GM Readers! ☀️

Welcome to the 2nd 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.

This week, we are adding an “Elite Jobs Corner” where we curate top jobs from founders / companies we personally know / work with. Check it out!

Thanks for reading!

Liang and Dan 🙌

P.S. This newsletter will evolve like the internet does, please give us feedback in the comments section or reply directly via email! 🙏

💾 Byte Sized Stories

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

1. Elon Musk launches a new AI company: x.ai

⚡️ TL;DR: x.AI’s goal is “to understand the true nature of the universe." The founding team worked at DeepMind, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and much more. 🧠 On a Twitter Spaces, Elon said:

• xAi is “definitely in competition” with OpenAI … “You don't want to have a unipolar world where one company dominates in AI"

• xAi plans to use Twitter data to train a super intelligent AI that is “maximally curious” and “truth seeking”

⚡️ So What: Amongst other things, Twitter has been in the news lately for rate limiting its users (capping the number of tweets a user can read per day). Elon’s rationale was to prevent companies who were scraping Twitter data to train AI models. Musk wants to train xAi models on top of data from Twitter, a company he owns. Some estimates highlight Twitter generates 500M Tweets per day! In other words, this is an insane amount of data that he could train xAi models on. This a huge competitive advantage, especially if he continues to close off Twitter data to others. Remember data is the new oil. 

Read More Here, Here

2. Google changed its policy to allow NFTs in Apps and Games

⚡️ TL;DR: Google Play now allows developers to incorporate NFTs and digital assets into their apps and games. Companies that use NFTs have to make it clear to users that their apps have blockchain components.

⚡️ So What: The two leading apps stores in town now diverge on their policy for NFTs and Web3. Apple previously announced a more restrictive policy for NFTs (e.g. apps developers cannot have any call to action for users to purchase NFTs). Users can only purchase NFTs through Apple’s in-app payment system.

Globally, Android has a ~71% market share and iOS has a ~28% market share. Both Android and Web3 have an open source ethos built on more open ecosystems. If/when Web3 adoption takes off, Google’s app store ecosystem could be the default choice for developers. This forces Apple to either change their policy or hope Web3 doesn’t go mainstream. Competition amongst the Big Tech giants are fierce and the name of the game is growth.

Read More Here, Here

3. Meta Drops Llama 2 LLM Model 🦙

⚡️ TL;DR: Llama 2 is Meta’s next generation open source large language model (LLM), which was trained on 40% more data than its Llama 1 LLM. It will be free for research and commercial use. Microsoft and Meta will also expand their partnership, making Microsoft the preferred partner for Llama 2. Remember, Microsoft is also an investor in and has a huge partnership with OpenAI … they are all-in on AI.

⚡️ So What: Meta’s Llama 2 is an open source model, which means developers can fine tune it, add to it, and customize it. OpenAI’s models are closed sourced, so developers and businesses aren’t able to customize it for their use cases. Meta’s President of Global Affairs, Nick Clegg’s take:

“With the … wisdom of crowds you actually make these systems safer and better and, crucially, you take them out of the … clammy hands of the big tech companies which currently are the only companies that have either the computing power or the vast reservoirs of data to build these models in the first place.”

The open source ethos has powered innovations in many emerging tech industries. With open source, developers from all over the world can contribute to innovation and share those innovations for others to build on top of. Most of the Internet is built on top of open source software. Web3 also runs on open source, and many AI models are already open sourced.

Read More Here, Here, Here

📊 Let’s Get Graphic

One visual we couldn’t stop thinking about.

The Verge Surveyed 2,000 people about AI (report from late June 2023).

⚡️ Takeaways: (1) ChatGPT is still the most popular, but over 40% of people still don’t know what it is. (2) Most people haven’t heard of the other AI tools, particularly the image generators. (3) We are SO EARLY ⏳

🧠 Brain Food

One focus topic to feed your brain.

Last week, Liang achieved one of his big writer x business nerd dreams — to write an article for Harvard Business Review. 👏👏👏

Read the article here and see below for some additional insights 👇

⚡️ Big Question: What if Social Media was powered by open protocols?

