The Paragraph version of That Was The Week
Support That Was The Week
That Was The WeekUBI and AI Need Each Other
Support That Was The Week
That Was The WeekUBI and AI Need Each Other
The Paragraph version of That Was The Week
Subscribe to That Was The Week
Subscribe to That Was The Week
<100 subscribers
<100 subscribers
A reminder for new readers. That Was The Week collects the best writing on critical issues in tech, startups, and venture capital. I select the articles because they are of interest. The selections often include things I disagree with. The articles are only snippets. Click on the headline to go to the original. I express my point of view in the editorial and the weekly video.
Content this week from: @theinformation, @jglasner, @jasonlk, , @sama, @mustafasuleymn, @joshgnosis, , @fredericl , @TuckerCarlson, @ElonMusk, @pkafka
Editorial: Sequoia and Roelof
Jason Lemkin and Harry Stebbings
It may not have grabbed your attention, but The Information’s article this week about Sequoia Capital grabbed mine.
Roelof Botha is a highly accomplished person in his life before Sequoia and since. I am not sure he and I are friends, but when we meet, he makes me feel as if that were the case. he is warm, thoughtful, and considerate.
He is about 12 months into his tenure as the senior steward at the firm and has overseen many structure changes alongside market changes. Kate Clark and Abram Brown wrote the piece.
They make the point that following Roelof’s tenure:
But things have gone south ever since. With inflation high and interest rates soaring, the tech-heavy Nasdaq dropped more than 30% in 2022, bringing startup valuations crashing down and blocking the path toward public offerings for Stripe and the others—the worst macroeconomic environment for VC since the Great Recession. The downturn on top of the cash distributed to its limited partners has sunk the value of Sequoia’s assets over the nine months ended in March by 38% to $53.2 billion, according to the firm’s financial filings. This means the value of the firm’s assets are now roughly the same size as those of its younger rival, Andreessen Horowitz. Sequoia returned more than $15 billion to its LPs over the last three years, the firm’s spokesperson said.
Sequoia now faces multiple problems of its own making—some directly tied to Botha’s leadership, some not. The firm’s highest-profile crypto bet, Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX, evaporated overnight last November amid fraud allegations against Bankman-Fried—“a toe-curling embarrassment” for Sequoia, according to Sebastian Mallaby, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of “The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future.” The nine-digit wager on Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition has fared poorly, too, with Musk’s own estimate of the company’s value spiraling down more than 50% in the past six months.
The idea that the problems are “of their own making” seems wrong. Of course, nobody is perfect. But remember that most of the issues pertain to a dramatic market shift that could not have been anticipated. The FTX episode is a small factor from a financial point of view, and even there, I think blaming Sequoia is really a stretch.
What is really going on is that times have changed, and adjustments are needed. The mainly excellent article acknowledges that:
Sequoia in March also allowed investors in the fund to break its two-year lockup rule and withdraw some capital early, according to a Sequoia spokesperson. The firm was cognizant that the broad equities downturn had led to a liquidity crunch among LPs, the person said. The move got LPs some money when they needed it and bought Botha some breathing room with his investors.
The extent to which things have changed has been well documented here over the recent weeks, but to share a little more flavor, look below at the articles about venture capital.
Sequoia Capital is and remains one of the premier investment houses on the planet. Roelof Botha is a proven executor and will return the fund’s investors’ money and then some. But even Goliath can be blown over in a strong enough wind. And the wind is very strong at the moment.
The AI world shows no signs of stopping. Google I/O dominates the news, but my eyes were drawn to Sam Altman and DeepMind founder Mustafa Suleyman both commenting on the coming replacement of paid employment for humans by AI-driven equivalent roles. They focus on Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a requirement of a civilized future society. This is not a new trend, but Altamn’s WorldCoin launched the World App and WorldID this week alongside UBI tokens.
Getting authenticated into the WorldCoin universe is still near impossible as it requires a retina scan using an Orb device. Betaworks in New Your has one (shout out to John Borthwick), but according to the app, that is the only one in the US. I live in Palo Alto and was recommended to go to NY.
I can’t believe that it is impossible to take a retina scan more easily and cheaply than this. It is a major impediment to a great initiative becoming practical. That said, long live UBI token and WorldCoin. We are going to need it, or something like it.
Oh, and no video this week. Andrew and I are both traveling.
Year one of Roelof Botha’s tenure as ‘senior steward’ has been remarkably stormy, marked by billions in devalued investments, a Twitter bet gone haywire and a rising cold war over its stake in ByteDance.
By Kate Clark
May 5, 2023 9:00 AM PDT
One day in March, Sequoia Capital assembled a show of force: a private summit on artificial intelligence hosted at the firm’s airy offices in San Francisco’s Mission District. Around 100 people gathered—a who’s who of tech’s hottest sector, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman; Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s chief technology officer; and Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, a two-year-old generative AI startup recently valued at $4.1 billion.
Roelof Botha, who took over running Sequoia as its “senior steward” (Sequoia-speak for CEO) nearly a year ago, played the role of grinning host, mingling freely in the crowd as partners Sonya Huang, Konstantine Buhler and Pat Grady acted as onstage emcees. With a sweet smell drifting up from the Dandelion Chocolate factory below, a Q&A between Altman and Sequoia partner Alfred Lin anchored the morning’s schedule, followed later that afternoon by a conversation between Lin and Nvidia’s decabillionaire CEO Jensen Huang, clad in his trademark leather jacket. Several startups, including Scenario, a generative AI company offering technology for game developers, gave short demos between the longer sessions, hoping to impress the moguls in attendance. “The energy, the optimism—you could feel it,” said Scenario co-founder and CEO Emmanuel de Maistre.
Those are exactly the vibes Botha and his fellow Sequoia partners want to emanate right now: energy and optimism—business as usual for a firm that has become legendary in Silicon Valley for its unflappable culture and its early investments in Atari, Apple, Electronic Arts and Google. Aiming to prolong the firm’s 51-year run atop venture capital, Botha has set dealmakers Lin, Huang, Grady, Buhler, Stephanie Zhan and others at Sequoia on an aggressive hunt for AI startups. Already the firm has completed roughly 10 AI deals in 2023, a haul that has not been previously reported. These deals include buzzy names like Harvey (AI for lawyers) and LangChain (AI for developers).
Publicly, Botha, 49, is working hard to make it seem like little has changed during the past year. Shortly after the summit, Unity Technologies CEO John Riccitiello met with the Sequoia chief on a sunny Saturday afternoon at Botha’s Los Altos Hills, Calif., estate to discuss AI plans for the videogame software company. (Sequoia initially invested in Unity back in 2009 and still owns shares in the now-public company.) “In the world of AI, you can say you’ve got a plan, but if you’re not paying attention, the world turns itself over every 48 hours,” said Riccitiello. He was pleased to get 90 minutes with Botha, who has “less time than he used to” since taking command at Sequoia.
Despite his efforts to keep up appearances for the company, Botha can’t escape the reality of the situation. As conversations with three dozen people closely connected to him or Sequoia reveal, the past year has exposed the storied firm and its new leader to unprecedented levels of tumult. Falling equity markets have wiped away billions in value from Sequoia’s public portfolio, a decline that comes after a poorly timed, Botha-led change to Sequoia’s fund structure allowing it to hold public stocks longer.
Private markets, meanwhile, have forced even Sequoia’s bluest-chip portfolio companies to accept drastically lower valuations; Stripe’s price tag, for instance, was recently almost halved to $50 billion. Then there’s the $200 million or so gone from the FTX implosion; the $800 million the firm stunningly gambled on Elon Musk’s Twitter, now worth less than half that amount; and the $20 billion-plus stake in ByteDance held by Sequoia Capital China—a paper fortune endangered by a threatened U.S. ban on ByteDance’s highest-profile property, TikTok.
Those who can catch the spotlight-shy Botha in a private setting concede that circumstances are weighing on him. Phil Libin, who has led two companies that have received Sequoia dollars—Evernote and Mmhmm—has watched his longtime friend grow “more serious” over the past year. “He’s got a difficult job,” said the CEO. “He took over right at a time when everything’s not great.”
May 9, 2023
Venture capital is a hits business. It’s OK if most of your companies flounder or fail, so long as a few go on to monstrous valuations.
The trouble is, success requires some home runs. And, if we take the long view over the past 10 years, those haven’t panned out as hoped on the public markets.
A Crunchbase analysis of the 20 largest public market debuts of venture-backed U.S. companies founded in the past 15 years reveals that only three are trading above their initial offering prices. And even those three — Airbnb, Pinterest and Snowflake — are still well below where their shares closed in first-day trading.
For a sense of how our sample set stacks up, we compiled the 20 largest offerings of venture-backed startups founded in the past 15 years that went public in the past 10 years. We then compared initial public valuations to current ones:
Altogether, valuations for the group are down 42% from when they went public. It’s a dramatic decline for a cohort that includes the most famous startup names dating back more than a decade.
Of course, some have fared worse than others. The title of most billions in market cap erased, for instance, goes to Rivian, the electric-car maker that carried out the largest IPO of 2021. The company has shed $54 billion in market cap since its debut, when it was briefly valued at more than GM and Ford combined.
In second place is Coinbase, which debuted on Nasdaq in April 2021 through a direct listing of shares. The crypto platform has shed over $41 billion in market cap since then, and is down 84% from its first-day closing price.
In terms of steepest percentage decline in share price, no one is close to matching Bright Health Group, the Minneapolis-based health care plan provider that carried out a 2021 IPO at an initial valuation just over $11 billion. Its shares have declined more than 99% since then, and the company has raised doubts about its ability to continue as a going concern.
by Jason Lemkin | Blog Posts, Fundraising
So when I was a founder, I didn’t pay much attention to how VC funds themselves worked. I just pitched them.
But fast forward to today, and there is an incredible amount of information about how the industry actually works, and we put a bunch of the best stuff on SaaStr itself.
Most important today is for founders to know (1) how active the venture markets are, at each stage and (2) how healthy venture is overall. This you should know as a startup CEO or founder or executive. And importantly, I find most founders are still too optimistic here. They still think it’s all easier right now than it really is. So you have to see the data, and speak with it.
In terms of each stage, everything is now down. Most dramatic is later-stage investing, with the latest Crunchbase data showing Series D rounds are now own 92% (!) from the peak and 86% from a year ago:
Take out the $300m+ round for Wiz, and in fact, it’s almost 100% frozen. Other stages are down as well, but seeing the above shows you just how down the latest stages are.
