GM Readers! ☀️

Welcome to the 12th issue of Evolving Internet Insights — a weekly newsletter curating the top stories and our insights on the “Evolving Internet,” which covers AI, Web3 and everything in between.

A thought on our mind: unlike other emerging tech innovations that are more bottoms up and start up led, Big Tech is a critical piece of the AI puzzle. 🧩

Thanks for reading!

Liang and Dan 🙌

🌰 In a Nutshell

• Amazon invests $4B into Anthropic, an OpenAI rival

• ChatGPT released “seeing and hearing” functionality in the pursuit of multimodality

• OpenAI is raising a new financing round at a $80B - $90B valuation

• The WGA Writers strike ends after 148 days with both sides coming to terms on AI

• The two biggest ChatGPT user groups are on opposite ends of the spectrum: “single prompters” and “power users”

💾 Byte-sized Stories

This week’s top stories with our insights on top.

1. Amazon Invests Billions Into Anthropic, an OpenAI Rival ⚔️

⚡️ TL;DR: Amazon announced an up to $4B investment (and strategic collaboration) with Anthropic, the AI industry’s self-proclaimed maker of the “safer and more reliable'' large language model. Amazon will become a minority owner in the company and utilize Anthropic’s underlying technology to power its own products. In turn, Anthropic has committed to using Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider.

⚡️ So What: While this investment represents only a fraction of the combined $13B that Microsoft has invested into OpenAI since 2019, the move by Amazon serves as a “touché” moment between these two Big Tech companies. Amazon stands to benefit by becoming an “AI leader” almost overnight, and through this strategic collaboration with Anthropic, much of its investment will be reinvested back into Amazon Web Services, the flagship product in Amazon’s lineup as far as profitability is concerned.

⚡️ Zoom Out: We are in the middle of a generative (gen) AI arms race–with Big Tech being the jockeys and AI scaleups being the horses 🏇. This announcement is much more than just the sheer magnitude of investment dollars going into Anthropic. The announcement further validates just how computing power and training cycles have become the hottest commodity in the gen AI space. It seems like Big Tech will throw any amount of money to be at the front of this race.

Read More Here, Here, Here

2. ChatGPT Can Now Help You via Voice and Visual Prompts 🗣️🤳

⚡️ TL;DR: Users now have the ability to speak directly to and have a conversation with ChatGPT, as well as, upload photos and documents to the platform for new levels of intelligent assistance. Previously, users could only engage with ChatGPT through a simple text interface. This feature set will roll out to Plus and Enterprise users over the next two weeks and everyone else “soon after.”

⚡️ So What: With this recent feature release, OpenAI has truly leveled up the potential use cases and utility of the platform. It has only been a few days since release, but we have already seen examples of users uploading pictures of what is in their fridge and asking ChatGPT to make a recipe from the ingredients analyzed to snapping a picture of moving boxes and asking ChatGPT if they would fit her specific minivan 🤯

While we are not fortune tellers, we did share in our last ⚡Insights 11 issue, that our prediction is that “the next big ‘wave’ in generative AI will be building multimodal interfaces” for users. Sometimes things are better communicated outside of text messages. 😜

⚡️ Zoom Out: OpenAI has been on a tear lately with recent releases. In the last few months, they launched ChatGPT Enterprise, DALL-E 3, and now they are going multimodal. And the company is reportedly working with legendary Apple designer, Jony Ive on a hardware device. 👀 

Riding this momentum, there are rumors floating around that OpenAI is raising another round of financing at a valuation range of $80B - $90B (~3x its current valuation).

Read More Here, Here, Here, Here, Here

3. The Hollywood Writers Strike Is Over 🤝

⚡️ TL;DR: The WGA (Writer’s Guild of America) writer’s strike ends after 148 days. The use of AI in the writing process was one of the key issues in the strike. Here are some key concessions related to AI in the deal:

• AI cannot be used to write or rewrite scripts

• AI-generated writing is not source material which means all credits in a piece of writing must be attributed to a human

• Writers can choose to use AI tools, but a company cannot mandate the use of AI tools for writers 

• Studios must disclose to writers if they are given any AI-generated materials to incorporate into their work

⚡️ So What: The questions around AI and copyrighting represent an emerging debate. The WGA has taken a more conservative stance focused around how to ensure studios don’t use AI to exploit writer’s work. All of this comes down to how attribution for creative content works in the Age of AI. Interestingly enough, in the deal there is a clause that states: “The WGA reserves the right to assert that exploitation of writers’ material to train AI is prohibited by [the contract] or other law.”

⚡️ Zoom Out: Notably, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) has not reached an agreement with actors. This is important because the AI debate goes beyond writing and into other performative aspects in the media and entertainment space–questions around an AI using an actor’s likeness to create content, etc. While the law on AI copyrights evolves, the WGA deal could set industry precedence on how creative industries should think about AI.

Read More Here, Here

📊 Let’s Get Graphic

One visual we couldn’t stop thinking about.

Two of the Largest ChatGPT User Segments Are Polar Opposites: Power Users & “Single Prompters”

⚡️ Takeaway: It seems like there are two types of ChatGPT users: power users and surface level users.

~35% of users use ChatGPT for a single prompt. These “single prompters” are likely using ChatGPT more like a search engine and asking pointed questions.

Another ~35% use ChatGPT and use ChatGPT for 5+ prompts. These “power users'' are likely getting into the nuances of prompting and redefining their output for more advanced use cases.

If prompting becomes a critical skill in the future of work, the power users (5+ prompts) will be ahead of the curve. To the “single prompters,” it is important to dive beyond the surface level and explore the power of these tools. 🤿

🐇 Down the Rabbit Hole

Some deeper dives to help you get smarter on emerging tech.

1. Google, Healthcare and Generative AI: Deep dive into how Google plans to use generative AI to fix healthcare.

2. Recruiting and Managing Talent: Best practices on recruiting and managing talent by Elad Gil, startup founder, executive, venture investor, and known to be “Silicon Valley’s biggest solo VC.”

3. Elon Musk on AI: Deep dive on how Elon Musk views AI and written by Walter Issacon, who recently released Musk’s biography.

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