The other famous ex of top actress Amber Heard, Elon Musk, and Meta top executive Mark Zuckerberg challenged each other to an MMA fight this week, aptly described by the Guardian as a megarich-weirdo cage fight.
That fight is obviously never going to happen, and it's downright pathetic that Airbnb chief Brian Chesky also tried to make headlines by proposing a bench-pressing competition for tech CEOs. Like a freshman wanting to tussle with two upperclassmen boys at a school dance. First, let the man reflect on how he managed to demolish the soul out of the inner cities of Barcelona and Amsterdam in a way that generalissimo Franco and that short tempered Eastern neighbor didn't even manage.
Meta-top guy Mark Zuckerberg is trying to appear cooler at the urging of his spin doctor, the English ex-Vice Prime Minister Nick Clegg (whose website, by the way, is identical to mine because we use the same template, one of us needs to do something about that). Zuckerberg previously appeared for nearly three hours on Joe Rogan's popular podcast, and recently Lex Fridman, whose podcast is always very engaging, laid out the red carpet for Zuckerberg for two hours and 42 minutes.
Cynics noted that these are probably not coincidental venues where Zuckerberg's rival Elon Musk is a frequent guest. Musk got into marijuana with Rogan, and I can see Zuckerberg wanting to top that by sucking the venom out of a live Amazonian frog during the broadcast in a Kambo ritual. Instead, the rivals exchanged some lame texts, Zuckerberg on Instagram and Musk on Twitter.
Herein lies precisely the crux of the problem. After all, Zuckerberg once bought Instagram but is not the founder; those were Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, who are currently causing a furor with their new company Artifact. Musk in turn bought Twitter for $44 billion. While the whole world is busy with AI, the gentlemen are anxiously trying to stay in the news with their products of a previous generation.
Musk visionary, Zuckerbergexecutive
Musk is a maverick to say the least, but undisputed as a visionary and entrepreneur. While he was not the founder of Tesla, he was one of its first investors. Musk is the driving force behind the development of electric cars worldwide. Without Tesla, for example, Mercedes would never have built the EQS or Hyundai the cheaper models. I have no idea whether SpaceX is useful or an unnecessary side effect of too much testosterone, but it is a phenomenal achievement for a software maker from South Africa to successfully set up a rocket builder in America that values itself at a whopping $150 billion, Bloomberg reported Friday.
Zuckerberg never gets this respect because the one company he built, partly because of the movie The Social Network, will always be remembered as invented by others. Facebook's success was in Zuckerberg's brilliantly created "timeline" product, the addictive way of organizing friends' posts in one place.
But before Facebook, there were social networks like Friendster and MySpace, or in the Netherlands, Hyves. Facebook is effectively a Habbo Hotel grown out of its strength. Zuckerberg bought Instagram ($1 billion) and Whatsapp ($19 billion), and that shows his gift as an executive, not a visionary developer.
Tip: Andreessen at Fridman
Which is why it was all the more embarrassing for Zuckerberg that Marc Andreessen was Lex Fridman's guest this week. Andreessen was the principal developer of the first graphical Web browser Mosaic, co-founder of the first major dotcom company Netscape and, with his investment firm Andreessen Horowitz, financier of over 300 companies, including not only hits like Airbnb, Coinbase and Pinterest, but also ... Instagram, Facebook and SpaceX.
Andreessen is 51 years old and has been respected as an entrepreneur, visionary and investor for 30 of those years. Anyone comparing the appearances of Andreessen and Zuckerberg at Fridman will be struck by Andreessen's much broader view of the role of technology in society than Zuckerberg, who seems to be able to view the world exclusively through very narrow Facebook glasses.
It is therefore no coincidence that Andreessen has invested heavily in OpenAI, currently the undisputed leader in AI worldwide. Neither Musk nor Zuckerberg plays any role in AI developments. I also refer again to the excellent, thoughtful piece Andreessen wrote about AI early this month, titled "Why AI Will Save the World.
What did Zuckerberg share with the world this month? Who posted an Instagram video of himself training with a world champion jiu jitsu. That's the new geek version of buying a Porsche 911 convertible in a midlife crisis.
McKinsey sharp about AI
In recent weeks I've written more than enough about AI, but so much is happening that I want to share a few more tips. First, a new McKinsey report on the economic potential of AI. I immediately confess that I have not meticulously studied all 50 pages, but the summary on page three is already highly recommended.
The report concludes that GenAI could add "$2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion annually" to the global economy, almost the economic equivalent of adding an entire new country the size and productivity of the United Kingdom to the earth ($3.1 trillion GDP by 2021). To prepare the report, McKinsey analysts surveyed 850 occupations and 2,100 detailed work activities in 47 countries, representing more than 80% of the global workforce.
(I repeat it almost weekly when it comes to the bizarre numbers in the AI industry: a Dutch trillion is a thousand times a billion; in English, a trillion is a "trillion" and a billion is a "billion. Those designations are as useful as the invention of the mile, inch and el).
An example from the McKinsey report showing the meteoric development in AI:
'Claude, Anthropic's generative AI, in May 2023 was capable of processing 100,000 tokens of text, equivalent to about 75,000 words in a minute - the length of an average novel - compared to about 9,000 tokens when it was introduced in March 2023.'
So Claude's throughput increased from 9,000 words per minute to 75,000 words within two months!
The Mistral.ai presentation of €105 million
Last week I wrote about Mistral.ai, the French company that raised the highest funding ever from a European company in a first round, at €105 million. That made me curious about the presentation used for investors, and it is now here.