Earlier-stage is way down too, falling below $10 Billion total in Q1 for the first time in a decade:
But what about VC funds themselves? How flush are they with cash not just today. — but for the future?
And here’s a very telling metric: VCs have to fundraise themselves to get the money to give to founders. They raise money from LPs, or Limited Partners. And that fundraising is down to a 10+ year low!
Now what does that mean? Well, it doesn’t mean VCs have no money to invest … today. They are indeed still sitting on funds they raised last year and the year before at record levels, per the chart above.
But it does mean almost every VC fund is going to be even more cautious. The issue isn’t just exit multiples, or growth rates. It’s also now that they are having a much tougher time raising funds themselves to give to startups.
If that doesn’t last more than a quarter or two, startups won’t really notice. But if this trend continues (and there’s no reason right now to believe otherwise) … it likely will make million+ checks even harder to get in the coming quarters. When VCs aren’t sure they’re going to have nearly as much money to invest themselves going forward.
In tougher times, it’s almost always better to just raise now if you can. This is one more reason.
MAY 9, 2023
Brief dance in our hands,
Small Apps flicker, then depart,
Endless change expands.
– ChatGPT
It’s easier than ever before to build great apps. It’s harder than ever before to sustain them, to grow them into enduring companies.
Those two ideas are related, yin and yang.
Business models have not caught up to the potential of this new paradigm. Small Apps create more potential value than they can capture; partnering up with protocols
could fill the gap.
That easier to create equals harder to defend is not a revolutionary idea. It’s one I’ve been playing with for a while, since I wrote Shopify and the Hard Thing About Easy Things in August 2020: “Here’s the hard thing about easy things: if everyone can do something, there’s no advantage to doing it, but you still have to do it anyway just to keep up.”
That essay was about ecommerce specifically, but I wrote that the same pattern was playing out across industries and verticals.
It’s happening in newsletters, where Substack gives writers an easy way to try to become the next Ben Thompson. It’s happening in video games, where Epic Games is building the tools and literally giving them away for free to expand the Total Addressable Market. It’s happening in AI, where OpenAI is giving everyone GPT-3 to build on top of.
That last sentence has become more apparent in recent months as GPT-3 gave way to GPT-4. And it’s not just the GPT-wrappers, it’s the fact that AI makes it easier for anyone to build apps themselves, for evermore niche use cases.
People like me like to write about whether or not these products have moats, whether they can stand the test of time. We’re already at the backlash to the backlash on that subject:
Making something people want is good advice. Massive winners will be crowned simply by making products that people love without worrying about growth hacking or moat digging. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently tweeted something to this effect:
But at the same time, with everything moving so quickly, users are like kids in a candy store, sampling everything, even paying for the sweetest, and then moving on to the next. Check out Lensa, the first of this generation of AI apps to take the App Store by storm:
From a peak of over $2.5 million in net revenue per day in December, Lensa fell to $206k per day by early January. That data is a few months old, but I can’t imagine it’s rebounded. Either way, that’s an incredibly successful outcome. The app’s founders made something people loved, earned a shitload of money for it, and slowly faded away as the AI avatar hype cooled and competitors rushed onto the scene.
It’s not just Lensa. How many of these apps do you expect will be making more than $200k per month a year from now? How many will grow to become Big Companies?
I suspect we’ll see this pattern play out over and over again in the months and years ahead. It’s only going to get easier to build apps, and their functionality will only get more mindblowing. People will try the newest, pay for them, and move on.
So if you’re building a Small App, what are you to do?
One way to approach the situation is to try to dig moats. Maybe you add social features to create network effects. Maybe you capture valuable proprietary data that you use to personalize and improve your product so much people don’t want to leave. Some will undoubtedly be able to build moats, and we’ll probably see a number of billion dollar companies created by one person or a small handful of people.
For most, though, that will be a losing battle. It pushes against the physics of these things.
A second way to approach the situation would just be to build cheaply, avoid raising money, and try to generate as much cash as possible while the getting’s good. We’ve already seen, and will continue to see, developers generate hundreds of thousands of signups and millions of dollars in weeks, and again, building something that people are willing to pay for, if only briefly, is fucking awesome. Go make your millions and rinse, wash, repeat (or go kick it on a beach for a while).
But I think there might be another, third way. Small Apps that recognize their fleeting nature can team up with protocols that are built to last to build something bigger and more durable collectively.
We’re going to explore that third way today.
Last week, Slow Ventures’ Sam Lessin wrote a compelling screenshot essay on Social Apps as consumable fashion instead of enduring networks.
Taimur May 10, 2023
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, envisions a future where jobs replaced by powerful AI tools won’t necessarily require humans to earn money. However, this vision is predicated on living in a turbo-charged capitalist technocracy.
“In the next five years, computer programs that can think will read legal documents and give medical advice,” Altman wrote in a 2021 post called “Moore’s Law for Everything.” In another ten, “they will do assembly-line work and maybe even become companions.” Beyond that time frame, he wrote, “they will do almost everything.” In a world where computers do almost everything, what will humans be up to?
Altman believes that within the next decade, AI will be capable of performing a wide range of tasks, potentially rendering humans obsolete in many fields. While Altman foresees the creation of new jobs along the way, the nature of these jobs remains uncertain.
“In the next five years, computer programs that can think will read legal documents and give medical advice,” Altman wrote in a 2021 post called “Moore’s Law for Everything.” In another ten, “they will do assembly-line work and maybe even become companions.” Beyond that time frame, he wrote, “they will do almost everything.” In a world where computers do almost everything, what will humans be up to?
OpenAI, under Altman’s leadership, has developed advanced AI programs such as ChatGPT and GPT-4, which mimic human conversations and possess remarkable capabilities. As other tech giants like Google and Meta enter the AI race, fears arise that human efficiency will be surpassed, particularly in the workplace.
Altman proposes universal basic income (UBI) as a solution, providing a guaranteed income to supplement wages or sustain livelihoods. UBI has been tested in various forms and gained attention during the COVID-19 pandemic, addressing concerns about job losses and precarious work.
However, recent research offers a different perspective on the necessity of UBI. OpenAI’s working paper suggests that while AI will impact jobs, humans will likely continue to work alongside AI systems, with certain roles being less exposed than others.
The integration of AI into the economy will depend on factors like data availability, regulations, and power dynamics. Altman’s UBI proposal could be seen as an attempt to shape the future according to his vision, benefiting existing tech giants and limiting alternative possibilities.
The idea of UBI as presented by Altman highlights a power dynamic where the masses become shareholders in the wealth generated by AI mega-corporations. It raises concerns about power imbalances between workers and employers in a technocratic world dominated by a few profitable companies.
When he was asked in January whether OpenAI planned to “take the proceeds that you’re presuming you’re going to make someday and?.?.?.?give them back to society,” Altman demurred. Yes, the company could distribute “cash for everyone,” he said. Or “we’re [going to] invest all of this in a non-profit that does a bunch of science.”
The scenario Altman describes parallels the current situation of social platform moderators, who perform low-wage roles monitoring and correcting AI algorithms that filter out toxic content. These workers are often overlooked and subject to harsh conditions, highlighting the hidden labor behind AI-driven systems.
May 10, 2023, 4:25 AM PDT
DeepMind
A co-founder of DeepMind, the AI company bought by Google in 2014, warned about AI-related job losses.
Mustafa Suleyman said at a San Francisco conference that there will be "a serious number of losers."
He said that universal basic income could be the answer.
A co-founder of the AI company DeepMind has warned that governments will need to figure out a plan to compensate people who will lose their jobs to the new technology, the Financial Times reported.
"Unquestionably, many of the tasks in white collar land will look very different in the next five to 10 years," Mustafa Suleyman said at GIC's Bridge Forum in San Francisco on Tuesday, per the FT. "There are going to be a serious number of losers [and they] will be very unhappy, very agitated."
DeepMind was bought by Google in 2014, and has helped it develop large language models similar to ChatGPT called LaMDA and PaLM. Suleyman left DeepMind last January, before setting up his own chatbot business called Inflection AI.
Suleyman said that governments need to give "material compensation" to people who will lose their jobs due to AI, per the FT. "This is a political and economic measure we have to start talking about in a serious way," he said.
Jürgen Schmidhuber believes AI will progress to the point where it surpasses human intelligence and will pay no attention to people
Sat 6 May 2023 20.00 EDT
The man once described as the father of artificial intelligence is breaking ranks with many of his contemporaries who are fearful of the AI arms race, saying what is coming is inevitable and we should learn to embrace it.
Prof Jürgen Schmidhuber’s work on neural networks in the 1990s was developed into language-processing models that went on to be used in technologies such as Google Translate and Apple’s Siri. The New York Times in 2016 said when AI matures it might call Schmidhuber “Dad”.
That maturity has arrived, and while some AI pioneers are looking upon their creations in horror – calling for a handbrake on the acceleration and proliferation of the technology – Schmidhuber says those calls are misguided.
The German computer scientist says there is competition between governments, universities and companies all seeking to advance the technology, meaning there is now an AI arms race, whether humanity likes it or not.
“You cannot stop it,” says Schmidhuber, who is now the director of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology’s AI initiative in Saudi Arabia.
“Surely not on an international level, because one country might may have really different goals from another country. So, of course, they are not going to participate in some sort of moratorium.
“But then I think you also shouldn’t stop it. Because in 95% of all cases, AI research is really about our old motto, which is make human lives longer and healthier and easier.”
I would be much more worried about the old dangers of nuclear bombs than about the new little dangers of AI
Prof Jürgen Schmidhuber
Schmidhuber’s position contrasts with a number of his contemporaries, including Dr Geoffrey Hinton, who spectacularly quit Google this week after a decade with the company in order to speak more freely on AI.
Hinton, who is referred to as the godfather of AI, won the Turing award in 2018 for his work on “deep learning”, which is the foundation for much of the AI in use today….
Chamath Palihapitiya
MAY 9, 2023
In technology circles, people balk at the mere mention of government regulation. The naysayers argue it interferes with innovation and is a bad byproduct of big government.
But history tells a different story. Transparent, accountable and expert oversight—even when implemented late or ineffectively at first—has proven to be an important part of scaling an economy.
For better or worse, regulation is a necessary and proven boundary condition of capitalism. So why does the topic of regulation ignite such a visceral reaction, especially as it relates to what might be humankind’s biggest technological leap yet—artificial intelligence?
Given all the noise being made about this issue lately, I thought it would be useful to run through some of the arguments against AI regulation and offer my rebuttals.
Mark these down as famous last words. While it’s admittedly early in the life of AI and generative pre-trained transformers, progress is compounding at a rate that’s measured in days.
