Doing Business with Chatbots: Companies might be overestimating how much it costs to run LLM-based applications.
Business Insights

Doing Business with Chatbots: Companies might be overestimating how much it costs to run LLM-based applications.

There are many great applications to be built on top of large language models, and the overhead of doing so may be lower than you think. Sometimes, I've spent all day on a weekend developing ideas only to find that I've spent less than $0.50.
Opportunities and Pitfalls for Large Language Models: The LLM business landscape is crowded with APIs and short on high-value, hard-to-build applications.
Business Insights

Opportunities and Pitfalls for Large Language Models: The LLM business landscape is crowded with APIs and short on high-value, hard-to-build applications.

The competitive landscape of large language models (LLMs) is evolving quickly. The ultimate winners are yet to be determined, and already the current dynamics are exciting. Let me share a few observations, focusing on direct-to-consumer...
Figure showing how researchers obtained the Alpaca model
Business Insights

When One Machine Learning Model Learns From Another: Was Google’s Bard trained on output from OpenAI's ChatGPT? The technique is legit, but it raises thorny questions.

Last week, the tech news site The Information reported an internal controversy at Google. Engineers were concerned that Google’s Bard large language model was trained in part on output from OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which would have violated OpenAI’s terms of use.
Emad Mostaque, Alexandr Wang, Andrew Ng, and Peter Diamandis at Abundance 360, March 20, 2023
Business Insights

Catching AI's Next Wave: Generative AI will drive tremendous value and growth.

Generative AI is taking off, and along with it excitement and hype about the technology’s potential. I encourage you to think of it as a general-purpose technology (GPT, not to be confused with the other GPT: generative pretrained transformer).
Surviving Silicon Valley Bank: The collapse of SVB threatened tech startups, but brought the AI community together.
Business Insights

Surviving Silicon Valley Bank: The collapse of SVB threatened tech startups, but brought the AI community together.

Last week, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), Signature Bank, and Silvergate Bank suddenly collapsed. If it passed uneventfully from your point of view, good for you! Many companies worked nonstop through the weekend scrambling to preserve funds so they could pay their employees.
First mill-brand watermarked paper with the text "Old Council Tree Bond 100% Cotton Fiber"
Business Insights

Watermarking is a No-Go: Market incentives will keep creators from watermarking AI-generated content.

ChatGPT has raised fears that students will harm their learning by using it to complete assignments. Voice cloning, another generative AI technology, has fooled people into giving large sums of money to scammers, as you can read in this issue of The Batch.
Colorful flower meadow
Business Insights

Who Will Control Cutting-Edge Language Models?: Why the future is likely to bring more large language models like ChatGPT

Will the future of large language models limit users to cutting-edge models from a handful of companies, or will users be able to choose among powerful models from a large number of developers?
Illustration of an oasis in the middle of a field covered in snow
Business Insights

Generative models are AI's next pillar of value creation: Models like DALL·E and Stable Diffusion are creating a new paradigm for AI applications.

As the winter holiday approaches, it occurs to me that, instead of facing AI winter, we are in a boiling-hot summer of AI.
Photograph of light at the end of a tunnel
Business Insights

What to Do in a Tough Economy: How to Survive and Thrive Amid Economic Uncertainty

The economic downturn of the past six months has hit many individuals and companies hard, and I’ve written about the impact of rising interest rates on AI. The effects of high inflation, the Russian war in Ukraine, and an economic slowdown in China are rippling across the globe...
Scanner over a collage of images
Business Insights

The Fate of GPU Prices and What It Means for AI

The rise of AI over the last decade has been powered by the increasing speed and decreasing cost of GPUs and other accelerator chips. How long will this continue? The past month saw several events that might affect how GPU prices evolve.
Iteration process chart
Business Insights

How to Reduce Risk and Uncertainty in AI Projects

When I wrote recently about how to build a career in AI, several readers wrote to ask specifically about AI product management: the art and science of designing compelling AI products. I’ll share lessons I’ve learned about this here and in future letters.
Data scrapping tweak
Business Insights

More Data for AI Developers: A New Law Makes it Easier to Scrape the Web

Many AI systems have been built using data scraped from the internet. Indeed, even the cornerstone dataset for computer vision research, ImageNet, was built using images taken from the public internet.
U.S. Three-Month Treasury Bill Secondary Market Interest Rate, Discount Basis
Business Insights

What Rising Interest Rates Mean for AI, Part 2: Why It Still Makes Sense to Forge Ahead

Last week, I wrote about how rising interest rates are likely to lead investors and other finance professionals to focus on short-term returns rather than longer-term investments.
US federal funds effective interest rate
Business Insights

What Rising Interest Rates Mean for AI, Part 1: What's Likely to Happen

The United States Federal Reserve Bank has signaled that it will continue to raise interest rates. As one consequence, the stock market is significantly down, particularly tech stocks, relative to the beginning of the year.
Bodiam Castle at East Sussex, England
Business Insights

How to Build AI Startups Part 2: Will a Data Moat Protect You?

Last week, I described trends that AI Fund, the venture studio I lead, has seen in building AI startups. I'd like to discuss another aspect of building companies that’s unique to AI businesses: the controversial topic of data moats.

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