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Howdy, wizards.
Here’s what’s brewing in AI today.
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman just spoke at New York Times’ DealBook Summit, revealing OpenAI’s upcoming 12-day of product launches starting today.
Other highlights from the interview:
ChatGPT now has 300 million weekly active users and receives more than 1 billion messages per day. 1.3 million developers in the US are using OpenAI’s products.
Sam quickly switches the subject when asked about OpenAI’s relationship with Microsoft. He briefly acknowledges that some tension exists, but the two companies are overall aligned on incentives.
Most of the safety concerns related to AI won’t actually happen at the moment AGI is here, but rather on the long continuation towards true superintelligence. “We’ll hit AGI sooner than most people in the world think, and it will matter much less”.
Sam sees deep learning as sort of like a law of physics, and thinks AI will historically be viewed as something that was first discovered by a few companies, but over time will become commoditised – and that’s fine since science should be diffused throughout society. He says the AI will be used for everything and that it will be inconceivable to people in the future that their devices are not all smart.
When asked how he feels, on a personal level, about Elon Musk suing OpenAI, he replied “tremendously sad”, explaining that he grew up with Elon as a hero, followed by praise for Elon for making the world think more ambitiously, himself included. Altman’s perception of the lawsuit, “whatever the stated claim is”, is that Elon sees OpenAI as a competitor, and is resorting to legal action to weaken them, rather than simply competing in the marketplace.
Why it matters The launches and upgrades OpenAI has been teasing for later this year are coming. Rumour has it that Sora will finally be released. Rest assured I’ll be updating you on every important announcement.
And if you want to follow things in real-time, OpenAI’s livestream starts at 10am PT.
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Screenshot from a16z.com // DALL-E
Venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz (a16z) has released their yearly list of big ideas—predictions on what will be trending in tech—for 2025.
The list features 50 of trends across 7 verticals and, naturally, there’s a lot of AI-related stuff in there. I’ve summarised the most interesting AI trends below.
Key upcoming trends in AI (my favourites in bold):
AMERICAN DYNAMISM
AI reviving demand for hardware engineering roles to bridge the gap between software and physical systems
CONSUMER TECH
AI video tools will get better in every way and hyper-specialized (separate tools for e.g. product marketing; cinematic, long-form film; hyperrealistic, 3D avatars ++)
Building an AI brain – AI will take our “digital exhaust” eg emails, tweets, browsing history and more to understand how you think and feel. Turning AI into an infinite memory bank to help us make informed decisions. You can find links to some of the most interesting companies working in this space in my newsletter from October.
Analyzing (and making use of) qualitative data becomes possible at scale with LLMs, web-based agents, and multimodal models
CRYPTO
ENTERPRISE + FINTECH
AI will make enterprises replace legacy systems with dynamic, AI-powered alternatives that actively assist in not just facilitating, but actually completing the work
AI-native startups evolving beyond initial differentiation to build lasting defensibility through network effects, switching costs, virality and transcending narrow use cases into actual workflows
GAMES
AI-native storytelling gets serious, enabling real-time, player-driven experiences, blurring the lines between film and gaming
AI companions get way more lifelike, having their own “inner worlds”, forming deeper relationships with users. Check out my newsletter from yesterday for more on this trend.
GROWTH-STAGE TECH
Google’s dominance will loosen, as more people use AIs like ChatGPT and Perplexity for general search, and domain-specific search engines like Consensus (academic research), Harvey (law), Hebbia (financial services) and more.
GenAI will transform sales, automate many current parts of sales reps’ work, allowing them to focus on high-touch, consultative selling.
The next wave of AI apps goes beyond GPT wrappers, using diverse models and contextual data to deliver high ROI
INFRASTRUCTURE
AI will make strides in math, physics and coding – evolving the reasoning approach that OpenAI’s o1 model pioneered.
Why it matters a16z’s article might seem long, but it’s actually a super-condensed read to help you understand a lot about how tech will evolve in the near-term future. An actual treasure trove.
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This newsletter is written & curated by Dario Chincha.
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