We have gone from breathlessly awaiting a new iPhone each year to anticipating awe-inspiring new AI innovations on a weekly basis. This cycle is only a few months old, but we can only guess where we will be a year from now.
Yet it takes just minutes to imagine the dangers that could arise. For example, the emergence of Auto-GPT creates a range of possibilities: Phishing attacks that relentlessly go after our finances and personal data. Hacking access to critical hardware like GPS navigation and utility infrastructure. Even the ability to generate politically and economically debilitating fake news stories corroborated by lifelike photos and videos.
If we can imagine it, bad actors will do it. And it would be naive not to think about managing and preventing these risks in both the near and long term. Society may be better off regretting an early leap into regulation than one that comes too late.
Get ready for Google AI in all your apps.
By Shirin Ghaffary May 10, 2023, 5:50pm EDT
Shirin Ghaffary is a senior Vox correspondent covering the social media industry. Previously, Ghaffary worked at BuzzFeed News, the San Francisco Chronicle, and TechCrunch.
Five months ago, a small San Francisco startup called OpenAI upended the tech industry — and the rest of the world — when it released ChatGPT. The app showed millions of people the immense capabilities of generative AI, how it can do everything from write original poetry to churn out working lines of code, all in a matter of seconds.
It quickly became clear that AI technology like ChatGPT had the potential not only to radically change the way we consume and create information but to transform every aspect of our daily lives. And it threatened Google’s business to its core.
It’s against that backdrop that Google invited journalists like me to visit Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California, for the company’s much-anticipated annual I/O developer conference. The keynote presentation on Wednesday was Google’s chance to recapture the excitement it lost to OpenAI and the startup’s main investor, Microsoft, which ate Google’s lunch in February by releasing AI-powered search features in Bing and a corresponding chatbot, BingGPT.
Google is now facing the possibility of losing its dominance in the search market and reputation as a leader in AI, a technology many feel is as revolutionary as the mobile phone or the internet itself. Now, in order to reclaim its place as the company leading the charge on this rapidly developing technology, Google is putting AI into virtually all of its most popular products — despite the technology’s known flaws.
It was clear from the start of Google’s big event on Wednesday that AI was the star. Before executives presented onstage, electronic artist Dan Deacon played clanging music generated by Google’s AI technology as he recited poetic lyrics with psychedelic-looking AI-generated illustrations behind him. After Deacon wrapped his musical AI mystery tour, Google CEO Sundar Pichai took the stage.
“Seven years into our journey, we are at an exciting inflection point. We have an ability to make AI even more helpful,” he said onstage at Wednesday’s presentation. “We are reimagining all our core products, including search.”
But underneath the buzz was an air of nervousness about what Google is about to unleash on the world. In the coming weeks, billions of people will see generative AI in everything from Google search to Gmail to services powered by Google’s cloud technology. The update will, among other things, let people use AI to compose emails in the Gmail mobile app, create new Google Docs presentations with AI-generated images based on a few keywords, and text their friends on Android in Shakespearean-style prose spun up by AI. While these new generative AI applications could supercharge Google’s products and give better productivity and creativity tools to the masses, the technology is also prone to error and bias, and if executed poorly, it could damage Google’s core mission to serve its users reliable information.
Of the many ways Google is changing its apps with AI, search is the most meaningful. In the coming weeks, a limited group of beta testers will experience a new, more visual Google search experience. It looks familiar in many ways to the old Google search, but it works in some fundamentally different ways.
In the new Google search, when you enter a search query, you don’t just get a long list of blue links. Instead, Google will show you a few results in gray boxes before serving up a large, AI-generated block of text inside a light-green box that takes up a majority of the screen. This result is supposed to give you the information you’re looking for, gathered from disparate sources across the web and written in an approachable tone. To the right of the AI-generated result, you’ll also see a few links most relevant to your search. There are also some green boxes underneath the AI result, in which Google prompts you to go deeper by asking suggested follow-up questions, or come up with your own. And if you click into the actual text of the AI result, you’ll find links to the websites that Google pulled the information from. If you don’t like the new search experience, you can toggle back to the old one.
Frederic Lardinois @fredericl / 10:17 AM PDT•May 10, 2023
Image Credits: TechCrunch
At its I/O developer conference, Google today announced the launch of PaLM 2, its newest large language model (LLM). PaLM 2 will power Google’s updated Bard chat tool, the company’s competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and function as the foundation model for most of the new AI features the company is announcing today. PaLM 2 is now available to developers through Google’s PaLM API, Firebase and on Colab.
Google, similar to OpenAI, didn’t provide a lot of the technical details about how it trained this next-gen model, including parameter counts (PaLM 2 is a 540-billion parameter model, for what it’s worth). The only technical details Google provided here are that PaLM 2 was built on top of Google’s latest JAX and TPU v4 infrastructure.
Image Credits: Google
“What we found in our work is that it’s not really the sort of size of model — that the larger is not always better,” DeepMind VP Zoubin Ghahramani said in a press briefing ahead of today’s announcement. “That’s why we’ve provided a family of models of different sizes. We think that actually parameter count is not really a useful way of thinking about the capabilities of models and capabilities are really to be judged by people using the models and finding out whether they’re useful in the tests that they try to achieve with these models.”
Instead, the company decided to focus on its capabilities. Google says the new model is better at common sense reasoning, mathematics and logic. Indeed, as Ghahramani noted, the company trained the model on a large amount of math and science texts, as well as mathematical expressions. It’s no secret that large language models — with their focus on language — have struggled with handling math questions without resorting to third-party plugins. Google, however, argues that PaLM 2 can easily solve math puzzles, reason through problems and even provide diagrams.
PaLM 2 also now features improved support for writing and debugging code. The model was trained on 20 programming languages, including popular ones like JavaScript and Python, but also the likes of Prolog, Verilog and Fortran. PaLM 2 forms the basis of Codey, Google’s specialized model for coding and debugging, which it is also launching today as part of its code completion and generation service, among other things.
Google today also highlighted that PaLM 2 was trained on a corpus that features over 100 languages, making it, in Google’s words, “excel at multilingual tasks,” including more nuanced phrasing than previous models.
Ron Miller @ron_miller / 10:29 AM PDT•May 10, 2023
Image Credits: TechCrunch / Getty Images
At Google I/O today, the company announced that it was removing most waitlist restrictions and making Bard, the company’s generative AI chatbot more widely available, starting today in English. The idea is to continue to work on the chatbot, but with a larger group of people
In a blog post announcing the change, Sissie Hsiao, vice president and GM for Assistant and Bard at Google, made the official announcement. “As we continue to make additional improvements and introduce new features, we want to get Bard into more people’s hands so they can try it out and share their feedback with us. So today we’re removing the waitlist and opening up Bard to over 180 countries and territories – with more coming soon,” she wrote.
MAY 10, 2023
At Google I/O, Adobe and Google announced that Adobe Firefly and Adobe Express are integrating with Bard by Google. Further, Adobe’s Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) will be incorporated, ensuring transparency with AI-generated content within Bard.
Adobe Firefly is Adobe’s new generative artificial intelligence (AI) system and is currently in beta. Adobe says that it’s “one of the most successful beta launches” in Adobe’s history. During Firefly’s first month, users generated more than 70 million images.
One of Firefly’s primary features is how Adobe developed the AI model. The generative AI was trained using legally owned images, unlike some competing models trained with stolen content. The way in which Adobe created Firefly means that it generates commercially viable content fit for professional use.
While Adobe’s commitment to ethics may limit Firefly’s performance, it enables a level of transparency few, if any, competing generative AI systems can offer. Further, the open-source technology underpinning the Content Authenticity Initiative works with the Firefly-Bard integration. Bard by Google and new members Universal Music Group (UMG), Stability AI, and Spawning.ai bring the total number of members in the CAI to over 1,000.
Bard is Google’s experimental conversation AI service. “In the coming months, Firefly will become the premier generative AI partner for Bard, powering and highlighting text-to-image capabilities,” says Adobe.
A new chief executive won’t change the fact that Musk still owns the company.
By Shirin Ghaffary May 11, 2023, 6:50pm EDT
Shirin Ghaffary is a senior Vox correspondent covering the social media industry. Previously, Ghaffary worked at BuzzFeed News, the San Francisco Chronicle, and TechCrunch.
Elon Musk just announced that, in six weeks, he’s stepping down as the CEO of Twitter. But if you think that means the Elon-Twitter story is over, don’t hold your breath.
Musk announced on Thursday that he has chosen his replacement as the chief executive of Twitter and its parent company, X, and that she will be starting in about six weeks. This is the most concrete timeline he’s made about his succession plan since December of last year when he first confirmed that he would eventually step aside. But Musk will still be the sole owner of Twitter, and unless he sells the company — or a controlling share of it — the billionaire is still in control.
We don’t know yet who will replace Musk. Some media insiders have guessed it could be NBCUniversal advertising executive Linda Yaccarino, who has publicly defended Musk and recently interviewed him at a major advertising conference. Yaccarino did not respond to a request for comment. At this point, it’s still anyone’s guess.
Regardless of who replaces Musk, it’s not clear how much real power the new Twitter CEO could have. Even if he follows through with this plan and actually gives up his job as CEO — this is not at all guaranteed to happen until it happens — Musk’s ownership of Twitter means he can essentially hire or fire a new CEO as he pleases. Since Twitter is now a private company, Musk has virtually no outside accountability from an independent board of directors to question his decisions.
Published May 9, 2023
If there were any question remaining about the political leanings of Elon Musk, and the direction that he’s guiding Twitter, this should probably seal it.
Today, controversial right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson, who was recently dismissed from Fox News, has announced that he’ll continue to broadcast his highly popular program exclusively on Twitter instead.
Carlson will take advantage of Twitter’s newly introduced longer video upload limits to lead a new charge at the app, which Twitter will be hoping could be the beginning of a new content shift towards the app.
In some ways, the announcement is major coup for the social network, with Carlson’s program regularly watched by over 3 million people per night on Fox News before its cancelation. However, it does also come with significant risk. Carlson has been the subject of various legal probes and investigations over the often outlandish claims aired within his program, while many advertisers also pulled their spend from Fox as a result of Carlson’s controversial statements and stances.
For Twitter, that’s unlikely to provide more reassurance to advertisers, many of whom have already stepped away from the app due to Musk’s various changes and updates – though Elon has said that the money doesn’t matter to him as much as upholding the principles of free speech.
Musk has also clarified that Twitter has not entered into a commercial agreement with Carlson, as such, with the commentator coming to the app via the same process as any other content creator, and using Twitter’s re-vamped Subscriptions program to monetize his work.
