Nervous About AI

OpenAI entered the Silicon Valley stratosphere last year with the release of two AI products, the image-generator DALLE-2 and the chatbot ChatGPT. (The company recently unveiled GPT-4, which can ace most standardized tests, among other improvements on its predecessor.) Sam Altman (above), OpenAI’s co-founder, has become a public face of the AI revolution, alternately evangelical and circumspect about the potent force he has helped unleash on the world.

In the latest episode of On With Kara Swisher, Swisher speaks with Altman about the many possibilities and pitfalls of his nascent field, focusing on some of the key questions around it. Among them: How do we best to regulate a technology even its founders don’t fully understand? And who gets the enormous sums of money at stake? Altman has lofty ideas for how generative AI could transform society. But as Swisher observes, he sounds like the starry-eyed tech founders she encountered a quarter-century ago — only some of whom stayed true to their ideals.

Kara Swisher: You started Loopt. That’s where I met you.

Sam Altman: Yeah.

Swisher: Explain what it was. I don’t even remember, Sam. I’m sorry.

Altman: That’s no problem. Well, it didn’t work out. There’s no reason to remember. It was a location-based social app for mobile phones.

Swisher: Right. What happened?

Altman: The market wasn’t there, I’d say, is the No. 1 thing.

Swisher: Yeah. Because?

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Humanoid Robots

Human-shaped robots with dexterous hands will be staffing warehouses and retail stores, tending to the elderly and performing household chores within a decade or so, according to a Silicon Valley startup working toward that vision.

Why it matters: Demographic trends — such as a persistent labor shortage and the growing elder care crisis — make fully-functioning, AI-driven humanoid robots look tantalizingly appealing.

• Companies such as Amazon are reportedly worried about running out of warehouse workers, whose jobs are physically and mentally demanding with high attrition.

Driving the news: A heavy-hitting startup called Figure, which just emerged from stealth mode, is building a prototype of a humanoid robot that the company says will eventually be able to walk, climb stairs, open doors, use tools and lift boxes — perhaps even make dinner.

• The company is the brainchild of Brett Adcock, a tech entrepreneur who previously founded Archer Aviation (a "flying taxi" maker that went public) and Vettery (an online hiring marketplace that he and a partner sold for $100 million).
• He's assembled an all-star team of 40, including leading roboticists from Boston Dynamics and Tesla.
• They've moved into a 30,000-square-foot facility in Sunnyvale, California, where they plan to set up a mock warehouse to test their prototype.
• "We just got done in December with our full-scale humanoid," Adcock tells Axios. "We'll be walking that in the next 30 days."

Where it stands: The prototype — called Figure 01 — stands about 5'6" and weighs 130 pounds.

• It'll be fully electric, run for five hours on a charge and is intended for warehouse use.
• "We think we can get into commercial operation within a few years," Adcock tells Axios. "We should be able to do most jobs — physical labor jobs that humans don't want to do."

Yes, but: Humanoid robots are staggeringly difficult to build and engineer to perform reliably.

• There are a host of design challenges, from simple balance to replicating human movements.
• "We need to be able to push it and have it not fall down," says Adcock about the Figure 01. (Boston Dynamics has plenty of robot blooper videos on YouTube.)
• From there, programming a robot to move boxes in a warehouse is a lot easier than, say, engineering it to cook a meal.

What they're saying: "We face high risk and extremely low chances of success," Adcock wrote in a mission statement.

• But he exuded optimism in an interview: "This stuff just wasn't possible 10 years ago — I think it's possible now."
• A decade ago, "you just didn’t have the energy or the power density to make this work."

Reality check: Engineering robots is expensive. Adcock says he is self-financing Figure: "I put in $10 million last year."  READ MORE...

California's Economy Declining

California officials are sounding the alarm after recent statistics showed that fewer corporate and start-up activity in the state was leading to a decline in tax revenue, according to a report by Bloomberg News.

This year, just nine companies based in the state had held initial public offerings (IPOs), which is when a company first lists shares for sale on the stock market – considered a milestone in its growth after strong activity and high valuation, the report revealed. 

In 2021, California – whose start-up ecosystem in ‘Silicon Valley’ is considered the most prodigious in the world – saw 81 companies conduct IPOs, making 2022 a year of a nine-fold decrease.

Moreover, the value of these IPOs was far lower than in the past, raising merely $177 million, or 2% of the total amount of money raised by U.S. companies that went public in 2022. 

By contrast, in 2021, California’s share of the revenue generated by IPOs was 39%, by far the largest of any state.  READ MORE...

The Metaverse

Silicon Valley has been anticipating virtual reality for more than three decades, and keeps running into the same problem: people mostly like actual reality

Maybe this will be my Paul Krugman moment. The Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist was famously the winner of a study to establish which op-ed commentator was most consistently correct. 

In 1998, he also famously claimed, “By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.” 

I am not nearly so storied in accomplishments as Krugman. But I do make my living offering predictions and forecasts. 

So I might as well say it: I predict that the metaverse won’t happen.

The “metaverse,” for those who don’t know, is a still-mostly-hypothetical virtual world accessed by special virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technology. 

The idea is to create a sort of next-level Internet overlaid on our physical world. People plugged into the metaverse exist in our physical world like everyone else but can see and interact with things that others can’t. 

Think The Matrix or the Star Trek Holodeck or the Fortnite-esque brandscapes of Ready Player One.  READ MORE