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Gm. Welcome to the last Homescreen of the year. I hope you’ve enjoyed it this year as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it. Otherwise, I’ll see you again on the other side, aka Jan 3rd.

— Stephen Flanders

🏠 AI

Apple Awakens

It’s well known that Apple is AI’s sleeping giant. Despite basically lapping the field in tech, they are basically non-existent when it comes to AI.

That may finally be changing.

Apple has awakened with two new papers introducing techniques for 3D avatars and efficient language model inference.

The first paper brings us Human Gaussian Splats, or HUGS for short. HUGS is an AI method that is able to generate animated 3D avatars from short single camera videos. Basically, all you need to 3D-ify yourself is to shoot a small video on your phone.

The second deals with LLMs on devices with limited memory. It proposes minimizing data transfer from flash storage into scarce DRAM during inference. In English: it makes it so your phone and tablet can run LLMs.

And that’s the key point of this all, isn’t it?

Apple’s big advantage is in hardware. Chances are you have a Mac, iPad, iPhone, or all 3. It doesn’t really matter if they take a bit longer to get the software up to speed because all they need to do is throw their models into their devices and it’s GGs. Why use GPT when I can just use Apple?

This is why Samsung is developing an AI smartphone, Google is putting Gemini natively into Pixel, and Sam Altman flirted with iPhone designer Jony Ive.

Distribution matters just as much as product, and nobody has better distribution than Apple. It’s up to everyone else to catch up while Apple is still product-less.

In 2024, Keep An Eye On…The AI hardware wars.

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🤝 THE LATEST IN…

TECH

• Apple has won the Beeper war. 

• Sorry Windows Mixed Reality, you’re going out to pasture.

• Tesla is dropping stock-based compensation.

• The Vision Pro looks set for February.

AI

• Midjourney V6 is here.

• Anthropic is raising a boat load of cheddar. 

• ByteDance admitted to the OpenAI no-no. 

• You know all about Copilot, but have you met Coscientist.

SCIENCE

• You can never be too safe when it comes to planet-threatening space rocks.

• Nuclear fusion has now been replicated 3 times.

• Driverless cars may actually be safer than humans.

• A little brain shock could do wonders for your health.

CRYPTO

• Coinbase, welcome to France.

• Circle, Bonjour.

• Prometheum, the Gary Gensler exchange, is launching next year.

• Solana is like kinda eating Ethereum’s lunch right now.

🏃‍♀️ QUICKIES

Raise: Totus Medicines, an AI small molecule drug R&D company, raised a $66M Series B round.

Stat: 38%: The decrease in amount of active VC funds in 2023. It can only go up from here, founders.

Rabbit hole: What I Wish Someone Had Told Me (Sam Altman)

🛠️ FOUNDERS CORNER

The best resources we recently caIme across that will help you become a better founder, builder, or investor.

💪 Amazely is the AI growth platform for businesses.

👺 Cline is the A/B testing platform you’ve been looking for.

⛑ Sunnybox is the ultimate APIs for handling email.

🎁 FINAL JEOPARDY!

This Final Jeopardy! question stumped every contestant. Can you get it right?

Category: From Page To Stage

Clue: The opera based on this 1993 memoir was staged at a prison for the first time in 2023 at Sing Song with a chorus of 14 members.

REACH 40K+ FOUNDERS, INVESTORS & OPERATORS

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FINAL JEOPARDY! ANSWER

Dead Man Walking