Though, logically, it does seem like some kind of deal must have been struck to get Carlson over the line, especially when you also factor in staff costs for production, etc.
Here’s the math.
By Peter Kafka May 11, 2023, 6:30am EDT
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Peter Kafka covers media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.
Okay. We still don’t know why Tucker Carlson is out at Fox* but we know where he’s going. He’s setting up shop at Twitter, cheered on by Elon Musk.
Next question: Can he make money there?
To be clear, money isn’t the only reason Carlson wants to be on Twitter. And if he was most interested in money, he probably wouldn’t go anywhere at all in the near future since doing so looks likely to kick off a legal fight with Fox about the remainder of his very lucrative contract. Carlson wants to be on Twitter because he wants attention — both in general and in the runup to the 2024 elections.
But Carlson also likes money, and Fox reportedly paid him $20 million a year. Can he make anything like that on Twitter? I think he can.
My gut says that Musk has already promised Carlson that he’ll pay him as much or more than his Fox paycheck to come to Twitter. After all, if you’ve already incinerated tens of billions of dollars to buy Twitter, why not shovel a few million more onto the fire? Bringing the most popular and powerful host on cable TV news to his platform guarantees we’ll continue to pay attention to Musk. And to Musk, attention is priceless.
Musk, for what it’s worth, says “we have not signed a deal of any kind whatsoever” with Carlson, and if Musk were a normal person, I’d encourage you to parse that statement for potential loopholes — maybe there’s a verbal deal but not a signed one? But since it’s Musk, who just makes things up, I wouldn’t bother spending energy on that. Maybe he’s telling the truth, maybe he’s not.
For now, Musk wants to use Carlson as a high-profile test case for his pitch that Twitter can become a full-fledged media platform, one where Free Thinkers can set up shop and make money without having to worry about the Woke Mind Virus. (He’s already trying to make the case to Don Lemon, who was fired from CNN the same day Fox fired Carlson.)
So let’s speculate about what Carlson could actually do on Twitter if he wanted to try replicating his Fox show on the site.
Some starting assumptions: Since Carlson wants both money and the spotlight, he’ll want a hybrid approach. Which means Carlson superfans can pay up to watch everything he does, via a subscription offering, and Carlson will also promote free ad-supported clips on the site.
Let’s also assume that even though marketers have fled both Carlson’s show on Fox and Twitter under Musk’s ownership, there will be some advertisers who are willing to attach themselves to a Carlson Twitter show.
At Fox, Carlson averaged around 3 million pay TV viewers per episode. And Fox also says it has more than 1 million subscribers for Fox Nation, its (formerly) Tucker-heavy streaming service.
Published May 9, 2023
Twitter has released two new updates for DMs, which have been in the works for a few months, but are now getting a full launch in the app.
First off, you’ll now be able to reply direct to any message within a DM thread, making it easier to interact within group chats and discussion, with greater clarity around who and what you’re responding to in-stream.
As you can see in this example, shared by social media expert Matt Navarra, now, you’re able to reply to a specific message in a chat thread, and that response will be aligned to the original message bubble, as opposed to being added to the end of the chain.
Twitter’s also added a new emoji picker within DMs, so you can react to a message with a wider range of emoji options.
Twitter first previewed this back in January, and it’ll provide more ways to use quick emoji responses within DMs, which could add another fun element to your chat interactions.
In addition to these updates, Twitter chief Elon Musk says that the first iteration of encrypted DMs will be launched this week, adding more security and privacy in the app.
Twitter’s been developing encrypted DMs for months, with Musk flagging this as one of his priority projects when he first took over at the app. And while some have concerns around the added protection that encryption can potentially provide for criminal activity, the general consensus seems to be that greater security for all users is more important than the risks associated with facilitating such among the few.
Again, not all agree, but Twitter will be moving into line with Meta in implementing E2E across all of its messaging options.
Musk also says that audio and video calling options will soon also be available in Twitter DMs, expanding the connective capacity of the option.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Karissa Bell| @karissabe| May 10, 2023 7:49 PM
Twitter is beginning to roll out its long-promised encrypted direct messaging feature. However, the initial rollout comes with some major limitations that could make it less than ideal for privacy-conscious Twitter users.
Of note, the feature is currently only available to verified Twitter users, which includes Twitter Blue subscribers and those part of a “Verified Organization.” It’s not clear if this is just for the early rollout or if encryption will be added to the growing list of exclusive features for users with a checkmark. For now, an encrypted chat requires both users to be verified, according to the company.
There are also some significant limitations to the feature itself. It doesn’t support group messages, or any kind of media other than links. The company also doesn’t allow users to report an encrypted message directly, advising on a help page that users should report accounts separately if they “encounter an issue with an encrypted conversation participant.”
Finally, the level of encryption appears to be less secure than what other apps offer. For one, message metadata is not encrypted. Furthermore, Twitter notes that “currently, we do not offer protections against man-in-the-middle attacks” and suggests that the company itself is still able to access encrypted DMs without the participants knowing. “If someone–for example, a malicious insider, or Twitter itself as a result of a compulsory legal process—were to compromise an encrypted conversation, neither the sender or receiver would know,” the company explains on a help page. It added that it’s working on improvements that would make such exploits more “difficult.”
Thursday May 11, 2023 9:06 am PDT by Juli Clover
Disney plans to combine the Hulu and Disney+ streaming services into a single app by the end of this year, Disney CEO Bob Iger said yesterday during Disney's Q2 earnings call (via TechCrunch).
A single streaming app will include programming from both Hulu and Disney+, but Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ will also still be available as standalone services. The combined app will be provided first to subscribers who have the Disney+ and Hulu bundle, so rather than swapping back and forth, users can access all of their content in a single app.
"The integrated app experience that we announced today is for consumers that have subscribed to both services for now," said Iger. He explained that Disney is taking the two-app bundle and combining it into one experience that will have "basically more content than it offered before."
With the merging of the services, Disney plans to increase pricing. "We plan to set a higher price for our ad-free tier later this year," Iger said.
Disney's announcement came as the Disney+ service lost four million subscribers during the quarter.
Min Jeong Lee and Takahiko Hyuga
Thu, May 11, 2023 at 3:12 AM PDT·5 min read
(Bloomberg) -- SoftBank Group Corp. lost money in its Vision Fund investment unit again despite a rebound in tech stocks, as the Japanese conglomerate suffered losses on unlisted startups in its portfolio.
The Vision Fund unit lost ¥297.5 billion ($2 billion) in the three months ended March, compared with a ¥2.2 trillion loss a year earlier. The gargantuan investment fund that Masayoshi Son proudly set up in 2017 lost a record ¥4.3 trillion for the full fiscal year, almost doubling the record loss of ¥2.6 trillion the year before.
While SoftBank has lost money off and on for years, the latest results are surprising because technology valuations around the world have largely rebounded this year. The Nasdaq 100 index, a benchmark for tech stock performance, rallied 20% during the March quarter, lifting share prices for some of SoftBank’s biggest investments.
The South Korean e-commerce company Coupang Inc., for example, gained about 9%, while the Chinese ride-hailing company Didi Global Inc. rose about 20%. SoftBank accounts for such gains in its portfolio companies as profit on its income statement.
But SoftBank marked down the value of its private companies far more than the increases in its public holdings. It lost about about $3.9 billion on its private portfolio during the quarter, while it gained about $1.9 billion with public companies.
By Sam Kessler
May 8, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. PDT
Updated May 9, 2023 at 7:31 a.m. PDT
In the age of large language models (LLMs) and ChatGPT, AI is poised to make a weird internet even weirder – turning the content-driven social media apps, news sites and media platforms of today into future uncanny valleys that blur the line between man and machine.
As advances in AI make it more difficult to discern bots from humans, Sam Altman, the co-founder of Open AI – the company behind ChatGPT – thinks blockchains can help.
Altman’s crypto project, Worldcoin, rose to prominence last year with a controversial, Silicon Valley vision for a universal basic income (UBI): a crypto token that can be distributed in equal quantity to everyone in the world.
In the age of large language models (LLMs) and ChatGPT, AI is poised to make a weird internet even weirder – turning the content-driven social media apps, news sites and media platforms of today into future uncanny valleys that blur the line between man and machine.
As advances in AI make it more difficult to discern bots from humans, Sam Altman, the co-founder of Open AI – the company behind ChatGPT – thinks blockchains can help.
Altman’s crypto project, Worldcoin, rose to prominence last year with a controversial, Silicon Valley vision for a universal basic income (UBI): a crypto token that can be distributed in equal quantity to everyone in the world.
Worldcoin is back again this week with a new launch – this one poised to be its biggest yet. World App, Worldcoin’s crypto wallet, built on the Ethereum sidechain Polygon, is the first product from the elusive identity upstart that anyone, anywhere will be able to download.
The new app is one part minimalist crypto wallet, and one part passport for the AI era. It’s Worldcoin’s biggest swing yet to redefine itself in the eyes of consumers.
Worldcoin’s initial rollout was rocky. The retina-scanning metal “orb” that the project used to authenticate new users was criticized as dystopian, and a damning exposé from the MIT Technology Review forced Tools for Humanity – the company behind Worldcoin – to confront allegations of exploitation and deceptive recruiting practices.
Weathered by negative press coverage and a tumultuous year for the wider crypto industry – and amid an AI boom kicked off, in large part, by Altman’s Open AI – Worldcoin reasserted itself in March with a repackaged vision focused on “proof of personhood.” Announced in March, Worldcoin’s World ID protocol will allow app developers to leverage its network of biometrically-authenticated humans.
“Everything that has happened with AI in the last six months has made people understand the project a lot better,” said Tiago Sada, the head of product at Tools for Humanity.
For those without a World ID, who’ve yet to peer into one of Worldcoin’s retina-scanning orbs, World App will function as a stripped-down crypto wallet – not too dissimilar from Coinbase Wallet, Metamask, or any number of other apps that allow people to buy, sell, and store cryptocurrency.
“You would probably find even fewer features on World App, actually, than on some of those wallets – and that's deliberate,” explained Sada.
Tools for Humanity has global ambitions, and it says it designed its wallet app to be more accessible than other wallet services. To avoid overwhelming new crypto users, the app opts for a sleek, “minimalist” design, boasts a relatively bare-bones feature set, and is somewhat restricted in the number of crypto tokens that it supports.
Built on Polygon – a blockchain that can send and receive assets from Ethereum but offers cheaper fees to users – World App currently offers access to “wrapped,” Polygon-based versions of Bitcoin, Ethereum and stablecoins like the U.S. dollar-pegged DAI token (Worldcoin says more tokens are coming soon).