⚡️ Social Media Walled Gardens

Meta’s new Threads app is effectively a Twitter clone. If you had Instagram, it was easy to migrate your following over. But if you didn’t, you would have to rebuild your following from scratch. For creators who depend on social media apps for their livelihood, this is problematic. For the user, this is a clunky experience. But what choice do users have — modern social media platforms are constructed as walled gardens with high switching costs. And worse, platforms are always at war with each other and users suffer.

⚡️ Platforms to Protocols

Protocols represent the software that powers the ins and outs of a platform. They determine things like what information a user account holds, what users can create, what actions they can take etc. They sit alongside the “state” — the history of user data and interactions.

Btw, this is not a new concept, email (which is a protocol) works this way. The Email Protocol (SMTP) governs how emails are sent. The applications we use for email are built by companies like Google and Yahoo, on top of the email protocol. But, no single company owns the email protocol. If a platform blocks you, but you have your email list stored somewhere, you can still email those on the list from a different application.

If social media platforms were based on open protocols, user data would be interoperable across platforms — making social media identities unified and portable. The user would have “one profile” (or social graph) that they can take with them from platform to platform. Developers can also build applications on top of the same protocol.

⚡️ Benefits of Open Protocol Systems for Users

A social media ecosystem powered by open protocols encourages more competition, which means if a platform’s quality declines, or if a better platform enters the industry, users can easily take their data and audiences with them to a competitor.

This leads to portable and interoperable digital identities and a bunch of apps serving different user segments. In this world, the “best apps” are the ones that actually provide value to users versus locking them in.

⚡️ Why should users care?

Well… owning your digital identity feels pretty important since we are spending an increasing amount of time online and becoming more digitally native. 👇

📝 1337 Jobs Corner

We curate elite jobs from founders and companies we personally know and/or work with. For the uninitiated, in Internet Speak, “1337” = “Elite.”

⚡️[Web3] Senior Smart Contract Engineer at Story Protocol

• What: Story Protocol is building Web3 technology to revolutionize how narrative universes are created. Its mission is to unleash an entirely new way to create, govern, and license intellectual property on the blockchain.

• Who: Team has deep expertise in media, tech, and business. Founding team members are successful serial entrepreneurs. Backed by elite VCs globally. 👀

⚡️[AI] Founding Lead Infrastructure Engineer at Konko.ai 

• What: Konko AI is a fully managed API that allows developers to easily access, evaluate, choose, fine-tune and deploy large language models (LLMs)

• Who: Founding team with operator and technical backgrounds in AI, venture backed startups, consulting, and both Harvard Business School grads 🤓

🫵 Are you a potential candidate? You can apply directly or reply to this newsletter with an email asking for us to refer you (please include why we should refer you). What are you waiting for? Take a chance! 🎲

🫵 Do you know someone who is a great fit for these roles? Reply to this newsletter and give us more details. 🤝

🐇 Down the Rabbit Hole

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

1. How to use AI to Do Stuff: Deep Dive Blog that breaks down use cases for generative AI tools — from writing to image generators to video making and more. This is a great “roll up the sleeves” tutorial to jump into.

2. Why Build in Web3: Article breaking down the Web3 value proposition to users, highlighting themes around data ownership, portability / interoperability, less zero sum network effects.

3. Make Something Wonderful: The Steve Jobs archive produced this e-book that chronicles the life of Steve Jobs through personal letters, interviews and emails. Full of wisdom on design and product building that is relevant for those building in emerging tech.

🌊 Watercooler Talk

Overheard from our community

Liang’s HBR article got great positive feedback!

• “This was the first time I understood why Web3 could be useful”

• “100% agree with the observation, the social web is evolving back into the original thesis of the open web.”

• “Love it, reshared with my team.“

P.S. Got some watercooler talk for us? Share your suggestions in our comments section!

🙏 Shameless Asks

It takes us days to put this together, sharing it takes you 30 seconds 😘

An easy way to support us and the newsletter is through the referral program.

Idea: Thinking about creating bespoke content for top referrers 🧠⚡️

⚡️ Share Evolving Internet Insights with a friend and ask them to subscribe

⚡️ Share on Twitter / Linkedin with a short note

⚡️ Share on your company Slack / Teams channels and communities

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).