Dispatch 051: Happy Thursday 📧
Tomorrow is both a holiday and far more importantly, my wife's birthday – happy birthday! 🥳🎂🎈 – and yes, I'm back on the road. Again. So I'm shipping out some links. Though I will undoubtedly dig into the breaking news of the moment, that Google was just declared a monopolist – again! – perhaps later tonight. For now, a dispatch...
I Think...
💰 AI Eats Up 58% of Global Venture Dollars – And it's even more concentrated (70%) in the US market. Pitchbook's chart on the rise of this relative percentage is sort of wild to see – though also hardly surprising, it certainly feels like AI deals are the only ones you see and hear about right now. And just imagine if such deals weren't all the rage, what might the VC and startup ecosystems look like right now?... Lastly, you'll note how skewed this is by one deal: OpenAI's $40B raise, which is by far the largest round ever, of course. Bigger than any IPO, in fact. And it's fairly misleading since $30B of that $40B is tranched, set to come later this year if OpenAI is able to convert into a for-profit. So the $73B raised in Q1 is really more like $43B... [Pitchbook]
📲 Perplexity AI in Talks to Integrate Assistant Into Samsung, Motorola Phones – While the Motorola deal sounds done, the Samsung one is still a work-in-progress, per the report. The latter would obviously be massive given their market share. And both would be blows to Google, since Gemini is being baked into Android and these deals could change such defaults. Also, just imagine a world where Samsung phones have Perplexity, Google phones have Gemini, and Apple has... Siri. Yikes. Let's make a deal, Apple. Maybe with Perplexity! But at the very least, let's outsource it to ChatGPT! Or Gemini! Or anyone! [Bloomberg 🔒]
🤖 Meta Blocks Apple Intelligence on Facebook and Its Other iOS Apps – This is probably less about the ongoing war between these two sides and more about avoiding product confusion, since Meta offers their own AI tools, of course. This isn't about Siri – for once – it's more about Apple's AI writing suggestion tools and the like. And yeah, maybe there's a side of shade here, as such headlines naturally imply that Meta doesn't think Apple's AI tools are any good/worth including in their products. And they're not wrong! At least right now. But what if, once improved, Apple starts to enforce inclusion (to maintain system uniformity)?... [9to5Mac]
🧠 OpenAI’s Latest Breakthrough: AI That Comes Up With New Ideas – With o3 and o4-mini (not confusing at all) now out there in the world, this article points to a new wave of breakthroughs we may start to see thanks to these new models. In particular, around science if OpenAI has truly figured out a way to apply knowledge in one field to create unique approaches in another tangential (or completely unrelated) one. As the article notes, some history's best minds were able to leverage deep knowledge about two or more fields to achieve breakthroughs, but it was a truly rare talent. Imagine if AI unlocks this at scale... In a way, it's the inverse of the fear I wrote about last month that AI was becoming too predicated around reasoning and rationality and that could stop it from creating true breakthroughs because a lot of those came from iconoclasts who seemed crazy to others at the time. This would be AI at its best: augmenting what humans are capable of... [Information 🔒]
I Wrote...
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
I Note...
- Following OpenAI's big move into memory, Grok gains similar functionality. But just imagine if it included all of your tweets (that might be bad)! [TechCrunch]
- A smaller, but useful tweak to ChatGPT is a dedicated images area. (No, this isn't their "social network".) [Verge]
- OpenAI also named some advisors to the non-profit side of the house – which is currently still the entire house, so clearly this is meant to signal movement towards shifting their status to a for-profit entity... [Verge]
- And while they haven't even raised their first $100B for the Stargate Project in the US, there's already talk of a UK expansion for the initiative. [FT 🔒]
- Meanwhile, Anthropic's Claude gets deeper integration with Google's Workspace suite, which makes sense given Google's large stake in the company. [Inc]
- Figma (confidentially) files to go public. Kudos for having the balls to do so even in this insane (in a bad way) market environment. It could not be any more volatile. Hopefully that changes before they actually go out – presumably in a few months. Though there's always time to pull back, if not. [Reuters]
- Google rolls out Veo 2, their (impressive) text-to-video tool to Gemini Advanced users. I still have absolutely no idea where to find it or how to invoke it. I'm not trolling. I can't figure it out. [Verge]
- Sam Neill is set to star in the next Godzilla x Kong installment. He better be playing Dr. Alan Grant. [THR]
- Marvin Levy, the publicist who helped make Steven Spielberg, Steven Spielberg, passed away at 96. The only publicist ever to win an (honorary) Oscar, "simplicity was his mantra" is the quote Spielberg gave while giving him credit for helping to craft the marketing around everything from ET to Schindler's List. [NYT]
- With Andor's second (and final) seasons about to launch, Tony Gilroy feels done with the Star Wars universe (for now – he's been one of the only bright lights in that entire universe of late!). He compares the experience to doing "eight movies in five years". Can't wait. [THR]
- Tesla's internal analysis suggested that the 'Cybercab' would be a bust in the market, but Elon Musk pushed forward anyway with the unveil. We'll see soon enough (or not) which group was right... [Information 🔒]
- Another body in the reading curation space (which has come back around as a field thanks to AI) as Smashing, from the founder of Goodreads, shuts down after not even a year in market. [TechCrunch]
- Elliot is at the gates of HP(E), building up a stake... [Bloomberg 🔒]
I Quote...
"I think I was wrong. Like, very wrong."
– Sheryl Sandberg, testifying in federal court for Meta's antitrust case about the time, as COO of Facebook, that she told Mark Zuckerberg that spending $1B to acquire Instagram was "way too much". Today, the service would undoubtedly be worth something around $500B as a stand-alone entity – which is what the FTC is trying to make happen in court!
I Spy...
The aforementioned Pitchbook chart showing the rise of AI funding versus the VC sector as a whole, relatively speaking (again, skewed by the OpenAI mega round).