A reminder for new readers. That Was The Week collects the best writing on critical issues in tech, startups, and venture capital. I select the articles because they are of interest. The selections often include things I disagree with. The articles are only snippets. Click on the headline to go to the original. I express my point of view in the editorial and the weekly video.
Content this week from: @theinformation, @jglasner, @jasonlk, , @sama, @mustafasuleymn, @joshgnosis, , @fredericl , @TuckerCarlson, @ElonMusk, @pkafka
Editorial: Sequoia and Roelof
Jason Lemkin and Harry Stebbings
It may not have grabbed your attention, but The Information’s article this week about Sequoia Capital grabbed mine.
Roelof Botha is a highly accomplished person in his life before Sequoia and since. I am not sure he and I are friends, but when we meet, he makes me feel as if that were the case. he is warm, thoughtful, and considerate.
He is about 12 months into his tenure as the senior steward at the firm and has overseen many structure changes alongside market changes. Kate Clark and Abram Brown wrote the piece.
They make the point that following Roelof’s tenure:
But things have gone south ever since. With inflation high and interest rates soaring, the tech-heavy Nasdaq dropped more than 30% in 2022, bringing startup valuations crashing down and blocking the path toward public offerings for Stripe and the others—the worst macroeconomic environment for VC since the Great Recession. The downturn on top of the cash distributed to its limited partners has sunk the value of Sequoia’s assets over the nine months ended in March by 38% to $53.2 billion, according to the firm’s financial filings. This means the value of the firm’s assets are now roughly the same size as those of its younger rival, Andreessen Horowitz. Sequoia returned more than $15 billion to its LPs over the last three years, the firm’s spokesperson said.
Sequoia now faces multiple problems of its own making—some directly tied to Botha’s leadership, some not. The firm’s highest-profile crypto bet, Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX, evaporated overnight last November amid fraud allegations against Bankman-Fried—“a toe-curling embarrassment” for Sequoia, according to Sebastian Mallaby, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of “The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future.” The nine-digit wager on Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition has fared poorly, too, with Musk’s own estimate of the company’s value spiraling down more than 50% in the past six months.
The idea that the problems are “of their own making” seems wrong. Of course, nobody is perfect. But remember that most of the issues pertain to a dramatic market shift that could not have been anticipated. The FTX episode is a small factor from a financial point of view, and even there, I think blaming Sequoia is really a stretch.
What is really going on is that times have changed, and adjustments are needed. The mainly excellent article acknowledges that:
Sequoia in March also allowed investors in the fund to break its two-year lockup rule and withdraw some capital early, according to a Sequoia spokesperson. The firm was cognizant that the broad equities downturn had led to a liquidity crunch among LPs, the person said. The move got LPs some money when they needed it and bought Botha some breathing room with his investors.
The extent to which things have changed has been well documented here over the recent weeks, but to share a little more flavor, look below at the articles about venture capital.
Sequoia Capital is and remains one of the premier investment houses on the planet. Roelof Botha is a proven executor and will return the fund’s investors’ money and then some. But even Goliath can be blown over in a strong enough wind. And the wind is very strong at the moment.
The AI world shows no signs of stopping. Google I/O dominates the news, but my eyes were drawn to Sam Altman and DeepMind founder Mustafa Suleyman both commenting on the coming replacement of paid employment for humans by AI-driven equivalent roles. They focus on Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a requirement of a civilized future society. This is not a new trend, but Altamn’s WorldCoin launched the World App and WorldID this week alongside UBI tokens.
Getting authenticated into the WorldCoin universe is still near impossible as it requires a retina scan using an Orb device. Betaworks in New Your has one (shout out to John Borthwick), but according to the app, that is the only one in the US. I live in Palo Alto and was recommended to go to NY.
I can’t believe that it is impossible to take a retina scan more easily and cheaply than this. It is a major impediment to a great initiative becoming practical. That said, long live UBI token and WorldCoin. We are going to need it, or something like it.
Oh, and no video this week. Andrew and I are both traveling.
Year one of Roelof Botha’s tenure as ‘senior steward’ has been remarkably stormy, marked by billions in devalued investments, a Twitter bet gone haywire and a rising cold war over its stake in ByteDance.
By Kate Clark
May 5, 2023 9:00 AM PDT
One day in March, Sequoia Capital assembled a show of force: a private summit on artificial intelligence hosted at the firm’s airy offices in San Francisco’s Mission District. Around 100 people gathered—a who’s who of tech’s hottest sector, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman; Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s chief technology officer; and Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, a two-year-old generative AI startup recently valued at $4.1 billion.
Roelof Botha, who took over running Sequoia as its “senior steward” (Sequoia-speak for CEO) nearly a year ago, played the role of grinning host, mingling freely in the crowd as partners Sonya Huang, Konstantine Buhler and Pat Grady acted as onstage emcees. With a sweet smell drifting up from the Dandelion Chocolate factory below, a Q&A between Altman and Sequoia partner Alfred Lin anchored the morning’s schedule, followed later that afternoon by a conversation between Lin and Nvidia’s decabillionaire CEO Jensen Huang, clad in his trademark leather jacket. Several startups, including Scenario, a generative AI company offering technology for game developers, gave short demos between the longer sessions, hoping to impress the moguls in attendance. “The energy, the optimism—you could feel it,” said Scenario co-founder and CEO Emmanuel de Maistre.
Those are exactly the vibes Botha and his fellow Sequoia partners want to emanate right now: energy and optimism—business as usual for a firm that has become legendary in Silicon Valley for its unflappable culture and its early investments in Atari, Apple, Electronic Arts and Google. Aiming to prolong the firm’s 51-year run atop venture capital, Botha has set dealmakers Lin, Huang, Grady, Buhler, Stephanie Zhan and others at Sequoia on an aggressive hunt for AI startups. Already the firm has completed roughly 10 AI deals in 2023, a haul that has not been previously reported. These deals include buzzy names like Harvey (AI for lawyers) and LangChain (AI for developers).
Publicly, Botha, 49, is working hard to make it seem like little has changed during the past year. Shortly after the summit, Unity Technologies CEO John Riccitiello met with the Sequoia chief on a sunny Saturday afternoon at Botha’s Los Altos Hills, Calif., estate to discuss AI plans for the videogame software company. (Sequoia initially invested in Unity back in 2009 and still owns shares in the now-public company.) “In the world of AI, you can say you’ve got a plan, but if you’re not paying attention, the world turns itself over every 48 hours,” said Riccitiello. He was pleased to get 90 minutes with Botha, who has “less time than he used to” since taking command at Sequoia.
Despite his efforts to keep up appearances for the company, Botha can’t escape the reality of the situation. As conversations with three dozen people closely connected to him or Sequoia reveal, the past year has exposed the storied firm and its new leader to unprecedented levels of tumult. Falling equity markets have wiped away billions in value from Sequoia’s public portfolio, a decline that comes after a poorly timed, Botha-led change to Sequoia’s fund structure allowing it to hold public stocks longer.
Private markets, meanwhile, have forced even Sequoia’s bluest-chip portfolio companies to accept drastically lower valuations; Stripe’s price tag, for instance, was recently almost halved to $50 billion. Then there’s the $200 million or so gone from the FTX implosion; the $800 million the firm stunningly gambled on Elon Musk’s Twitter, now worth less than half that amount; and the $20 billion-plus stake in ByteDance held by Sequoia Capital China—a paper fortune endangered by a threatened U.S. ban on ByteDance’s highest-profile property, TikTok.
Those who can catch the spotlight-shy Botha in a private setting concede that circumstances are weighing on him. Phil Libin, who has led two companies that have received Sequoia dollars—Evernote and Mmhmm—has watched his longtime friend grow “more serious” over the past year. “He’s got a difficult job,” said the CEO. “He took over right at a time when everything’s not great.”
May 9, 2023
Venture capital is a hits business. It’s OK if most of your companies flounder or fail, so long as a few go on to monstrous valuations.
The trouble is, success requires some home runs. And, if we take the long view over the past 10 years, those haven’t panned out as hoped on the public markets.
A Crunchbase analysis of the 20 largest public market debuts of venture-backed U.S. companies founded in the past 15 years reveals that only three are trading above their initial offering prices. And even those three — Airbnb, Pinterest and Snowflake — are still well below where their shares closed in first-day trading.
For a sense of how our sample set stacks up, we compiled the 20 largest offerings of venture-backed startups founded in the past 15 years that went public in the past 10 years. We then compared initial public valuations to current ones:
Altogether, valuations for the group are down 42% from when they went public. It’s a dramatic decline for a cohort that includes the most famous startup names dating back more than a decade.
Of course, some have fared worse than others. The title of most billions in market cap erased, for instance, goes to Rivian, the electric-car maker that carried out the largest IPO of 2021. The company has shed $54 billion in market cap since its debut, when it was briefly valued at more than GM and Ford combined.
In second place is Coinbase, which debuted on Nasdaq in April 2021 through a direct listing of shares. The crypto platform has shed over $41 billion in market cap since then, and is down 84% from its first-day closing price.
In terms of steepest percentage decline in share price, no one is close to matching Bright Health Group, the Minneapolis-based health care plan provider that carried out a 2021 IPO at an initial valuation just over $11 billion. Its shares have declined more than 99% since then, and the company has raised doubts about its ability to continue as a going concern.
by Jason Lemkin | Blog Posts, Fundraising
So when I was a founder, I didn’t pay much attention to how VC funds themselves worked. I just pitched them.
But fast forward to today, and there is an incredible amount of information about how the industry actually works, and we put a bunch of the best stuff on SaaStr itself.
Most important today is for founders to know (1) how active the venture markets are, at each stage and (2) how healthy venture is overall. This you should know as a startup CEO or founder or executive. And importantly, I find most founders are still too optimistic here. They still think it’s all easier right now than it really is. So you have to see the data, and speak with it.
In terms of each stage, everything is now down. Most dramatic is later-stage investing, with the latest Crunchbase data showing Series D rounds are now own 92% (!) from the peak and 86% from a year ago:
Take out the $300m+ round for Wiz, and in fact, it’s almost 100% frozen. Other stages are down as well, but seeing the above shows you just how down the latest stages are.
Earlier-stage is way down too, falling below $10 Billion total in Q1 for the first time in a decade:
But what about VC funds themselves? How flush are they with cash not just today. — but for the future?
And here’s a very telling metric: VCs have to fundraise themselves to get the money to give to founders. They raise money from LPs, or Limited Partners. And that fundraising is down to a 10+ year low!
