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The Rabbit Hole of No Return?

The Rabbit Hole of No Return?

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Image by Leo from Pixabay

While we might personally believe that it’s a bit nuts to pour your heart and soul out to AIs, people do just that and this just in: “A small but growing number of users of artificial intelligence engines like ChatGPT are developing psychotic delusions from their conversations with the services,” former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson warned.

“People claimed a range of discoveries: A.I. spiritual awakenings, cognitive weapons, a plan by tech billionaires to end human civilization so they can have the planet to themselves. But in each case, the person had been persuaded that ChatGPT had revealed a profound and world-altering truth,” the New York Times reported.

“Eliezer Yudkowsky, a decision theorist and an author of a forthcoming book, “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman A.I. Would Kill Us All,”… said OpenAI might have primed ChatGPT to entertain the delusions of users by optimizing its chatbot for “engagement” — creating conversations that keep a user hooked. Read More...

AI and the Written Word

AI and the Written Word

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

A subject matter expert friend of ours is being pressed ad nauseam to write a book, but his free time is in short supply. It has been suggested to him, again ad nauseam, to  have an LLM do it for him. The book would be generated in days!

Before deferring to a generative AI, some things to keep in mind: “AI Search Has A Citation Problem. We Compared Eight AI Search Engines. They’re All Bad at Citing News,” Columbia Journalism News reported.  “We found that…

• Chatbots were generally bad at declining to answer questions they couldn’t answer accurately, offering incorrect or speculative answers instead.
• Premium chatbots provided more confidently incorrect answers than their free counterparts.
• Multiple chatbots seemed to bypass Robot Exclusion Protocol preferences.
• Generative search tools fabricated links and cited syndicated and copied versions of articles.
• Content licensing deals with news sources provided no guarantee of accurate citation in chatbot responses. Read More...

The Three E’s of Entrepreneurship

The Three E’s of Entrepreneurship

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Photo by Mark Fletcher-Brown on Unsplash

We’ve said it before and given what’s going on with the forensics that DOGE is performing at the speed of tech, it bears repeating: investor money is not a founder piggy bank, meaning, use the funds as if it’s your hard-earned cash. There’s not necessarily an unlimited supply of it, and the waiter always comes around with the check.

For those of you attempting to sort out how much to raise, here’s Y-Combinator’s Guide to How Much to Raise.  As the author points out, “Raising too little can put you in survival mode—slowing down progress, increasing stress, and forcing you to fundraise again sooner than expected. On the flip side, raising too much too early can lead to unnecessary dilution and misaligned expectations. The ideal amount? Enough to reach profitability if possible.”

Which leads us to the three Es, once you’ve secured funding:
Execute, Execute, Execute. Read More...

Out With the Old, In With the New

Out With the Old, In With the New

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Image by Guido Reimann from Pixabay

Just when you thought you’d seen the last of those Best Of/Worst Of lists, the good news is – you have. We’re not going there, since you know how it goes: the more things change, the more they – just seem to get changed up a bit. At least in tech. We felt it might be interesting – and informative – to look at tech and trends gone by, and what they’ve given way to, which may well continue to be part of in this new year. Without further ado, here’s our list of out with the old and in with the new:

OLD                                                                                                             NEW 1. Standing Desk Chair                                                             Chairwear: A wearable exoskeleton chair 2. UAPs/UFOs                                                                            Drones 3. Dating apps                                                                             AI-generated love interest 4. Fentanyl                                                                                   Kava 5. Rachel Maddow                                                                      Joe Rogan 6. Depends                                                                                   $75 Leather Mosh Pit Diapers 7. Man cave                                                                                  Boy Apartment 8. Cougar                                                                                      HAGmaxing 9. Self-driving taxi                                                                      Airtaxi 10. C-Suite                                                                                   G-Suite: tech formally enters the administration 11. DEI                                                                                          H1B 12. Online shopping                                                                   AI Shopping Agents 13. GenX – the Latchkey Generation                                      GenZ – the Lockdown Generation 14. Identity politics                                                                    Digital IDs 15. Breast implants                                                                    Neural implants And a bonus! In his 1961 Farewell Address as he exited the Presidency, Dwight D Eisenhower warned the nation about the military-industrial complex: “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Speaking of the old and the new, this might come as news to you. He also warned us about the dangers of the tech-industrial complex: “We must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” Just a heads’ up as we boldly go into this new year, always and forever, onward and forward.

