torrent file of their new model, attractively named MoE 8x7B. It made one humorous Twitter user sigh "wait you guys are doing it wrong, you should only publish a blog post, without a model." It will be a while before people stop taking aim like this at Google. Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, only amour for Mistral.
Details should become clear in the coming days, but the fact that Amnesty International is already protesting because of the lack of a ban on facial recognition is worrying. EU Commissioner Breton believes this puts Europe at the forefront of AI and therefore he would likely thrive as a tech investor on Wall Street.
CFO Paul Vogel got kicked while he was already down: "Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said the decision was made because Vogel did not have the experience needed to both expand the company and meet market expectations." Vogel was not available for comment but still sold over $9 million worth of options. It remains difficult to build a stable business as an intermediary of other people's media.
I hold out hope that AI will be used in medical technology, to more quickly detect diseases, make diagnoses or develop treatments. But right now, the smartest kids in the class seem focused on developing AI videos that mimic the dances of real people on TikTok.
Where are the female automotive designers? 'Perhaps the way forward in the automotive industry lies neither with the feminine (the unwritten page) nor the masculine (full steam ahead), but somewhere in the middle that combines the practical and the poetic, with or without a ponytail,' according to Wired.
I don't normally write about my own work, preferring to try to share background, tips and insights that I hope will be of use to you as a reader. But because it is often asked for, this time I like to tell you about two investments I am excited about. Of course, I also cover notable things in the tech world, such as the jubilant crypto world about Ripple, Elon Musk's new AI company, traffic jam dodging by drone and Lionel Messi's deal with Apple. But now first, iXora and Unveil.
Ede-based iXora has developed a form of liquid cooling technology(immersion cooling) that allows data centers to save more than 30% in energy and space, because it eliminates the need for fans as with the usual air cooling of computers. And the latest generation of chips gets so hot that air cooling becomes too inefficient and expensive, but also socially unacceptable given the CO2 emissions. That makes the market potential of iXora huge worldwide.
Amsterdam-based Unveil links top photographers to collectors through its own marketplace based on blockchain technology. Through a careful curation process, collectors worldwide find new high-quality work in a user-friendly way. Collectors can buy the physical work, a print, a digital version in the form of an NFT, or both. Unveil can play a crucial role in the explosion of AI-generated fakes; it guarantees authenticity.
I have previously worked with these entrepreneurs with great pleasure and success, their companies are forerunners in fast growing global markets and sustainability is an important part of their proposition. And not unimportantly, there is also an opportunity for you to participate as an investor even with a small amount, whereas this is usually reserved only for vc funds with very deep pockets.
Please note that this is not an advertisement for investing in these companies. I explain what my considerations were for investing, but I want to emphasize that investing in startups has the very highest form of risk. Simply put, my advice is: only do it with money you could lose. And above all, do it because you support the companies' goals.
Why does Warren Buffett store in the Veluwe?
Earlier this year at CES in Las Vegas, iXora signed a licensing deal with the American company Lubrizol, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, the investment company of the legendary Warren Buffett. Why would such a global player license technology from a Dutch startup?
Hypotherm Rack Management (HRM) from iXora. Server in and done. Crucial: fits into a standard 19-inch rack, the standard in data centers worldwide.
The answer is that huge demand for energy-saving solutions has accelerated worldwide since de Russia's invasion of Ukraine the helmeted Russian neighbor visit. On top of that, energy consumption in data centers plays an extremely large role, because next to real estate and equipment, energy costs are the biggest expense. Data centers are still full of energy-guzzling fans, which will become obsolete with iXora's liquid cooling.
When using the iXora solution, a data center can accommodate more servers per square foot, with lower energy costs and therefore a reduced carbon footprint. Add to this the huge increase to cloud and streaming services in recent years and the current explosion of AI applications, making it irreversible that heavy server-intensive applications will dominate the market. Conclusion: immersion cooling is hot.
Own experience with data centers
My personal experience with data centers goes way back, for example, I was a very satisfied customer with Flabber and 925 for many years with the innovative hosting company True. (Jort Kelder and I even shot a lightly humorous movie in their data center 15 years ago.) So when True founder Vincent Houwert, after selling True and some wanderings in the Caribbean, couldn't resist getting back into business and started iXora, I was immediately interested.
With Planet Internet, I have been a customer and reseller of data center services for many years, and in the process I have experienced, through trial and error, how complex data centers operate. Although it is a multi-billion dollar business, it is one in which every dime is turned over. I always compare data centers to drinking water from the tap: everyone needs it and uses it, but every penny spent on it is a penny too much so the margins are thin.
Data center owners hate risks and opaque investments. This is precisely why I find iXora so interesting: it is the only party in the world that enables immersion cooling in the existing infrastructure of a data center.
In a billion-dollar market, of course, there are plenty of competitors, but they either only cool the chip, leaving the rest of the motherboard to give off heat and fans remain necessary, or their solutions require the installation of entire jacuzzis into which the servers are submerged.