Now what does that mean? Well, it doesn’t mean VCs have no money to invest … today. They are indeed still sitting on funds they raised last year and the year before at record levels, per the chart above.
But it does mean almost every VC fund is going to be even more cautious. The issue isn’t just exit multiples, or growth rates. It’s also now that they are having a much tougher time raising funds themselves to give to startups.
If that doesn’t last more than a quarter or two, startups won’t really notice. But if this trend continues (and there’s no reason right now to believe otherwise) … it likely will make million+ checks even harder to get in the coming quarters. When VCs aren’t sure they’re going to have nearly as much money to invest themselves going forward.
In tougher times, it’s almost always better to just raise now if you can. This is one more reason.
MAY 9, 2023
Brief dance in our hands,
Small Apps flicker, then depart,
Endless change expands.
– ChatGPT
It’s easier than ever before to build great apps. It’s harder than ever before to sustain them, to grow them into enduring companies.
Those two ideas are related, yin and yang.
Business models have not caught up to the potential of this new paradigm. Small Apps create more potential value than they can capture; partnering up with protocols
could fill the gap.
That easier to create equals harder to defend is not a revolutionary idea. It’s one I’ve been playing with for a while, since I wrote Shopify and the Hard Thing About Easy Things in August 2020: “Here’s the hard thing about easy things: if everyone can do something, there’s no advantage to doing it, but you still have to do it anyway just to keep up.”
That essay was about ecommerce specifically, but I wrote that the same pattern was playing out across industries and verticals.
It’s happening in newsletters, where Substack gives writers an easy way to try to become the next Ben Thompson. It’s happening in video games, where Epic Games is building the tools and literally giving them away for free to expand the Total Addressable Market. It’s happening in AI, where OpenAI is giving everyone GPT-3 to build on top of.
That last sentence has become more apparent in recent months as GPT-3 gave way to GPT-4. And it’s not just the GPT-wrappers, it’s the fact that AI makes it easier for anyone to build apps themselves, for evermore niche use cases.
People like me like to write about whether or not these products have moats, whether they can stand the test of time. We’re already at the backlash to the backlash on that subject:
Making something people want is good advice. Massive winners will be crowned simply by making products that people love without worrying about growth hacking or moat digging. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently tweeted something to this effect:
But at the same time, with everything moving so quickly, users are like kids in a candy store, sampling everything, even paying for the sweetest, and then moving on to the next. Check out Lensa, the first of this generation of AI apps to take the App Store by storm:
From a peak of over $2.5 million in net revenue per day in December, Lensa fell to $206k per day by early January. That data is a few months old, but I can’t imagine it’s rebounded. Either way, that’s an incredibly successful outcome. The app’s founders made something people loved, earned a shitload of money for it, and slowly faded away as the AI avatar hype cooled and competitors rushed onto the scene.
It’s not just Lensa. How many of these apps do you expect will be making more than $200k per month a year from now? How many will grow to become Big Companies?
I suspect we’ll see this pattern play out over and over again in the months and years ahead. It’s only going to get easier to build apps, and their functionality will only get more mindblowing. People will try the newest, pay for them, and move on.
So if you’re building a Small App, what are you to do?
One way to approach the situation is to try to dig moats. Maybe you add social features to create network effects. Maybe you capture valuable proprietary data that you use to personalize and improve your product so much people don’t want to leave. Some will undoubtedly be able to build moats, and we’ll probably see a number of billion dollar companies created by one person or a small handful of people.
For most, though, that will be a losing battle. It pushes against the physics of these things.
A second way to approach the situation would just be to build cheaply, avoid raising money, and try to generate as much cash as possible while the getting’s good. We’ve already seen, and will continue to see, developers generate hundreds of thousands of signups and millions of dollars in weeks, and again, building something that people are willing to pay for, if only briefly, is fucking awesome. Go make your millions and rinse, wash, repeat (or go kick it on a beach for a while).
But I think there might be another, third way. Small Apps that recognize their fleeting nature can team up with protocols that are built to last to build something bigger and more durable collectively.
We’re going to explore that third way today.
Last week, Slow Ventures’ Sam Lessin wrote a compelling screenshot essay on Social Apps as consumable fashion instead of enduring networks.
Taimur May 10, 2023
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, envisions a future where jobs replaced by powerful AI tools won’t necessarily require humans to earn money. However, this vision is predicated on living in a turbo-charged capitalist technocracy.
“In the next five years, computer programs that can think will read legal documents and give medical advice,” Altman wrote in a 2021 post called “Moore’s Law for Everything.” In another ten, “they will do assembly-line work and maybe even become companions.” Beyond that time frame, he wrote, “they will do almost everything.” In a world where computers do almost everything, what will humans be up to?
Altman believes that within the next decade, AI will be capable of performing a wide range of tasks, potentially rendering humans obsolete in many fields. While Altman foresees the creation of new jobs along the way, the nature of these jobs remains uncertain.
“In the next five years, computer programs that can think will read legal documents and give medical advice,” Altman wrote in a 2021 post called “Moore’s Law for Everything.” In another ten, “they will do assembly-line work and maybe even become companions.” Beyond that time frame, he wrote, “they will do almost everything.” In a world where computers do almost everything, what will humans be up to?
OpenAI, under Altman’s leadership, has developed advanced AI programs such as ChatGPT and GPT-4, which mimic human conversations and possess remarkable capabilities. As other tech giants like Google and Meta enter the AI race, fears arise that human efficiency will be surpassed, particularly in the workplace.
Altman proposes universal basic income (UBI) as a solution, providing a guaranteed income to supplement wages or sustain livelihoods. UBI has been tested in various forms and gained attention during the COVID-19 pandemic, addressing concerns about job losses and precarious work.
However, recent research offers a different perspective on the necessity of UBI. OpenAI’s working paper suggests that while AI will impact jobs, humans will likely continue to work alongside AI systems, with certain roles being less exposed than others.
The integration of AI into the economy will depend on factors like data availability, regulations, and power dynamics. Altman’s UBI proposal could be seen as an attempt to shape the future according to his vision, benefiting existing tech giants and limiting alternative possibilities.
The idea of UBI as presented by Altman highlights a power dynamic where the masses become shareholders in the wealth generated by AI mega-corporations. It raises concerns about power imbalances between workers and employers in a technocratic world dominated by a few profitable companies.
When he was asked in January whether OpenAI planned to “take the proceeds that you’re presuming you’re going to make someday and?.?.?.?give them back to society,” Altman demurred. Yes, the company could distribute “cash for everyone,” he said. Or “we’re [going to] invest all of this in a non-profit that does a bunch of science.”
The scenario Altman describes parallels the current situation of social platform moderators, who perform low-wage roles monitoring and correcting AI algorithms that filter out toxic content. These workers are often overlooked and subject to harsh conditions, highlighting the hidden labor behind AI-driven systems.
May 10, 2023, 4:25 AM PDT
DeepMind
A co-founder of DeepMind, the AI company bought by Google in 2014, warned about AI-related job losses.
Mustafa Suleyman said at a San Francisco conference that there will be "a serious number of losers."
He said that universal basic income could be the answer.
A co-founder of the AI company DeepMind has warned that governments will need to figure out a plan to compensate people who will lose their jobs to the new technology, the Financial Times reported.
"Unquestionably, many of the tasks in white collar land will look very different in the next five to 10 years," Mustafa Suleyman said at GIC's Bridge Forum in San Francisco on Tuesday, per the FT. "There are going to be a serious number of losers [and they] will be very unhappy, very agitated."
DeepMind was bought by Google in 2014, and has helped it develop large language models similar to ChatGPT called LaMDA and PaLM. Suleyman left DeepMind last January, before setting up his own chatbot business called Inflection AI.
Suleyman said that governments need to give "material compensation" to people who will lose their jobs due to AI, per the FT. "This is a political and economic measure we have to start talking about in a serious way," he said.
Jürgen Schmidhuber believes AI will progress to the point where it surpasses human intelligence and will pay no attention to people
Sat 6 May 2023 20.00 EDT
The man once described as the father of artificial intelligence is breaking ranks with many of his contemporaries who are fearful of the AI arms race, saying what is coming is inevitable and we should learn to embrace it.
Prof Jürgen Schmidhuber’s work on neural networks in the 1990s was developed into language-processing models that went on to be used in technologies such as Google Translate and Apple’s Siri. The New York Times in 2016 said when AI matures it might call Schmidhuber “Dad”.
That maturity has arrived, and while some AI pioneers are looking upon their creations in horror – calling for a handbrake on the acceleration and proliferation of the technology – Schmidhuber says those calls are misguided.
The German computer scientist says there is competition between governments, universities and companies all seeking to advance the technology, meaning there is now an AI arms race, whether humanity likes it or not.
“You cannot stop it,” says Schmidhuber, who is now the director of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology’s AI initiative in Saudi Arabia.
“Surely not on an international level, because one country might may have really different goals from another country. So, of course, they are not going to participate in some sort of moratorium.
“But then I think you also shouldn’t stop it. Because in 95% of all cases, AI research is really about our old motto, which is make human lives longer and healthier and easier.”
I would be much more worried about the old dangers of nuclear bombs than about the new little dangers of AI
Prof Jürgen Schmidhuber
Schmidhuber’s position contrasts with a number of his contemporaries, including Dr Geoffrey Hinton, who spectacularly quit Google this week after a decade with the company in order to speak more freely on AI.
Hinton, who is referred to as the godfather of AI, won the Turing award in 2018 for his work on “deep learning”, which is the foundation for much of the AI in use today….
Chamath Palihapitiya
MAY 9, 2023
In technology circles, people balk at the mere mention of government regulation. The naysayers argue it interferes with innovation and is a bad byproduct of big government.
But history tells a different story. Transparent, accountable and expert oversight—even when implemented late or ineffectively at first—has proven to be an important part of scaling an economy.
For better or worse, regulation is a necessary and proven boundary condition of capitalism. So why does the topic of regulation ignite such a visceral reaction, especially as it relates to what might be humankind’s biggest technological leap yet—artificial intelligence?
Given all the noise being made about this issue lately, I thought it would be useful to run through some of the arguments against AI regulation and offer my rebuttals.
Mark these down as famous last words. While it’s admittedly early in the life of AI and generative pre-trained transformers, progress is compounding at a rate that’s measured in days.
We have gone from breathlessly awaiting a new iPhone each year to anticipating awe-inspiring new AI innovations on a weekly basis. This cycle is only a few months old, but we can only guess where we will be a year from now.
