4/20 & The AI Arms Race

Now that we’ve crossed the 4/20 Threshold…

Let’s have a Munchy Throwback:

“Wanna go for a late night insomnia run?”

The familiar phrase invokes awe in some, hunger in others, and sprint to the car for a few.

Listen up: We’re talking about Insomnia cookies, the phenomenon that seems to have recently taken over the late night college scene.

Nope, it’s taken nearly two decades of work for insomnia cookies to get to this point.

Seth Berkowitz and Jared Barnett started the company during their time at the University of Pennsylvania.

Berkowicz basically started baking cookies in between classes, and delivering them to students. This allowed him to monetize right from the start, and understand what customers would be willing to pay for.

Lesson in there- figure out what makes people actually pay for stuff. Many business students start out their “business” by writing out a business plan- in reality, the plan will change very often.

Elon, BBC, & Twitter:

Before anybody makes fun of my jokes about BBC- know that Elon started it first…

Anyways- Elon and the BBC had a tense, yet entertaining conversation. Full of laughs and giggles- at least from Elon’s end.

The reporter, who attempted to catch Elon off guard, was quite unsuccessful in doing so.

See, here’s a quick summary of the key parts of the conversation:

• Elon states the algorithm is now open sourced, and creator paywalls are on the horizon

• Elon discusses the fact that employees vehemently opposed his acquisition, then flipped to forcing him to buy the company last year

• What once had a 4 month runway, has shifted to a company that will likely be cash flow positive next quarter

• Now…the free speech debate: When Elon asked the reporter to name an example of hate speech on the For you page, the reporter could not do so. Go figure, I guess

• The north star KPI for Twitter, according to Elon: Unregretted user minutes. Seems reasonable.

• Also, he tried turning the additional Twitter building into a homeless shelter, but the owner of the building refused…

Also, Twitter, as of this morning, has partnered with eToro to provide real-time crypto and stock information for users. Hey, as long as we’re getting that doge information, we’re good!

Anyways, onward.

Keeping Up with AI:

This is the 2007 iphone era, but for AI. And so, the question becomes- which layer of the stack will get the most value? And which layer should you focus on as a budding entrepreneur?

The two primary layers that will accrue value are the infrastructure layer, and the application layer. We’ll find out soon enough…

The Open Source LLM race:

Stability AI has released their open source LLM. Which means, we are officially in an open source AI arms race.

It’s all the usual top dog suspects- Meta, Microsoft, Google, etc.

But Stable Diffusion’s got a word to say!

The StableLM open-source language model has between 3 and 7 billion parameters- (1 parameter per human anyone?).

Anyway, The Stable LM can generate text and code, making it very useful to develop applications. That’s what all these giants are looking to do- be THE go-to platform on which developers build stuff.

ChaosGPT

ChaosGPT. The AI that can update itself….

The twist?

It aims to wipe out humanity. It’s literal aim is to establish global dominance, cause chaos and destruction, control humanity through manipulation, and establish immortality… A little extreme, don’t ya think?

Specifically, it’s capabilities include browsing the web, save files, talk to other GPT agents, and run code. The fact that it can talk to other GPT agents means…

It can string together many AI’s to execute its aims…you know, this is either really neat, or things are about to get very heated real fast.

It’s a battle between the AI accelerationists and the AI doomers.

Who will win?

Stay tuned.