You work. You get money. You take money and invest it. If you are lucky, it becomes larger. Otherwise, it becomes smaller. If you have a lot of money, you can either start a company or not. If you start a company, you invest in your own ability to influence outcomes and in your own transformation function. There are other, personal utility functions also being satisfied in executing the transformation function. Alternately, you focus on the work of getting capital into other companies. For this allocation and selection work, you are rewarded. To this, you can add the capital of others, until you are doing selection on their behalf.
artificial intelligenceaugmented realityCryptodecentralized financeenterprise blockchainMetaverse / xRnarrative zeitgeistNFTs and digital objectsregulation & complianceventure capital
·In this conversation, we talk with Jamie Burke of Outlier Ventures. This is a fascinating and educational conversation that covers frontier technology companies and protocols in blockchain, IoT, and artificial intelligence, and the convergence of these themes in the future. Jamie walks us through the core investment thesis, as well as the commercial model behind shifting from incubation to acceleration of 30+ companies. We pick up on wisdom about marketing timing and fund structure along the way.
This week, we look at:
Deep Fakes behind South Park creators' new parody, Sassy Justice
The AI-created author of the fake Hunter Biden intelligence report
GPT-3 winning the love and attention of people on Hacker News
How should we react to these robots and their desire to mess with our minds
Unlike equities, the crypto markets were born from machines, and are constructed from code. Hold dear the tokens in which you believe, and stay away from the stories of easy money. Nothing is easy. To win Russian roulette is not good fortune. It is, instead, a grave mistake to play a lethal game. Have you nothing to lose?
And then Brexit. And then Taiwan and China. And then Covid, again. And then, who knows.
From now on and forever, your counterparty is the data center running an AI cluster on top of the Internet. The data center that has already profiled you and knows everything about you. Bring the tinfoil hat.
artificial intelligencebig techdigital transformationenterprise blockchainidentity and privacyIndiaregulation & compliancetelecom & infrastructure
·This week, we look at:
IBM spinning out its managed services division with $18 billion of revenue in order to focus on hybrid cloud and digital transformation
Reliance Jio, the Indian mobile telecom provider with 400 million users, contemplating financial services with backing from Google and Facebook
The role that technology infrastructure plays in the delivery of financial services
I presented earlier this week at the Ally Invest virtual conference, and the prompt asked for a description of what happens to finance from Fintech to Crypto / Blockchain to Augmented Reality / Virtual Worlds and finally to Artificial Intelligence.
This week, we look at:
What it means to ask questions and find answers
From asking simple questions that result in neobanks and roboadvisors. Who will win — Schwab or Robinhood?
To asking macro questions about the finance / high-tech competition. Who will win — Goldman Sachs or Google?
To asking profound questions about the nature of the work, and the art of finding your own questions.
We can't formulate the questions for you. But we can give you a framework of needs for both the individual, and the organization.
The questions that you ask are the answers that you will get.
The question of consciousness goes to the root of why we build, what we create, and how we decide what is valuable and what is not. And if we can control our self-conception and the modeling we do of the world, the texture of life becomes better. A recurrent theme in our writing is that systems don’t care about their agents per se. There are many game theoretical equilibria where agents suffer, but systems perpetuate. So figuring out how an agent within a system reflects on happiness is paramount.
Within a decade, the form factor for computing will radically change from staring at screens with flat imagery, to participating in embedded virtual worlds with fully navigable, hyper-realistic environments. Those environments will be filled with software agents, some hybrid human and others entirely AI, that are entirely unrecognizable as anything but real to 90% of the population.
OpenAI, backed with $1B+ by Elon Musk & MSFT, can now program SQL and write Harry Potter fan-fiction
This week, we look at a breakthrough artificial intelligence release from OpenAI, called GPT-3. It is powered by a machine learning algorithm called a Transformer Model, and has been trained on 8 years of web-crawled text data across 175 billion parameters. GPT-3 likes to do arithmetic, solve SAT analogy questions, write Harry Potter fan fiction, and code CSS and SQL queries. We anchor the analysis of these development in the changing $8 trillion landscape of our public companies, and the tech cold war with China.
What we know intuitively, and what the software shows, is that the pixelated image can be expanded into a cone of multiple probable outcomes. The same pixelated face can yield millions of various, uncanny permutations. These mathematical permutations of our human flesh exit in an area which is called “latent space”. The way to pick one out of the many is called “gradient descent”.
Imagine you are standing in an open field, and see many beautiful hills nearby. Or alternately, imagine you are standing on a hill, looking across the rolling valleys. You decide to pick one of these valleys, based on how popular or how close it is. This is gradient descent, and the valley is the generated face. Which way would you go?