Yet it takes just minutes to imagine the dangers that could arise. For example, the emergence of Auto-GPT creates a range of possibilities: Phishing attacks that relentlessly go after our finances and personal data. Hacking access to critical hardware like GPS navigation and utility infrastructure. Even the ability to generate politically and economically debilitating fake news stories corroborated by lifelike photos and videos.
If we can imagine it, bad actors will do it. And it would be naive not to think about managing and preventing these risks in both the near and long term. Society may be better off regretting an early leap into regulation than one that comes too late.
Get ready for Google AI in all your apps.
By Shirin Ghaffary May 10, 2023, 5:50pm EDT
Shirin Ghaffary is a senior Vox correspondent covering the social media industry. Previously, Ghaffary worked at BuzzFeed News, the San Francisco Chronicle, and TechCrunch.
Five months ago, a small San Francisco startup called OpenAI upended the tech industry — and the rest of the world — when it released ChatGPT. The app showed millions of people the immense capabilities of generative AI, how it can do everything from write original poetry to churn out working lines of code, all in a matter of seconds.
It quickly became clear that AI technology like ChatGPT had the potential not only to radically change the way we consume and create information but to transform every aspect of our daily lives. And it threatened Google’s business to its core.
It’s against that backdrop that Google invited journalists like me to visit Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California, for the company’s much-anticipated annual I/O developer conference. The keynote presentation on Wednesday was Google’s chance to recapture the excitement it lost to OpenAI and the startup’s main investor, Microsoft, which ate Google’s lunch in February by releasing AI-powered search features in Bing and a corresponding chatbot, BingGPT.
Google is now facing the possibility of losing its dominance in the search market and reputation as a leader in AI, a technology many feel is as revolutionary as the mobile phone or the internet itself. Now, in order to reclaim its place as the company leading the charge on this rapidly developing technology, Google is putting AI into virtually all of its most popular products — despite the technology’s known flaws.
It was clear from the start of Google’s big event on Wednesday that AI was the star. Before executives presented onstage, electronic artist Dan Deacon played clanging music generated by Google’s AI technology as he recited poetic lyrics with psychedelic-looking AI-generated illustrations behind him. After Deacon wrapped his musical AI mystery tour, Google CEO Sundar Pichai took the stage.
“Seven years into our journey, we are at an exciting inflection point. We have an ability to make AI even more helpful,” he said onstage at Wednesday’s presentation. “We are reimagining all our core products, including search.”
But underneath the buzz was an air of nervousness about what Google is about to unleash on the world. In the coming weeks, billions of people will see generative AI in everything from Google search to Gmail to services powered by Google’s cloud technology. The update will, among other things, let people use AI to compose emails in the Gmail mobile app, create new Google Docs presentations with AI-generated images based on a few keywords, and text their friends on Android in Shakespearean-style prose spun up by AI. While these new generative AI applications could supercharge Google’s products and give better productivity and creativity tools to the masses, the technology is also prone to error and bias, and if executed poorly, it could damage Google’s core mission to serve its users reliable information.
Of the many ways Google is changing its apps with AI, search is the most meaningful. In the coming weeks, a limited group of beta testers will experience a new, more visual Google search experience. It looks familiar in many ways to the old Google search, but it works in some fundamentally different ways.
In the new Google search, when you enter a search query, you don’t just get a long list of blue links. Instead, Google will show you a few results in gray boxes before serving up a large, AI-generated block of text inside a light-green box that takes up a majority of the screen. This result is supposed to give you the information you’re looking for, gathered from disparate sources across the web and written in an approachable tone. To the right of the AI-generated result, you’ll also see a few links most relevant to your search. There are also some green boxes underneath the AI result, in which Google prompts you to go deeper by asking suggested follow-up questions, or come up with your own. And if you click into the actual text of the AI result, you’ll find links to the websites that Google pulled the information from. If you don’t like the new search experience, you can toggle back to the old one.
Frederic Lardinois @fredericl / 10:17 AM PDT•May 10, 2023
Image Credits: TechCrunch
At its I/O developer conference, Google today announced the launch of PaLM 2, its newest large language model (LLM). PaLM 2 will power Google’s updated Bard chat tool, the company’s competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and function as the foundation model for most of the new AI features the company is announcing today. PaLM 2 is now available to developers through Google’s PaLM API, Firebase and on Colab.
Google, similar to OpenAI, didn’t provide a lot of the technical details about how it trained this next-gen model, including parameter counts (PaLM 2 is a 540-billion parameter model, for what it’s worth). The only technical details Google provided here are that PaLM 2 was built on top of Google’s latest JAX and TPU v4 infrastructure.
Image Credits: Google
“What we found in our work is that it’s not really the sort of size of model — that the larger is not always better,” DeepMind VP Zoubin Ghahramani said in a press briefing ahead of today’s announcement. “That’s why we’ve provided a family of models of different sizes. We think that actually parameter count is not really a useful way of thinking about the capabilities of models and capabilities are really to be judged by people using the models and finding out whether they’re useful in the tests that they try to achieve with these models.”
Instead, the company decided to focus on its capabilities. Google says the new model is better at common sense reasoning, mathematics and logic. Indeed, as Ghahramani noted, the company trained the model on a large amount of math and science texts, as well as mathematical expressions. It’s no secret that large language models — with their focus on language — have struggled with handling math questions without resorting to third-party plugins. Google, however, argues that PaLM 2 can easily solve math puzzles, reason through problems and even provide diagrams.
PaLM 2 also now features improved support for writing and debugging code. The model was trained on 20 programming languages, including popular ones like JavaScript and Python, but also the likes of Prolog, Verilog and Fortran. PaLM 2 forms the basis of Codey, Google’s specialized model for coding and debugging, which it is also launching today as part of its code completion and generation service, among other things.
Google today also highlighted that PaLM 2 was trained on a corpus that features over 100 languages, making it, in Google’s words, “excel at multilingual tasks,” including more nuanced phrasing than previous models.
Ron Miller @ron_miller / 10:29 AM PDT•May 10, 2023
Image Credits: TechCrunch / Getty Images
At Google I/O today, the company announced that it was removing most waitlist restrictions and making Bard, the company’s generative AI chatbot more widely available, starting today in English. The idea is to continue to work on the chatbot, but with a larger group of people
In a blog post announcing the change, Sissie Hsiao, vice president and GM for Assistant and Bard at Google, made the official announcement. “As we continue to make additional improvements and introduce new features, we want to get Bard into more people’s hands so they can try it out and share their feedback with us. So today we’re removing the waitlist and opening up Bard to over 180 countries and territories – with more coming soon,” she wrote.
MAY 10, 2023
At Google I/O, Adobe and Google announced that Adobe Firefly and Adobe Express are integrating with Bard by Google. Further, Adobe’s Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) will be incorporated, ensuring transparency with AI-generated content within Bard.
Adobe Firefly is Adobe’s new generative artificial intelligence (AI) system and is currently in beta. Adobe says that it’s “one of the most successful beta launches” in Adobe’s history. During Firefly’s first month, users generated more than 70 million images.
One of Firefly’s primary features is how Adobe developed the AI model. The generative AI was trained using legally owned images, unlike some competing models trained with stolen content. The way in which Adobe created Firefly means that it generates commercially viable content fit for professional use.
While Adobe’s commitment to ethics may limit Firefly’s performance, it enables a level of transparency few, if any, competing generative AI systems can offer. Further, the open-source technology underpinning the Content Authenticity Initiative works with the Firefly-Bard integration. Bard by Google and new members Universal Music Group (UMG), Stability AI, and Spawning.ai bring the total number of members in the CAI to over 1,000.
Bard is Google’s experimental conversation AI service. “In the coming months, Firefly will become the premier generative AI partner for Bard, powering and highlighting text-to-image capabilities,” says Adobe.
A new chief executive won’t change the fact that Musk still owns the company.
By Shirin Ghaffary May 11, 2023, 6:50pm EDT
Shirin Ghaffary is a senior Vox correspondent covering the social media industry. Previously, Ghaffary worked at BuzzFeed News, the San Francisco Chronicle, and TechCrunch.
Elon Musk just announced that, in six weeks, he’s stepping down as the CEO of Twitter. But if you think that means the Elon-Twitter story is over, don’t hold your breath.
Musk announced on Thursday that he has chosen his replacement as the chief executive of Twitter and its parent company, X, and that she will be starting in about six weeks. This is the most concrete timeline he’s made about his succession plan since December of last year when he first confirmed that he would eventually step aside. But Musk will still be the sole owner of Twitter, and unless he sells the company — or a controlling share of it — the billionaire is still in control.
We don’t know yet who will replace Musk. Some media insiders have guessed it could be NBCUniversal advertising executive Linda Yaccarino, who has publicly defended Musk and recently interviewed him at a major advertising conference. Yaccarino did not respond to a request for comment. At this point, it’s still anyone’s guess.
Regardless of who replaces Musk, it’s not clear how much real power the new Twitter CEO could have. Even if he follows through with this plan and actually gives up his job as CEO — this is not at all guaranteed to happen until it happens — Musk’s ownership of Twitter means he can essentially hire or fire a new CEO as he pleases. Since Twitter is now a private company, Musk has virtually no outside accountability from an independent board of directors to question his decisions.
Published May 9, 2023
If there were any question remaining about the political leanings of Elon Musk, and the direction that he’s guiding Twitter, this should probably seal it.
Today, controversial right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson, who was recently dismissed from Fox News, has announced that he’ll continue to broadcast his highly popular program exclusively on Twitter instead.
Carlson will take advantage of Twitter’s newly introduced longer video upload limits to lead a new charge at the app, which Twitter will be hoping could be the beginning of a new content shift towards the app.
In some ways, the announcement is major coup for the social network, with Carlson’s program regularly watched by over 3 million people per night on Fox News before its cancelation. However, it does also come with significant risk. Carlson has been the subject of various legal probes and investigations over the often outlandish claims aired within his program, while many advertisers also pulled their spend from Fox as a result of Carlson’s controversial statements and stances.
For Twitter, that’s unlikely to provide more reassurance to advertisers, many of whom have already stepped away from the app due to Musk’s various changes and updates – though Elon has said that the money doesn’t matter to him as much as upholding the principles of free speech.
Musk has also clarified that Twitter has not entered into a commercial agreement with Carlson, as such, with the commentator coming to the app via the same process as any other content creator, and using Twitter’s re-vamped Subscriptions program to monetize his work.
Though, logically, it does seem like some kind of deal must have been struck to get Carlson over the line, especially when you also factor in staff costs for production, etc.