But I know from experience that data center owners have a huge aversion to this kind of geekiness, because there is a chance of leaking fluids into their data centers where miles of cables run under the raised floors. And no one wants to use robotic arms to hoist a server out of such a bathtub, which is necessary just to replace a simple hard drive.
iXora's solution is deliberately designed for easy installation and maintenance. Nothing robotic arm or bathtub: an iXora chassis fits into the globally common 19-inch rack, and anyone who can lift a computer can slide a server into an iXora HRM.
The team knows the customer
That simplicity in the solution is rooted in the experience of the iXora team, which has literally and figuratively grown up in data centers. Besides inventor Vincent Houwert, who previously founded hosting company True, iXora's founders are CEO Job Witteman, previously founder and 17-year CEO of the Amsterdam Internet Exchange AMS-IX, and CCO Vincent Beek, who has decades of commercial experience in the international technology world. And Erwin Bleeker joined iXora in February as Compute Specialist after spending a few years at Dell explaining how a data center works ;-).
iXora webinar Thursday, June 20
More information about the opportunity to participate in iXora is in this two-page summary. Investing is possible from as little as €5,000 and depending on your contribution there is a bonus of up to 30%. If you want to know more about iXora, I recommend watching the webinar next Thursday, July 20 at 8 p.m. in which CEO Job Witteman explains what iXora does with immersion cooling. why it is important for the world and how you can contribute to .
I write a lot about AI because it is the market in which the most progress is currently being made, with the largest potential market, which is virtually every earthling. At the same time, I worry about how AI will make it possible to manipulate all forms of sight and sound.
As you may know, I have a great love for photography, a passion that unfortunately comes with a commensurate lack of talent. My former colleague Alexander Sporre with whom I worked at business site 925, though, is a talented photographer. But Alexander is also a talented entrepreneur, and he and a number of partners have jumped into a big hole in the market with Unveil.
I believe in Unveil's proposition, in the explosion of AI-generated photos, to act as a beacon and marketplace of originality and authenticity.
What makes Unveil unique?
The developments in the field of AI are so rapid that there is a huge need worldwide for an independent party to guarantee the authenticity of digital work. Without such an independent party as Unveil, it is already no longer possible to tell whether a photo is real, or generated with AI.
Third generation marketplace
I see Unveil as a third-generation marketplace. In the first form, marketplaces were generic, think Marktplaats in the Netherlands and Craigslist in America, with a large unfiltered supply. (Both, by the way, bought by eBay for hundreds of millions.) The second generation marketplaces were a curated part of a large generic offering, think Uber Black and Airbnb Plus, or the Dutch Catawiki, effectively a curated version of eBay.
In the latest generation of marketplaces, of which Unveil is a forerunner, you will only see a carefully curated, high-level offering with a select small group of providers, who are often exclusively affiliated with a platform. Unveil has already attracted over 1,500 photographers, including a large number of top international photographers such as Bastiaan Woudt and Paul Cupido.
Global market, always traceable
Unveil connects digital art with physical prints on the blockchain, making art photography traceable as a globally tradable product, with the goal of providing royalties to the creator on the one hand and guaranteeing to the collector that the work purchased is authentic, with guarantees about the number produced. This solves a huge problem worldwide.
Proven business model: marketplace
From a financial perspective, it is crucial that the business model of a marketplace is proven and highly profitable, especially in this market, based on a 12.5% commission. Such a solid commission combined with the prices that renowned photographers receive for their work offers very good prospects for Unveil.
The team
Besides Chief Product Officer Alexander Sporre (ex-Richemont, co-founder Stories, art photographer), Unveil's founders are also Chief Commercial Officer Titus de Jong (ex-Salesforce, ex-HP) and Chief Creative Officer Julian Mollema (award winning designer, Ex-Build in Amsterdam). All entrepreneurs with a solid track record in their respective fields. Crucially, there is also a lot of interest in Unveil from the art world. For example, the Head of Photography at Sotheby's EMEA has joined Unveil's Advisory Board.
Participating in Unveil
More information about the opportunity to invest in Unveil is in this two-page summary. If you would like to learn more about Unveil, I would be happy to put you in touch with the founders.
Spotlight 9: Judge finds XRP is, oh no it's not, an investment
Every week in this column, I go over the highs and lows of the most important assets in technology. Never before has the financial world been so dominated by crypto news as it was Thursday, when an early global happy hour erupted in the cryptoscene following a U.S. judge's incomprehensible ruling in the case brought by the SEC against Ripple Labs.
Imagine if XRP had won the case outright....
The judge ruled that Ripple Labs' sale of the XRP cryptocurrency to institutional investors violated securities laws. But, the judge said, there was nothing illegal about the sale of XRP by Ripple Labs to individual traders on crypto exchanges. As if professional investors need information, transparency and protection but consumers don't?
This schizophrenic statement was not understood outside the crypto world. "Securities laws are designed specifically to protect individual investors, based on the idea that they cannot stand up for themselves," James Carlson, an adjunct professor of securities regulation at New York University, told The Information. "Large institutional investors don't need the protection of securities laws. This ruling effectively turns that philosophy on its head," Carlson said.
