Perhaps not surprising that Amazon has invested heavily in Anthropic (makers of Claude).
Meanwhile ChatGPT releases another big update, rolling out voice and image capabilities.
What a year it has been so far, and it still feels like we’re just beginning.
From an interview with Kevin Systrom, when asked about Threads, he mentions he can see both a bear case and a bull case: The bear case: It’s more or less what exists elsewhere, and there’s not much differentiated value. While you can get lots of attention very quickly for competing with Elon Musk, that attention turns into real judgment when it either provides value or doesn’t...
Haven’t had a chance to see the new FineWoven cases in person yet, but what a terrible launch they’ve had – with a continuous stream of very bad reviews. Third party leather case vendors must be ecstatic. What a bumper year they’re about to have. UPDATE: Got a chance to see them in the Apple Store yesterday. My impressions: didn’t give me joy, but wasn’t as bad...
So much content to choose from… here’s a few I read everything from:
Newsletters I read (and pay for):
Stratechery (paying customer since July 2014)
Benedict Evans (paying customer for years)
Blogs I read:
Daring Fireball (John Gruber)
David C Baker
No Mercy No Malice (Scott Galloway)
People I follow:
Dare Obasanjo
Benedict Evans
Alex Hormozi
Have a guess how many smartphone brands there are globally (ie that have enough sales volume to be noticed). If you guessed 50, you’re only out by a factor of 5. There’s currently 250 or so global smartphone brands (as per this report from Counterpoint). I didn’t realise there were this many – I was surprised the number was so high. But even more surprising, turns out just...
Whether you’re an Anthony Albanese fan or not, this interview by Tim McDonald is a masterclass in how to prepare, engage and cover (for a distracting co-host) when talking with a world leader (like it or not Albo is our country’s leader on the world stage). The interview coverage has been hijacked by the cohost’s antics (including dropping the F-bomb), which is a shame. Because...
A few related AI articles. First up, Reuters reporting that a trade group for US authors is suing OpenAI, accusing the company of unlawfully training ChatGPT on authors’ books. The report is catching attention because the authors represented include John Grisham, Michael Connolly and George R. R. Martin: “The complaint said ChatGPT generated accurate summaries of the authors’...
Most CRMs will highlight how they enable you to connect with your prospects and customers better. They help you ‘engage’. This can be good and bad. On the good side, it can keep you organised, so you’re freed up to care about people and provide value. On the bad side, it promotes an attitude of insincere activity – in the name of ‘staying connected’. Example:...
Just noting this here as a timestamp more than anything – AI writing startup Writer raises $100M at a $500M valuation. So many stories like this.
We’re heading into crazy times again. Buckle up.
You may have seen the TechCrunch article about Microsoft researchers accidentally exposing terabytes of sensitive internal data when providing access to some AI training data. In summary: This data included 38 terabytes of sensitive information, including the personal backups of two Microsoft employees’ personal computers. The data also contained other sensitive personal data, including passwords...