Bravo, sir.
Bit of a guilty pleasure, but it’s a sight to behold for sure.
JFC lmao
If you brand these ‘Wheelie Safe’ and market to upper middle class urbanites you’ll have more money than you know what to do with. Careful, you might end up a billionaire!
Successes:
* Tesla
Non-successes:
* Magic Leap
* Juicero
* Nuro
* Segway
What else am I missing? I suspect there are other successes that raised >$100mm pre-launch that I'm not thinking of.
I wonder why they wouldn't start smaller. That said, I still expect they'll succeed, and I hope they succeed. I don't believe in any rules of thumb, great startups always defy the odds.
[0]: https://www.startupranking.com/startup/tesla/funding-rounds
Skydio raised way more than 100 million and I'd call them success, although I'm not sure if they raised that much pre-launch.
I'm not sure how things would have played out if we had 100m+ before we launched anything. We may have delayed launch even further and missed out on valuable market feedback and brand awareness.
Now filter for SoftBank.
Worldcoin is easily 10x more stupid than Juicero. A glass of overpriced juice is much more benign and far more useful than retina scams and cryptocurrency.
(I guess Tesla was largely funded by Musk kn the beginning, but I doubt that’s the standard)
Unless we're talking robotics, I don't see why you would need a separate device for AI. Seems like we already have all the right form factors (phones, speakers, etc).
This reminds me of when Facebook tried to make a Facebook phone. Turned out iPhones and Androids were significantly better as phones and they could do Facebook just fine.
Dave, there is only one HAL3000.
A phrase used to extract a billion dollars from idiot investors.
Based on the article, it sounds like they're in exploratory talks to figure out what that "AI device" could be. I agree that it's likely we've already figured out the right form factors for such a device, but it's not a leap to imagine a significantly better UX than what we have from today's computing devices.
The movie "Her" seems like a decent blueprint for a post-smartphone "AI device".
Puck and a pair of AirPods? (Maybe compute in the case?)
A device optimised to run a set of LLMs and not sacrifice battery for e.g. a screen seems like it would have a niche, if it just worked. Picture the AIs profiled in the later series of Westworld.
On the Apple front they added a very small LLM to the keyboard autocorrect that is better at semantically correcting and predicting what you’re writing in iOS 17. It’s a ducking lot better already, but I imagine over the years it’ll round out to be incredibly useful.
I remember watching a Google I/O presentation back in 2016 when voice assistants were trending. There was all sorts of ideas like APIs to access google assistant, voice/chat being the new interface etc.
The future presented there made so much intuitive sense to me and now the tech has finally caught up. The current static state off affairs has clearly outlived its usefulness.
Its not all sunshine and roses, Apple is an order of magnitude better position to take this leap then OpenAI. I know this may be a little out there but I think Apple made the right move by not jumping the gun with LLMs, IMO it makes more to let the dust settle and either partner with one of the winners or pick up the open standard (Llama 5?)
Atm its looks more like getting they lay of the land, which IMO is the smart move.
I'm not saying I like that Siri is terrible. I'm a Siri/Homepod user and somehow it seems worse each year, but possibly Apple sees little upside to Siri compared to adding a programmable button to the iPhone.
SoftBank is originally one of the big 3 telecom providers in Japan. We do joke around here about our phone bills increasing anytime Masayoshi Son makes a bad investment.
There's a reason why the iphone team was so small (https://www.theregister.com/2014/03/27/apple_employee_reveal...) you need to be ruthlessly focussed and not pressurised by outside investors or managers who don't know what they're talking about (Softbank)
I'm not sure what the money would be spent on at OpenAI. Maybe they will keep it small, and hyper-focussed. But I worked in VC for a while and VC money was described to me as rocket fuel, you don't want to go dousing it on things before the rocket is built because it stinks and has a tendency to blow things up
They were an early investor in WeWork, and paid Adam Neumann to go away instead of throwing him out head first.
On a serious note, I wonder if Altman will be able to control Ive’s obsession with form over function like Jobs did.
There is already no shortage of investment and hype around their core product - but it definitely does not seem like something you'd want to cram into a physical product, and definitely definitely not something you'd need $1B to develop.
This smells like "Open"AI is on-ramping to the final stage, cashout.
1. Raise $1B for a device blessed with Ive cool-factor for maximum hype and sales
2. Launch this device for $999 ($1299?)
3. Record-breaking IPO shortly after
4. ???
5. Everyone realizes they don't really need a $1k device to tell them "As an AI language model, I can't answer that question" fifteen times per day
Someone will build this device, might as well be OpenAi (+ Jony Ive).
I'm at a complete loss of words... seriously at this point just seize the money and hand it out at random. That outcome is sure to be better and more productive than anything SB has done or will do
I still remember when everybody suddenly added “COM” or “NET” to product and company names during the .COM bubble. Same with “AI” today. Good PR but ultimately meaningless.
Never mind, the device will be thin and will break in 2 weeks if you dare use it outside a temperature controlled clean room.
More discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37681663
