GM Readers! ☀️

Welcome to the 18th issue of Evolving Internet Insights’ 🧠 Brain Food — a weekly deep dive into a relevant emerging tech topic.

In this week’s issue, we revisit our “best of” storylines in AI to write a reflection of how crazy of a year it has been in AI. 

FYI, this will be the last issue of 🧠 Brain Food for 2023, we are taking next week off to “touch grass” as they say.

See you in 2024 and thanks for being a part of this community!

We appreciate you! 🙏

Liang and Dan 🙌

🧠 Brain Food

One focus topic to feed your brain.

Oh… How Quickly Things Can Change With Emerging Technologies 🤪

ChatGPT was crowned the fastest-growing consumer application in history, reaching 100M monthly users in January 2023 (just two months after launch). OpenAI seemed unstoppable and well on its way to become the AI era’s “hyper-scaler.” For most of this year, it was the “talk of the town.” The company had gone mainstream globally. Remember that commercial showing how DALL-E 3 can invent a cute hedgehog character and storyline with just a few prompts?

Then in November of this year, a shocking turn of events took place: the OpenAI board abruptly ousted Sam Altman. For four days, headlines from major media outlets reported on Sam Altman vs. the OpenAI board. After negotiations fueled by boba tea and McDonalds concluded, Sam Altman was rehired.

The theme of this reflection is not solely about OpenAI. The broader point is that AI is still emerging (read: in its infancy) and things can change in an instant. Fundamental aspects of the industry have not been set in stone. There are no clear “winners” yet. Especially, when you consider Google Deep Mind’s recent release of Gemini, their answer to OpenAI’s GPT models.

At one point, it felt like corporate and VC funding going to AI companies would never dry up, but we are seeing signs of a broader slow down. Yet, VCs are still deploying into the megarounds of a select few companies. The mental models and frameworks of the pre-AI era need to be reinvented for an AI (and Web3) era.

“Everyone” Is Trying to Figure Out AI

Due to all this excitment and progress, AI has become top of mind for the mainstream consciousness globally. AI as a technology is influencing decision-making and strategic thinking across a broad spectrum of global stakeholders like governments, corporations, investors, entrepreneurs, consumers, and so forth. But “figuring out” AI and incorporating it into your workflow or “lifeflow” is different depending on who you are:

• Governments: how should AI be regulated balancing innovation, privacy, national security, socio-economic disparities, and ethical considerations?

• Corporations: what strategies should be employed to integrate AI effectively in business processes, products, and services to enhance efficiency, customer satisfaction, and competitive advantage?

• Investors: what generates sustainable value in AI, and what part of the stack does value capture take place?

• Entrepreneurs: how can AI be leveraged to innovate and build category defining companies? 

• Consumers: is it useful to me? How is AI using my data?

Different stakeholders might have divergent goals with one another, and much of what will help the AI industry “cross the chasm” towards mainstream adoption is finding the balance between these divergent goals.

While AI has made a lot of progress, we are still early.

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DISCLAIMER: This post is provided strictly for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing written in this post should be taken as financial advice or advice of any kind. The content of this post are the opinions of the authors and not representative of other parties. Empower yourself, DYOR (do your own research).