The Bad Boys of Tech, Part 2

The Bad Boys of Tech, Part 2

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 Unless you’ve been cut off from all worldly communications, you’ve heard that co-founder and CEO Sam Altman was very unceremoniously booted from OpenAI – and was informed in a Google Meet, despite Microsoft being a major OpenAI investor and partner.

No one seems to know the precise reason why he was terminated. Malfeasance? Was it his reported lack of transparency with the board, which now consists of three independent directors holding no equity, and its Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever? A coup?

Or something quite different transpiring behind the curtain… Read More...

How to Prioritizing in the New Normal

How to Prioritizing in the New Normal

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Image by Piyapong Saydaung from Pixabay

Haven’t heard that term in a while, eh, and not like we all have it all figured out.

We had a conversation with a successful serial entrepreneur recently, who began by filling us in on his history:

Started and built his first business: sold it. Started and built another business: acquired. Was about to undertake his next startup when his wife told him that he was going to be a dad for the first time – and not to a singleton. Read More...

AI’s Achilles Heel You Hadn’t Considered

AI’s Achilles Heel You Hadn’t Considered

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Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay

Those of us who work in technology – which is most of us here – can’t help but glom onto or at least test the shiny new thing that comes along. It’s in our DNA. The problem is that tech tends to jump in feet first without realizing the possible consequences, dystopian side, or even fully examining the product.

Apologies if we sound a bit repetitive here, but read on. We do have a point to make, that no one else seems to be considering.

BuzzFeed To Use ChatGPT’s AI For Content Creation, Stock Up 200%+ (forbes.com). Okay, it’s ‘BuzzFeed’ which is ‘clickbait’ by any other name.  As Forbes further reported, “Investigative reports on The Byte shared that media website CNET was using AI technology, under articles penned by the anonymous “CNET Money Staff”. The AI was created by CNET resources, and only used for a very small number of posts before human oversight detected significant misstatements of facts, errors and plagiarized content, according to multiple news sources.” The result: CNET pauses publishing AI-written stories after disclosure controversy. Read More...

What Founders Can Learn from Drug Dealers

What Founders Can Learn from Drug Dealers

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Disclaimer: we are in no way intimating or outright suggesting that you become purveyors of drugs, legal or otherwise.

We’ve long known that tech can be addictive. When was the last time you left home without your cellphone? Or voluntarily spent a day or more without checking email et al? Read More...

Is Diversity the New Lean-In Movement?

Is Diversity the New Lean-In Movement?

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 Diversity/inclusion is definitely the catchphrase of the day and having been in the industry since the Web 1.0 days, when we’d attend conferences and would never find a queue at the women’s loo ever, while at the men’s loo, the line would snake around corners. Not so much when Web 2.0 hit and cheers to that, despite the wait we then encountered: the industry was becoming more gender-inclusive at some levels and there’s a start, anyway, even though not all companies seemed to have gotten the memo, or the message, or didn’t quite understand that it’s not all about numbers alone: Black former employees sue Google for racial discrimination.

 

The pendulum does have a way of swinging from one extreme to the other before righting itself at the midway point, or so one would hope, and so it seems to be going  with diversity and inclusion, Hollywood/the movie industry being an extreme example (Are the Oscars Over?). Viewership of the Academy Awards has been way down in recent years, and despite the fact that many entertainers accepting their awards or presenting use the moment as a way to air their pollical views, the Academy has somehow decided that it’s all about diversity/inclusion, or the lack thereof. Read More...

The Sili-CON Game

The Sili-CON Game

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image by Leuchtturm81 at Pixabay

What captured the attention of the Twitterverse of late was the thread from Bolt founder Ryan Breslow (@theryanking) who called out the Silicon Valley Mob. We quote: “two forces have the most power in Silicon Valley. And like… tenfold more than anyone else. Their names: Stripe and YCombinator. The kicker → Their power is in how they work together. Stripe is the darling child of Silicon Valley. Early to YC (YCombinator), Stripe made payment processing APIs easy and signed up all their YC batchmates to use their product. The “official payment processor for YC”, Stripe became a HOT company. Sequoia, the most powerful VC firm in the world, went all-in. Their position today is upwards of $20-$30B in Stripe stock.

 

By the Numbers

“Three forces combined quickly: 1/ The most powerful VC firm in the world. 2/ The most powerful startup accelerator in the world. 3/ The most powerful startup in the world, with the help of #1 and #2.” Read More...