Bounjour! My European summer continues today with a stop in Paris. It’s going to be a bit more difficult than London considering I don’t speak a lick of French, but I’m excited regardless. If any of you are in the area and want to link up, please send me a dm on Twitter!

— Stephen Flanders

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🏠 AI

Elon’s New AI Company

Elon Musk has been a vocal and frequent critic of AI:

• He has criticized his former company OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman.

• He has publicly professed hesitancy toward the technology due to its potential to smash us to smithereens.

• He signed March’s pause AI open letter.

• He has criticized current AI models’ “liberal bias”.

So yeah, the man isn’t the first face you’d picture when you hear “AI supporter”.

But, none of that is stopping him from building his own AI company, xAI.

According to the website, xAI’s goal is to “understand the true nature of the universe”. Your guess is as good as mine to what that means, but the answer will likely be revealed in a Twitter Spaces this afternoon.

To pursue this ambitious goal, xAI employs 12 AI veterans (including Musk) who have worked at the likes of DeepMind, Microsoft, and Tesla. In addition to these 12, xAI is also advised by Dan Hendrycks, the advisor of the Center for AI Safety, the same center which released May’s “treat AI like pandemic and nuclear war” letter.

Finally, xAI plans to work closely with other Elon companies Twitter and Tesla to “make progress toward our mission”. Again, hopefully the Twitter Spaces shines some light on what exactly this means.

A lot of unanswered questions here, but definitely exciting stuff.

The First Product?: Elon has talked previously about building “TruthGPT”, which he described as a “maximum truth-seeking AI”. It looks like xAI will be the entity through which this product is built.

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🏠 CRYPTO

Down Goes The SEC (Kinda)

For over two years now, Ripple and the SEC have been in a fight that many in crypto believe could determine the future of the industry.

The fight is over XRP, Ripple’s cryptocurrency. The SEC says it’s a security. Ripple says it’s not. So they did what any pair of reasonable adults would do when they have a disagreement. They went to court.

Yesterday, the first major ruling in the case came through. And the winner was…both of them.

Yep, the judge ruled partially in favor of both sides:

• She agreed with the SEC that Ripple selling XRP to institutional investors was unlawful security sales.

• But she agreed with Ripple that selling XRP to unknown parties was not unlawful security sales.

So, not a very climactic ending, but the two sides are interpreting it very differently:

• The SEC is considering an appeal.

• Ripple is doing backflips on Twitter.

And the rest of crypto is doing backflips with them. XRP is up bigly, and the rest of crypto is up along with it.

A Turning Point: Is this the spark crypto needed to start another bull market? Who knows, but this win along with the spot ETF applications are definitely a good start.

🏃‍♀️ QUICKIES

What else is going on?

• Twitter got slapped with a $500M lawsuit from its ex-employees.

• Apple has released the first public beta of iOS 17.

• Bard got a whole host of updates, including the ability to interact with over 40 languages.

• Stability AI has released Stable Doodle, their “sketch-to-image” model.

Stat: 20 pages: The length of the FTC’s newest record request into OpenAI, born out of a concern that ChatGPT’s “hallucinations” are defaming real people.

Rabbit hole: Data and Compute Are The Ultimate Flywheel (Every)

🎁 FINAL JEOPARDY!

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

Category: Coats Of Arms

Clue: This country’s coat of arms features a palm tree and a 19th-century American sailing ship.

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💉 DOPAMINE HIT

The future is now.

@violet.cooks

So cool seeing stuff you thought was sci-fi as a kid become a reality #selfdrivingcar #sanfrancisco #cruise

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FINAL JEOPARDY ANSWER

Liberia.