gatekeeping the laws of physics

poopcopters, laughing heirs, A.I. slop, podcast bros

*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•by your best friend erin griffith•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•

Buddies! What a week. OpenAI’s deal from hell closed. A VC debated a teacher.

And our Founder Modeiest Businessiest Hero™, Sam Altman, had his audacious plans to create a multitrillion-dollar new world order of GPUs get cruelly dismissed as the pipe dreams of a “podcast bro.”

I mean, rude??

Some of us are out here trying stuff in the arena while others think they can gatekeep the laws of physics and also how much money currently exists in the world. 😤

in other news

I wrote a story about a venture capital firm doing the unthinkable — they gave back money. Not in the form of actual returns on investment (lol come on, absolutely no one is doing that), in the form of slashing their fund size.

They’re doing it because the market is bad. I repeat, the market is bad!

This echoes the years after the dotcom crash when VC firms were humbled and lacked good investment opportunities. But few have gone this far in the post-ZIRP era. The fees are just too good! Read more here:

💸A Venture Capital Firm Does Something Rare: Give Money Back💸

Important Business Matters

Startup everyone’s into: Workflow. It may look exactly WeWork, down to the very founder. But there’s one big difference: “fancy artwork and plush furniture.” See? Totally different.

Startup everyone’s over: Udemy told its users that if they want to opt out of training LLMs for A.I. that may once day wind up replacing them, they get one chance. If they miss it or change their minds, too bad! Expect this from more companies that want to use their data for AI training… Once its in there, you kinda can’t get it back out.

Latest start-up feud: Anduril vs Salient Motion.

Reason to go on living: Poopcopters.

Reason to take up residence under your weighted blanket: There is some tech that is so powerful and scary that even big tech companies won’t put it in their products. Facial recognition tech, for example. Facebook wouldn’t put it in their glasses, but some kids at Harvard did! The project is meant to raise awareness, not actually exist in the real world. But man. We are coming so very terrifyingly close to a state of total surveillance.

Latest crush: TIL about The Tiffany Problem.

Latest heartbreak: What’s going to happen to all that DNA data owned by 23andme if the company collapses?

Latest thing the kids are into: A.I. slop.

Latest thing the olds are into: Creating “laughing heirs.”

It was a different time

This week OpenAI had a “dev day” to show off all the start-ups building businesses with its technology. All I could think of was this banger from 2011, when companies like Zynga were building farming empires inside Facebook’s walled garden, and then, with the sudden tweak of an algorithm, became irrelevant.

Around that time, Fred Wilson, a Business Hero venture capital investor, had some choice words for start-ups that build on other companies’ platforms: “Be your own bitch.”

“Don’t be a Google Bitch, don’t be a Facebook Bitch, and Don’t be a Twitter Bitch. Be your own Bitch.”

a dall-e summary of this newsletter:

“a clash between ideologies, futuristic tech, and dystopian humor” (this may be my favorite one yet?)

*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•the end•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•

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