Notable is the format, a Google Doc, and the total lack of illustrations or photos. It reads more like a seven-page white paper from academia and the crypto industry. (Incidentally, Mistral.ai's seven-page memo is exactly one page shorter than the Bitcoin whitepaper, which reminded me of the famous "7-minute abdominal workout" from Something About Mary. We are waiting for the first entrepreneurs to raise over 200 million with six pages).
Motivate yourself with yourself, went wrong
Speaking of gut training; I stumbled upon this tweet explaining how to use MyShell to create a chatbot using your own voice. The point of talking to yourself is completely unclear to me, but of course I immediately recorded a minute of my own ramblings in accordance with instructions using the Voice Memo app on the iPhone, uploaded it to MyShell and gave some character descriptions to my robot twins like "eternally positive, motivating and not cynical.
In short, my chatbot was especially not supposed to look like me but nevertheless, after the very first question, I disliked my own AI chatbot.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, I cannot include the voice of my chatbot in this newsletter, but let me summarize it this way: the AI-generated robot-Michiel combined the blood-irritating gym-positivism of Arie Boomsma, but without the delightful body, with my weak sandpaper voice, but without my signature modesty.
Short AI news
- Don't call us an AI startup: this AI startup foresees a glut of AI startups and therefore does not want to be called an AI startup. And of course, anno 2023 you may identify yourself as a startup however you like.
- The state of legislation on AI in Europe and the U.S.: Europe is ahead in terms of speed on legislation on AI. The only question is: Is it helpful to be ahead with restrictive legislation?
- Prince Constantine at Humberto Tan: If we start banning instead of tolerating, won't Europe become an outlet for American companies instead of a player and producer? That, in summary, is the question raised by Constantijn van Oranje on Radio 1, partly in response to State Secretary Van Huffelen's ongoing waffling about more legislation. Constantijn also rightly noted that the mistake should not be made of confusing AI, self-learning systems, with old-fashioned Hollandsche automation, or "double-check anyone of color not named Van Huffelen or Van Puffelen. (Examples here, here and here.)
Why true NFTs are the future
In all the news about AI, other fascinating developments risk being underexposed. Therefore kudos to Het Parool, which had an excellent piece on NFTs as a new revenue model for artists with the headline "With the push of a button you can send a work to a buyer on the other side of the world.
With the tidal wave of AI applications, real photos are no longer distinguishable from fakes, look for example at Photoshop's amazing new "generative fill. I wrote earlier about Unveil, the Dutch platform that provides a counterweight to all the AI-generated photography-bagger and is also mentioned in the Parool article as an example in the NFT world.
Unveil, which will open to the public in the coming weeks, collaborates with top photographers and precisely guarantees the authenticity of each work, with both the photographer and the collector benefiting from the transparency offered by capture of each work in the blockchain.
Blockchain transparency also shows that the prices of the famous Bored Ape NFTs collapsed this week and this article explains why.
Other interesting links
- Decades-long bet on consciousness ends - and it's philosopher 1, neuroscientist 0: Neuroscientist Christof Koch made a bet with philosopher David Chalmers 25 years ago that researchers would know by now how the brain arrives at consciousness. Consciousness is the main core of life, so this bet is about something. I am also aware that in this bet, England finally won over Germany.
- Singapore and Saudi sovereign wealth funds invest $930 million in Korea's Kakao Entertainment: Cynics suspected a relationship with the success of Squid Game and this huge investment in Korean entertainment by two sovereign wealth funds. The Saudis want to be less dependent on oil and Singapore is always thinking a few steps ahead.
- Worldcoin's World App is interesting decentralized ID and payment option: unfortunately there was no Orb, the iris scanner, nearby, to authenticate me but it's still an interesting app to download. You carry your ID and bank with you in your own wallet, so you have a world passport and you are your own bank.
- Tesla gives rare and interesting look at its Supercharger monitoring system: aardog to see for anyone concerned with the mass proliferation of technology. Only two of the nearly 2,000 Superchargers were offline and only two dozen were temporarily out of service.
- Tomorrow.io raises $87 million and launches second weather satellite: I didn't know this term yet, but climate tech security is hot, even in Israel that has previously excelled in other forms of tech security (network and cyber).
- The Information 50 database has ranked what they consider to be the most interesting startups based on revenue, business model and growth potential: A nice overview of what's going on, but subjective and that raises questions about relevance. What will turn out to be very relevant in a few years, but are the compilers overlooking?
Spotlight 9: The beginning of a crypto summer?
The crypto currencies BTC and ETH are the winners of the week. The recovery set in last week after the unexpected news that the world's largest asset manager, BlackRock, filed an application with the SEC for a Bitcoin spot Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF). I wrote about that last week but did not expect then that Bitcoin would go over $30,000 and stay above that. Once again, it appears that I have few predictive gifts when it comes to investing.
What has also become clear is that the crypto market, led by Bitcoin, is currently moving independently of the mainstream markets that closed Friday in minuscule territory. By contrast, of the 149 crypto assets included in the CoinDesk Markets Indices (CMI), 144 rose last week. If this trend continues into the summer, or just stabilizes around these prices with Bitcoin staying above $30,000 and ETH around $2,000, autumn seems like the time for another crypto rally with the markets also reopening to new crypto projects. And even the biggest crypto-optimist would not have dared to dream that at the beginning of this year.
