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Not a game
Hello Friends 💚
Welcome to the 31 new folks who joined The Green Room this week! Take off your shoes and make yourself at home. Sorry for the slight delay today. The power was out in the Bahamas last night.
So much has happened since we last spoke – devastating fires in Maui (support here), more Trump indictments, and lawsuits against the Fearless Fund (we announce the Fearless VC Summit raffle winner at the bottom!).
While Supreme Court cases, state laws, and the Fearless Fund lawsuit are all attempts to take us back in time, this week, let’s discuss the present and future. AI is already impacting our daily lives, from the rapid rise of ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) and Bard to the writer’s strike and medical chatbots.
We started playing around with open-source NLP tools and tracking the work of leading researchers (Joy Buolamwini and Timni Gebru) years ago. Highly recommended.
This week we’re sharing the seminal work by Amy Webb and one of our favorite talks from SXSW 2023. We’ve watched this video over 10x times, and each time we walk away with new gems. Out of all of the press conferences and commercials we’ve watched about AI, the keynote below sets the best context and foundation for your next dinner party or chatroom debate.
💚 Amy & Bryan
Zoom Out
SXSW is wild - it’s like Vegas for Sapiosexuals. 10 days. Tech, music, film, education, and culture. 300,000 people. We’re exhausted just thinking about it. But it’s an excellent moneymaker for Austin – it brings in $300M+ annually.
It’s also great for curious, perpetual learners – if you know where to look. This year, conference content included conversations and keynotes on everything from relationships to psychedelics. There were 1400 music performances, including Chloe Bailey, and over 285 Film and TV screenings. All the more reason we’re taking this week one keynote at a time.
Heads up: SXSW is already on pre-sale for 2024
Zoom in: Amy Webb
Amy Webb is a futurist, CEO of the Future Today Institute and professor at NYU Stern School of Business. She gave her Trends report at this year’s SXSW. It’s a good but long 64-min keynote video. But we simmered it down into quick notes and a much shorter video to save time and help you:
Understand some of the most impactful AI and tech trends leaders should consider.
Lay the groundwork for scenario planning.
Consider how these trends could affect your business and your people.
🎥 Novelty is the New Normal
Amy, a quantitative futurist, is a regular at SXSW. This year, she presented 35+ trends and how those trends are converging. In the talk, Amy shares that while she cannot predict the future, she looks for patterns as indicators of what the future could hold. We’ve structured the long talk into insights, implications and supporting context.
This information transfer is happening faster than we realize, and it's ambient. Meaning, you are not aware of it. You don't see it.
Insight #1: It’s the end of the internet as we know it.
Implication #1: Everything is information.
Supporting context
Transformers are neural networks that can learn the context in sequential data. A well-known transformer is Chat GPT. The T stands for Transformer. Chat GPT learns from all of the above + human feedback. Transformer technology makes it easier for the internet to search us, vs. us searching the internet.
Hardware, specifically AI accelerators, enables transformers to quickly process tons of data and machine learning. Only large tech companies can afford this type of machinery. For example, Chat GPT uses over 10k of these machines.
Software: Cloud Computing companies like AWS, Aszure, and Google are rushing to build cloud networks that can repair themselves. The goal is to train AIs with data 5x the size of Wikipedia for less money.
By 2030 we could have AIs that are 1000x more powerful than they are today. But they need more training data to get there.
Where our Google search history, musical and shopping choices were once the main fodder of tech companies to provide the data needed, the music playing in the background while you’re on a video conference, the mention that your husband is cooking dinner for you, and even your body odor will all be searchable/readable data.
“What if, instead of us searching the internet, the internet searches us?”
Insight #2: We’ve entered the assistive computing era.
Implication #2: You will never think on your own again.
Supporting context
Like paper and calculators, generative AI and the industrial metaverse will be ubiquitous and invisible and transform society.
These tools require foundational knowledge to use them. For assistive computing tools like Chat GPT or Bard, you must know what to ask these systems. But instead of teaching these skills, they are being banned (NY Board of Education, JPM, etc).
These systems are not 100% correct. They have a bias problem.
"We are building these assistive computive systems at breaking speeds, and we still have a bias problem. Bias is irritating.”
The Wrap-Up: Because we all desire a better future, we need to work together to focus on the right trends, their convergences, and their implications. To help us, Amy kindly shared a digital swag bag that you can access here. It includes her deck, trends, and methodology on how to leverage this information in your industry so you too can become a futurist.
And the winner is…
In response to last week's lawsuit against the Fearless Fund (and attack against affirmative action more broadly), we raffled a ticket to the Fearless Fund's VC Summit happening on August 18-19 in Atlanta, Georgia.
We’re so happy to announce that our winner is…AJ, B.
Please respond to this note to claim your ticket!
The announcement of our raffle for Culture Con NY will be held on September 14th.
Look how far we made it together!
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