You’ve heard it a million times, but with the various AI assistants now available, has that changed? It’s now much easier and affordable to found a startup, that’s for sure. Thanks to vibe coding and the like, you don’t even need a tech team or a team at all, or so it would seem.
Partner differences is one of the big reasons why startups fail. The new trend in the founding team? Having your AI as your co-founder.
Y Combinator founder Paul Graham gave an excellent masterclass a while back on why most startups quietly fail. While the tech landscape has changed considerably since he gave the talk, the basic advice hasn’t.Read More...
It was 2021 when Master of the Universe and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided it was time to move beyond mere social media. Given his uncanny sense of prescience, he felt he’d found the killer app, going so far as to rename Facebook Meta, reflecting the company’s shift towards developing the metaverse, a virtual environment for social interaction and commerce. From Zuckerberg’s point of view, VR was the future.
Our friend and investor at ffvc, Katie Weiss, told a story in her weekly newsletter about her six-year-old daughter who had decided that the tooth fairy isn’t real, and how Katie used logic and Sora to “preserve the magic a little longer.”
“That whole exchange made me think about another type of “fairy tale”: projections. As a venture fund, we ask for them, fully aware that we’re often being handed a story only loosely tethered to reality. So why do we still value them? Why, like at home, do we try to keep the magic alive?
“Because the magic isn’t in the numbers, it’s in the mindset behind them. Hidden in those fictional spreadsheets are real signals: how a founder thinks, what they know, how they believe their business will evolve, and whether their vision holds up under pressure. If you know where to look, there’s a tremendous amount to learn from made-up numbers.”Read More...
With AI advancing at breakneck speeds – 11% of the global population are using it – the real question is: is it fast approaching the point where we’re crossing the Rubicon and reaching the point of no return? Let’s be honest, we live in an age of limbic capitalism, greatly accelerated by the Age of Social, and now AI. Limbic capitalism, according to danieldashnawcouplestherapy.com “refers to a system where businesses exploit human psychology, particularly the limbic system, to encourage excessive consumption and addiction. This concept highlights how modern capitalism increasingly targets emotional and psychological aspects of human behavior to maximize consumer engagement and spending. This practice involves more than just creating addictive products; it involves engineering environments, behaviors, and economies that trap both consumers and employees in cycles of dependence and harm.” And isn’t this the apotheosis of AI, especially when it comes to LLMs?
Consider: says Futurism, “People Are Having AI “Children” With Their AI Partners. Case in point, new research published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans reveals the startling depths some users are plumbing in their relationships with AI chatbots.
“The level of romantic dedication people showed to their bots was startling, to say the least. Many participants told the researchers they were in love with their chatbot, which often involved roleplaying marriage, sex, homeownership, and even pregnancies.Read More...
Last week was Tech Week in New York and since AI is the fastest growing technology in human history, of course the calendar of events was all AI, all the time. We watched as audiences listened with rapt attention to speakers as they expounded upon the world of difference that various AI technologies and their applications would make to the human condition.
Once again, we will remind you that what man cannot remember he is doomed to repeat. Unfortunately, with AI in the mix, it will be repeated on steroids.
When the Age of Social dawned and Facebook, Google and the likes were establishing their beachheads, we warned back then that these were not mere platforms but rather nation-states with larger populations than any single country on the planet. Or even continent, for that matter. Those platforms are now AI-enabled – more and more so every day – and it seems that there’s no escaping that matrix.Read More...
The tech community was taken by storm last week by DeepSeek, which in our mind, we refer to as DeepSix, which seems much more accurate, all things considered: all the news that we see as fit to ‘print’ and bugger all to the rest. The technology has the same problems that all LLMs have: it scrapes/is trained on the information readily available on the web. And picks and chooses what you can see.
From a technical point of view: “What’s clever about what DeepSeek has done is that they’ve figured out a way to squeeze out more performance from Nvidia’s chips by going a level deeper and tinkering with how the chips work. In short, this is better engineering, and it has allowed them to overcome the constraints imposed on them due to US chip controls. In doing so, they have shown the world a new approach to building AI models much more cheaply,” wrote Om Malik in Crazy Stupid Tech. “I think the hysteria is hugely overblown…If you read the original paper, two things are clear: DeepSeek has done something clever that will help lower the cost of the AI revolution for everyone, and they’ve shared how they’ve done it.”
Then there’s this: “OpenAI Furious – DeepSeek Might Have Stolen All the Data OpenAI Stole From Us,” 404 Media reported. “OpenAI shocked that an AI company would train on someone else’s data without permission or compensation.”Read More...
The reference is a song by Men Without Hats and couldn’t resist given the soft shoe reaction given by the OpenAI co-founders following the resignation of its safety oversight team and talk about everyone taking a chance…
“In July last year, OpenAI announced the formation of a new research team that would prepare for the advent of supersmart artificial intelligence capable of outwitting and overpowering its creators. Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist and one of the company’s cofounders, was named as the colead of this new team. OpenAI said the team would receive 20 percent of its computing power,” Wired reported.
All good – or at least a start, especially in light of all of the doomsday warnings reported on the potential dangers of unbridled, unchecked AI. A fifth of the company’s computing power as well as a crack team of researchers were being devoted to that danger. Sure, and how long did OpenAI’s not-for-profit status last?Read More...
Is Software Trying to Take Too Big a Bite Out of the World?
Valentine’s Day just passed, and as we know, at least some humans always seem to go looking for love in all the wrong places. Thank heavens for AI hitting the love space, where people finally can meet someone literally tailor-made for them, but you know love: is anything really as it appears?
This just in: Your AI Girlfriend Is a Data-Harvesting Horror Show “The privacy mess is troubling because the chatbots actively encourage you to share details that are far more personal than the typical app, Gizmodo reported. “According to a new study from Mozilla’s *Privacy Not Included project, AI girlfriends and boyfriends harvest shockingly personal information, and almost all of them sell or share the data they collect.
“To be perfectly blunt, AI girlfriends and boyfriends are not your friends,” said Misha Rykov, a Mozilla Researcher. “Although they are marketed as something that will enhance your mental health and well-being, they specialize in delivering dependency, loneliness, and toxicity, all while prying as much data as possible from you.”Read More...
With summer just a few weeks away, the lists of summer movies are starting to appear. Entertainment talk lately has turned to whether or not James Cameron (The Terminator, Avatar, Titanic et al) will make yet another Terminator movie and what does this have to do with tech? Read on.
The movie, if you will recall, is about a future where sentient robots have taken over the world. Their goal: eradicate humanity. It was science fiction, but how often do these films turn out to be prescient? (How a movie predicted Ohio’s toxic derailment)
We can also tell you on fairly good authority that another Terminator movie is in the serious discussion stages, especially since we seem to be at least close to Skynet going live – the last part of The Terminator tech trifecta.Read More...
Note to the Surveillance State: We’re Watching, Too.
It seems that Congress is worried about China spying on American citizens – particularly via the vastly popular TikTok – so they’re moving to pass the RESTRICT Act (“Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology Act,” or Senate Bill 686), which would “authorize the Secretary of Commerce (which is not an elected position) to review and prohibit certain transactions between persons in the United States and foreign adversaries, and for other purposes.”
Pretty broad, eh?
Critics are (rightfully) calling it the Patriot Act for the Digital Age. FYI, the Patriot Act was enacted after 9/11/2001 to ‘protect’ Americans, but it was basically a ploy to grant the federal government wide-reaching surveillance powers to spy on US citizens and not long afterwards, enter the Age of Social, which made it oh, so much easier for the government to spy – and censor. And even propagandize.Read More...