Here’s the math.
By Peter Kafka May 11, 2023, 6:30am EDT
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Peter Kafka covers media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.
Okay. We still don’t know why Tucker Carlson is out at Fox* but we know where he’s going. He’s setting up shop at Twitter, cheered on by Elon Musk.
Next question: Can he make money there?
To be clear, money isn’t the only reason Carlson wants to be on Twitter. And if he was most interested in money, he probably wouldn’t go anywhere at all in the near future since doing so looks likely to kick off a legal fight with Fox about the remainder of his very lucrative contract. Carlson wants to be on Twitter because he wants attention — both in general and in the runup to the 2024 elections.
But Carlson also likes money, and Fox reportedly paid him $20 million a year. Can he make anything like that on Twitter? I think he can.
My gut says that Musk has already promised Carlson that he’ll pay him as much or more than his Fox paycheck to come to Twitter. After all, if you’ve already incinerated tens of billions of dollars to buy Twitter, why not shovel a few million more onto the fire? Bringing the most popular and powerful host on cable TV news to his platform guarantees we’ll continue to pay attention to Musk. And to Musk, attention is priceless.
Musk, for what it’s worth, says “we have not signed a deal of any kind whatsoever” with Carlson, and if Musk were a normal person, I’d encourage you to parse that statement for potential loopholes — maybe there’s a verbal deal but not a signed one? But since it’s Musk, who just makes things up, I wouldn’t bother spending energy on that. Maybe he’s telling the truth, maybe he’s not.
For now, Musk wants to use Carlson as a high-profile test case for his pitch that Twitter can become a full-fledged media platform, one where Free Thinkers can set up shop and make money without having to worry about the Woke Mind Virus. (He’s already trying to make the case to Don Lemon, who was fired from CNN the same day Fox fired Carlson.)
So let’s speculate about what Carlson could actually do on Twitter if he wanted to try replicating his Fox show on the site.
Some starting assumptions: Since Carlson wants both money and the spotlight, he’ll want a hybrid approach. Which means Carlson superfans can pay up to watch everything he does, via a subscription offering, and Carlson will also promote free ad-supported clips on the site.
Let’s also assume that even though marketers have fled both Carlson’s show on Fox and Twitter under Musk’s ownership, there will be some advertisers who are willing to attach themselves to a Carlson Twitter show.
At Fox, Carlson averaged around 3 million pay TV viewers per episode. And Fox also says it has more than 1 million subscribers for Fox Nation, its (formerly) Tucker-heavy streaming service.
Published May 9, 2023
Twitter has released two new updates for DMs, which have been in the works for a few months, but are now getting a full launch in the app.
First off, you’ll now be able to reply direct to any message within a DM thread, making it easier to interact within group chats and discussion, with greater clarity around who and what you’re responding to in-stream.
As you can see in this example, shared by social media expert Matt Navarra, now, you’re able to reply to a specific message in a chat thread, and that response will be aligned to the original message bubble, as opposed to being added to the end of the chain.
Twitter’s also added a new emoji picker within DMs, so you can react to a message with a wider range of emoji options.
Twitter first previewed this back in January, and it’ll provide more ways to use quick emoji responses within DMs, which could add another fun element to your chat interactions.
In addition to these updates, Twitter chief Elon Musk says that the first iteration of encrypted DMs will be launched this week, adding more security and privacy in the app.
Twitter’s been developing encrypted DMs for months, with Musk flagging this as one of his priority projects when he first took over at the app. And while some have concerns around the added protection that encryption can potentially provide for criminal activity, the general consensus seems to be that greater security for all users is more important than the risks associated with facilitating such among the few.
Again, not all agree, but Twitter will be moving into line with Meta in implementing E2E across all of its messaging options.
Musk also says that audio and video calling options will soon also be available in Twitter DMs, expanding the connective capacity of the option.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Karissa Bell| @karissabe| May 10, 2023 7:49 PM
Twitter is beginning to roll out its long-promised encrypted direct messaging feature. However, the initial rollout comes with some major limitations that could make it less than ideal for privacy-conscious Twitter users.
Of note, the feature is currently only available to verified Twitter users, which includes Twitter Blue subscribers and those part of a “Verified Organization.” It’s not clear if this is just for the early rollout or if encryption will be added to the growing list of exclusive features for users with a checkmark. For now, an encrypted chat requires both users to be verified, according to the company.
There are also some significant limitations to the feature itself. It doesn’t support group messages, or any kind of media other than links. The company also doesn’t allow users to report an encrypted message directly, advising on a help page that users should report accounts separately if they “encounter an issue with an encrypted conversation participant.”
Finally, the level of encryption appears to be less secure than what other apps offer. For one, message metadata is not encrypted. Furthermore, Twitter notes that “currently, we do not offer protections against man-in-the-middle attacks” and suggests that the company itself is still able to access encrypted DMs without the participants knowing. “If someone–for example, a malicious insider, or Twitter itself as a result of a compulsory legal process—were to compromise an encrypted conversation, neither the sender or receiver would know,” the company explains on a help page. It added that it’s working on improvements that would make such exploits more “difficult.”
Thursday May 11, 2023 9:06 am PDT by Juli Clover
Disney plans to combine the Hulu and Disney+ streaming services into a single app by the end of this year, Disney CEO Bob Iger said yesterday during Disney's Q2 earnings call (via TechCrunch).
A single streaming app will include programming from both Hulu and Disney+, but Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ will also still be available as standalone services. The combined app will be provided first to subscribers who have the Disney+ and Hulu bundle, so rather than swapping back and forth, users can access all of their content in a single app.
"The integrated app experience that we announced today is for consumers that have subscribed to both services for now," said Iger. He explained that Disney is taking the two-app bundle and combining it into one experience that will have "basically more content than it offered before."
With the merging of the services, Disney plans to increase pricing. "We plan to set a higher price for our ad-free tier later this year," Iger said.
Disney's announcement came as the Disney+ service lost four million subscribers during the quarter.
Min Jeong Lee and Takahiko Hyuga
Thu, May 11, 2023 at 3:12 AM PDT·5 min read
(Bloomberg) -- SoftBank Group Corp. lost money in its Vision Fund investment unit again despite a rebound in tech stocks, as the Japanese conglomerate suffered losses on unlisted startups in its portfolio.
The Vision Fund unit lost ¥297.5 billion ($2 billion) in the three months ended March, compared with a ¥2.2 trillion loss a year earlier. The gargantuan investment fund that Masayoshi Son proudly set up in 2017 lost a record ¥4.3 trillion for the full fiscal year, almost doubling the record loss of ¥2.6 trillion the year before.
While SoftBank has lost money off and on for years, the latest results are surprising because technology valuations around the world have largely rebounded this year. The Nasdaq 100 index, a benchmark for tech stock performance, rallied 20% during the March quarter, lifting share prices for some of SoftBank’s biggest investments.
The South Korean e-commerce company Coupang Inc., for example, gained about 9%, while the Chinese ride-hailing company Didi Global Inc. rose about 20%. SoftBank accounts for such gains in its portfolio companies as profit on its income statement.
But SoftBank marked down the value of its private companies far more than the increases in its public holdings. It lost about about $3.9 billion on its private portfolio during the quarter, while it gained about $1.9 billion with public companies.
By Sam Kessler
May 8, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. PDT
Updated May 9, 2023 at 7:31 a.m. PDT
In the age of large language models (LLMs) and ChatGPT, AI is poised to make a weird internet even weirder – turning the content-driven social media apps, news sites and media platforms of today into future uncanny valleys that blur the line between man and machine.
As advances in AI make it more difficult to discern bots from humans, Sam Altman, the co-founder of Open AI – the company behind ChatGPT – thinks blockchains can help.
Altman’s crypto project, Worldcoin, rose to prominence last year with a controversial, Silicon Valley vision for a universal basic income (UBI): a crypto token that can be distributed in equal quantity to everyone in the world.
In the age of large language models (LLMs) and ChatGPT, AI is poised to make a weird internet even weirder – turning the content-driven social media apps, news sites and media platforms of today into future uncanny valleys that blur the line between man and machine.
As advances in AI make it more difficult to discern bots from humans, Sam Altman, the co-founder of Open AI – the company behind ChatGPT – thinks blockchains can help.
Altman’s crypto project, Worldcoin, rose to prominence last year with a controversial, Silicon Valley vision for a universal basic income (UBI): a crypto token that can be distributed in equal quantity to everyone in the world.
Worldcoin is back again this week with a new launch – this one poised to be its biggest yet. World App, Worldcoin’s crypto wallet, built on the Ethereum sidechain Polygon, is the first product from the elusive identity upstart that anyone, anywhere will be able to download.
The new app is one part minimalist crypto wallet, and one part passport for the AI era. It’s Worldcoin’s biggest swing yet to redefine itself in the eyes of consumers.
Worldcoin’s initial rollout was rocky. The retina-scanning metal “orb” that the project used to authenticate new users was criticized as dystopian, and a damning exposé from the MIT Technology Review forced Tools for Humanity – the company behind Worldcoin – to confront allegations of exploitation and deceptive recruiting practices.
Weathered by negative press coverage and a tumultuous year for the wider crypto industry – and amid an AI boom kicked off, in large part, by Altman’s Open AI – Worldcoin reasserted itself in March with a repackaged vision focused on “proof of personhood.” Announced in March, Worldcoin’s World ID protocol will allow app developers to leverage its network of biometrically-authenticated humans.
“Everything that has happened with AI in the last six months has made people understand the project a lot better,” said Tiago Sada, the head of product at Tools for Humanity.
For those without a World ID, who’ve yet to peer into one of Worldcoin’s retina-scanning orbs, World App will function as a stripped-down crypto wallet – not too dissimilar from Coinbase Wallet, Metamask, or any number of other apps that allow people to buy, sell, and store cryptocurrency.
“You would probably find even fewer features on World App, actually, than on some of those wallets – and that's deliberate,” explained Sada.
Tools for Humanity has global ambitions, and it says it designed its wallet app to be more accessible than other wallet services. To avoid overwhelming new crypto users, the app opts for a sleek, “minimalist” design, boasts a relatively bare-bones feature set, and is somewhat restricted in the number of crypto tokens that it supports.
Built on Polygon – a blockchain that can send and receive assets from Ethereum but offers cheaper fees to users – World App currently offers access to “wrapped,” Polygon-based versions of Bitcoin, Ethereum and stablecoins like the U.S. dollar-pegged DAI token (Worldcoin says more tokens are coming soon).
New CEO to replace Elon
New CEO to replace Elon
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
No activity yet