"Securities laws are designed specifically to protect individual investors, based on the idea that they cannot advocate for themselves. Large institutional investors don't need the protection of securities laws. This ruling effectively turns that philosophy on its head."
James Carlson, New York University
Chance of 'boiler room' fraud
The implications of this part of the ruling are troubling. As Carlson said, "The potential for 'bucket shop' or 'boiler room' fraud is alarming." Think of the Wolf of Wall Street in a black crypto t-shirt. Carlson outlined a scenario in which a crypto company issues tokens to large institutional investors, who are given detailed information required by securities laws, but then resells them through crypto exchanges to individual traders, who are not given this information. The decision is likely to be appealed, so this may not be the end of the story.
XRP rose nearly 80% within a day, gave back some of the gains over the weekend but still rose nearly 50% in the last week.
It had been coming for a while: Elon Musk has entered the AI battlefield with x.AI and has become CEO of his third company, in addition to Tesla and SpaceX, Musk's space company that was valued at a whopping $150 billion in a private sale last week. The man may have driven on a few blocks past the "eccentric" exit, but it's still mind-boggling how he combines it all. The goal of x.AI is "to understand the true nature of the universe." Musk talked more on Twitter about the goals and possible collaboration with Tesla, shared few details. To be continued, no doubt.
That doesn't head nicely, but with Code Interpreter, ChatGPT can analyze data, create graphs, solve math problems and edit files, among other things. It also supports file uploading and downloading, which previously was not possible in ChatGPT. Wharton professor Ethan Mollick, author of an excellent newsletter by the way, says Code Interpreter can do things he used to spend an unimaginable amount of time on.
I did a little test by downloading a .csv file of XRP price data on Friday and asking Code Interpreter to display the key information from it in a graph. I found the result amazing, especially since Chat GPT is text-based and until recently the output was also limited to text. So not anymore because Code Interpreter spit out three relevant graphs within seconds!
Code Interpreter from ChatGPT generated these graphs from a .csv file I had uploaded. Saves a lot of time and effort!
Anthropic, which raised just under half a billion dollars from investors in May, launched a new version of their Chat GPT competitor Claude.ai. Decrypt makes a good comparison between Claude.AI, ChatGPT and Google Bard. Officially, Claude is only available in the US and UK, but with a good VPN it works fine. I'd love to hear who experiences major differences between ChatGPT and Claude, personally I see little difference in quality.
My favorite guru Gary Vaynerchuk doesn't think Threads is a Twitter-killer either, but points out that it could attract a new audience. Just try it, he advises. For now, my feed on Threads is still filled with second-hand posts from Instagram.
In 2014, I got to know Taco Carlier of VanMoof when we spent a week together walking around SXSW. Apart from being an incredibly nice guy with whom I have a pleasant contact to this day, I find the news about a possible bankruptcy of VanMoof very sad because the company was the big booster of the e-bike as a replacement for the car.
In my experience, integration of all components into a hardware product is extremely complex, Taco and I talked about that several times. He mentioned Tesla as an example of almost complete vertical integration. But crucially, what do you do at the moment when a product continuously fails and you experience quality problems to such an extent that customers become dissatisfied and the service department is overwhelmed. I won't bore you with stories from the old box about the woes called ISDN that I had to contend with, in the transition era between modems and broadband, but sometimes you have to dare to kill a product to survive as a company. Hopefully Vanmoof will survive the current malaise.
In other electric transport news, it was noticed that Lee Soo Man, founder of Korean K-pop institution SM Entertainment, invested $23 million with partners in passenger transport via drones. The EH216 can carry two passengers and flies without a pilot, leading to extraordinary videos. Just too bad about that bombastic music, therefore here, from SM Entertainment's stable, Red Velvet with Future, theme song from the popular Korean series Start-Up - yes, about Internet startups.
The high-quality sports site The Athletic (acquired last year by the New York Times, which last week dissolved its entire sports editorial staff) produced a nice long read about Lionel Messi's transfer to Miami, made possible by Apple. It remains extraordinary that Messi is the only player to benefit from the growth of subscribers to Apple TV+'s MLS subscription. The question looms as to when Apple will move more seriously into sports entertainment and move to acquire more sports rights, such as the Premier League, the NFL and the Olympics. And whether there will be more athletes then who will directly share in subscriptions to streaming services, separate of their clubs or leagues.
I want to reiterate that investing in startups carries the very highest form of risk. However, I did want to share my considerations for investing in iXora and Unveil. But simply put, my advice is: always do it only with money you can afford to lose and only in companies whose mission you support, then you will enjoy it the most. Profits remain uncertain.
I can't resist playing with MidJourney. This image is a combination of a photo I had uploaded, with an image generated by MidJourney.Result of the prompt in MidJourney to put an iXora HRM in a room like the final scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Looks more like a Transformer on steroids.
