Gm.
Ok answers to last week’s poll were legendary.
“As a European, is this blasphemy? Yes. But there's an excitement about that forbidden combo that can't be beaten by anything else.” - a reader at Facebook
“It's like the yin to the pizza's yang” - a reader at a web design firm
“Pineapple belongs on pizza” - a reader at an IP rights management company
FRESH POWDER
Looking at three startups that just raised. Congrats!
If you want to get your company in front of 19,500+ founders, investors, and operators, let us know! Contact [email protected] with any questions
AI OBVIOUSLY
Will GPT-4 Destroy Civilization?
Sam Altman’s response to the above question
All anyone can talk about is AI. I swear we’ve run out of stuff to talk about at parties. It’s either AI or flying balloons, that’s about it.
There’s been rumors that GPT-4 is coming, but OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said “people are begging to be disappointed and they will be.”
“It’ll come out at some point when we are confident we can do it safely and responsibly,” he said. Meanwhile Teamflow founder Flo Crivello tweeted on Saturday that we’re less than 7 GPU doublings away from AGI.
Everyone’s Racing to AGI
“AGI will be solved before we figure out connecting AirPods to multiple devices,” tweeted the ever-sarcastic ML researcher Roon.
Artificial General Intelligence is not yet real. It’s just an idea that scientists have been tossing around now for decades. It’s the ability of a computer to learn any intellectual task that a human being can.
When will it arrive? No one has any real idea. There’s been surveys done, some scientists think in 30-40 years, but no one is for sure. What happens when we reach AGI though?
But we’re not prepared for reaching it
I want to share a few ideas from MIT’s Max Tegmark. I’m a huge fan of his work.
“The idea is very simple. If we ever reach AGI then, of course, from that point on AI progress will be driven primarily not by humans, but by AI, which can go much faster than the typical human research and development timescale of years. And this raises this very controversial idea that AI might very rapidly through recursive self-improvement leave human intelligence far, far behind.”
QUICK HITS
Seed Round
Stat: $16 billion: The value of bets on the Super Bowl. Go Birds (hopefully they win).
Story we're watching: It turns out that generative AI has a pretty substantial environmental footprint. In today’s world of ESG, it’ll be interesting to see how (if?) AI and Big Tech companies mitigate this unpleasant side-effect.
Rabbit hole: Notes From Behind The Firewall: The State of Web Design in China (Kendra Schaefer)
WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON
The tech layoffs are hitting H1B Visa workers especially hard.
The Opera browser is the latest to add ChatGPT.
More layoffs look to be on Meta’s horizon.
Apple is updating AirTags so they can’t be used by creepy stalkers.
MONDAY MUSIC
Up to Something - Metro Boomin
For everyone who is “always up to something, never sittin on my ass! “
LAYOFFS TRACKER
Notable layoffs this week
TikTok: 40 people
Rigetti: 45 people (28%)
Moladin: 360 people (11%)
FOUNDERS CORNER
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