P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #313
Tech's moving fast so I breathe to slow down.
my story 🚀
i’ve been thinking 💭
The AI train is moving faster and faster. Early in the week I was fascinated by a handful of research papers. This roundup of arxiv papers was my jumping off point. Usually, training breakthrough models is hugely expensive — millions of dollars in computing time. But as researchers keep at it, those costs are coming down. In this case, all the way down to $20. In another corner of the research space, it turns out scaling up a GAN for text-to-image synthesis that’s both fast and excellent. Also, give it a low-resolution photo and you can get a 4K high resolution photo in return. Goodbye grainy 90s scanned photography! That’s not all. Now there’s Visual ChatGPT, a few tools cobbled together that enable a natural language interface for image manipulation. “Replace the sofa in this image with a desk and make it like a water-color painting.” Yeah, incredible. That’s not all. And this is just one week of stuff. And then later in the week, OpenAI announces plugins! From their blog post: “Though not a perfect analogy, plugins can be “eyes and ears” for language models, giving them access to information that is too recent, too personal, or too specific to be included in the training data.” Finally the chatbot will be able to browse the internet, execute Python code, run calculations on Wolfram, and even order groceries on Instacart. The future is going to be wild!
fun facts 🙌
Cash App music video compilation by Hindenburg Research. Context: the creator of this video is a short seller who will profit from decline of Cash App’s parent company’s stock. “This compilation shows various songs named after or referencing Cash App that feature its use in illegal activity including scamming, trafficking drugs and even paying for murder.” ~ learn more
El Ratoncito Pérez. Americans have the tooth fairy, but much of the world has El Ratoncito Pérez. “In 1894, Queen Maria Christina commissioned [Luis] Coloma to write a tale for King Alfonso XIII, who had just lost a tooth at the age of eight. Coloma's story follows Ratón Pérez, who lived with his family in a box of cookies at the basement of Prast confectionery store in Madrid, but frequently ran away from home through the pipes of the city, and into the bedrooms of children who had lost their teeth.” ~ learn more
Moving apps around your iPhone home screen. Did you know you don’t have to do it one by one? I did not until I watched this short instructional video. It was a moment where I simultaneously felt dumb and enlightened. ~ learn more
tech, startups, internet ⚡
Life as a serial entrepreneur with George Krueger. George is my favorite teacher from undergrad at University of Illinois, where he teaches a class called Financing Emerging Businesses. He’s also the favorite of this podcasting duo, Rohan and Jacob. They interviewed him about his experience running 26 businesses over his career. ~ learn more
Sparks of artificial general intelligence: early experiments with GPT-4. A paper published by Microsoft Research based on their experiments with an earlier version of GPT-4. If you aren’t into reading papers, that’s ok. Just scroll through and read the chat excerpts in the exhibits. You will be wowed or your money back. ~ learn more
How Duolingo reignited user growth. “I’ve never seen a growth story like this before—4.5x growth for a mature product, driven by a small handful of product changes, rooted in an innovative growth model, and explained in such actionable detail.” ~ learn more
The non-obvious emerging LP playbook. This resonated with me: “Effectively, this blogpost is dedicated to the investor looking to invest in fund managers who have yet to prove their institutional track record. And just like investing into a pre-seed founder, searching for product-market fit, the checks you are writing are… belief capital.” ~ learn more
better doing 🎯
Why smart people believe stupid things. “The prevailing view is that people adopt false beliefs because they’re too stupid or ignorant to grasp the truth. This may be true in some cases, but just as often the opposite is true: many delusions prey not on dim minds but on bright ones. And this has serious implications for education, society, and you personally.” ~ learn more
to your health ⚕
Advancements in anti-aging skincare with Kyle Landry, PhD. An interview on The Blonde Files Podcast, this is a bit of a sales pitch, yet an exceptionally good one. “Delavie Sciences was then created with the goal of tackling common skin concerns, particularly aging. Dr. Landry joins the show to discuss how and why skin ages, their groundbreaking research and introduction of Bacillus Lysate into skincare to help our bodies become more efficient at anti-aging, how food and lifestyle choices affect our skin, the importance of gut health in our overall wellbeing and much more.” ~ learn more
retail therapy 💸
India’s homegrown instant payment system has remade commerce and pulled millions into the formal economy. “The value of instant digital transactions in India last year was far more than in the United States, Britain, Germany and France. “Combine the four and multiply by four — it is more than that,” as one Indian cabinet minister, Ashwini Vaishnaw, told the World Economic Forum in January.” ~ learn more
under the microscope 🔬
A lucky break for lithium-sulfer battery technology. “Their goal was to slow down the chemical reaction that creates polysulfides when the battery charges and discharges. … But what they found instead was something incredible: a chemical phase of sulfur that basically stops battery degradation!” ~ learn more
teaching the kids 👩🏫
AI is about to transform childhood. Are we ready? “In the future, every middle-class kid will grow up with a personalized AI assistant — so long as the parents are OK with that. As for the children, most of them will be willing if not downright eager.” ~ learn more
big ideas 📚
On why I remain bullish on Nigeria. The country that’s on track to become the world’s 3rd largest has a lot going for it. Critics point to challenges with its leadership that hold the country back. They just had a contentious election. Ken Opalo offers a cautiously optimistic view. ~ learn more
Thanks for including my podcast interview in this week's digest!