GM Readers! ☀️

Welcome to the 3rd issue of Evolving Internet Insights — a weekly newsletter curating the top stories and our insights on the “Evolving Internet,” which covers everything from AI, Web3 and everything in between.

Emerging tech is becoming the “global equalizer” which is a stark difference from technology waves of the past. Love to see it!

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. Sam Altman’s Worldcoin: A Polarizing Launch

⚡️ TL;DR: Worldcoin, Sam Altman’s (Co-Founder and CEO of Open AI) other company, launched this week. Worldcoin’s vision is to serve as the global identity layer. To do this, Worldcoin aims to replace things like Google’s “I’m not a robot” reCAPTCHA that we all know and love and more seamlessly distinguish between humans and machines online. For example, when someone sends you a message online, how do you know they are human? Especially in a world where AI is ubiquitous, how do you know they aren’t a machine pretending to be a human?

Here is how it works: (1) A person scans their eye with a Worldcoin orb (see image below) to get their World ID; (2) The orb, through a lot of fancy cryptography and privacy-preserving tech, will register that person’s biometrics into a global database; (3) In return for registering their biometrics, the person will be recognized by the network as “human” and awarded with some $WLD tokens for their troubles.

So far ~2 Million people from around the world have registered for a World ID.

⚡️ So What: One of Sam’s worries is that proving personhood digitally in the age of AI will become increasingly important. But the broader tech and crypto community had a lot of mix thoughts on Worldcoin. Particularly highlighting the many layers of risks, a non-transparent rollout, etc. Many are skeptical that the orb, which is built by the Worldcoin team, is truly secure. Others have called out the fact that Worldcoin is exploiting users in developing countries by giving them a coin that they cannot yet use or transfer.

Broadly speaking, the intent of the project is good, because the digital identity problem is a global one. With anything global, there are many different variables to consider, such as regulatory regimes, socio-economic disparities, etc. This will definitely be an interesting project to watch especially as AI adoption continues to take off and the digital identity problem comes front and center.

Read More Here, Here, Here

2. Japan invests in AI Supercomputer to Stay Competitive

⚡️ TL;DR: Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) announced it will develop a new supercomputer to help Japan catch up in the global AI race. AI development (building large language models, data processing, etc) depends on powerful hardware. METI will invest $226M to finance the installation of these facilities with total Japanese government investment being closer to $450M.

⚡️ So What: The AI race comes down to a few critical things: (1) hardware, (2) talent, and (3) enduring public-private partnerships. Japan is at risk of losing the AI race. METI wants to solve the hardware issue first as that is a fundamental piece to advancement in the space. METI noted that by 2030, Japan will have a deficit of 789,000 software engineers. To address these problems, the government is hoping that by providing much needed infrastructure and working with Japan’s private sector, they can catch up in the AI race. Japan previously announced that AI model training does not violate copyright law — another pro-AI regulatory move to get the industry kickstarted in the country.

More broadly, this is an interesting example of a government stepping in to ensure its country doesn’t get left behind, while other countries (including the U.S.) have shown to be more cautious and less friendly towards the AI boom.

Read More Here, Here, Here

3. Publishers Join Forces and Plan to Sue AI Companies

⚡️ TL;DR: A coalition of publishers and media companies that includes The New York Times, News Corp, Axel Springer, and IAC, are getting ready to sue AI tech giants like OpenAI and Google. The publishers are worried that instead of Google sending users to a publisher’s webpage to consume content, a user can just ask an AI chatbots directly, circumventing the need to visit a publisher’s website.

⚡️ So What: Publishers are worried that with AI centralizing all traffic to a chatbot interface, their business models will be disrupted. This is because their revenue largely depends on serving ads to users that visit their websites. Publishers believe that companies like OpenAI are potentially violating copyright laws by training their models using proprietary content on the internet. Some other companies, like the Associated Press (AP) see the “writing on the wall” when it comes to AI and have taken a more collaborative approach. OpenAI will license AP’s text archive and AP will leverage OpenAI’s technology. The two different approaches highlight the game theory that exists for companies and industries as a whole on whether to be an early adopter of a technology or to fight it and preserve the status quo.

Read More Here, Here, Here

📊 Let’s Get Graphic

One visual we couldn’t stop thinking about.

⚡️Takeaway: ChatGPT and Generative AI adoption was a global phenomenon from day 1. For emerging countries, rapid and wide-scale adoption of these types of technologies could foster an even more entrenched “innovation culture” and increase the chance that they leapfrog their more developed counterparts technologically. For example, Latin America’s largest country, Brazil, already has about 1/3 of the country using ChatGPT, which rivals countries like the US in terms of adoption.

Chart: Monthly users of ChatGPT across Latin American countries

🧠 Brain Food

One focus topic to feed your brain.

AI, Celebrities and Hollywood

The issues surrounding AI in the Hollywood SAG-AFTRA (writers and actors) strike highlights the widespread impacts of AI especially in creative industries.

⚡️ Core Issue with AI: As a technology, AI enables creating without “the creator”. In Hollywood, the creators are the writers and actors. Writers fear that as AI becomes more capable and creative (read: human-like), they will become increasingly irrelevant in the writing process. Actors are worried that once their likeness is easily replicable, AI can use and compose on top of their likeness without needing the actor in the mix. While at the center of the discussion is a piece of new technology, these tensions highlight the need for a legal and intellectual property framework that works well in the age of AI. For instance, one rhetorical question we will throw out there is, would actors feel differently if there was a licensing regime that allowed them to monetize off of their likeness?

⚡️ Divergent Paths in Adopting AI: Not all famous folk are shying away from AI. For example, Virgin Voyages partnered with Jennifer Lopez to use “Jen AI” to create personalized invitation messages for customers. Football star, Lionel Messi also signed a deal with Pepsi to allow Pepsi to use a deep fake version of Lionel Messi to advertise for Lays potato chips. There is potentially a diverging view between those who have already “made it” and those who are up and coming. For the celebrities of the world, using AI might be yet another income stream. If anything, celebrities can scale themselves by using AI. Lionel Messi and Jennifer Lopez can license the AI version of themselves to an endless number of companies who could all produce content in parallel, allowing them as celebrities to “be” at multiple places at once. Whereas up and coming actors and writers cannot get the same deal. One of the downsides of new technology adoption is that sometimes the advantages accrue to those who already have the advantage. Scale begets scale.

⚡️ Tech Outpaces Governance: AI moves at the speed of innovation but regulation and governance certainly does not. But both are critical to enable a healthy and high-functioning ecosystem. By the time these initial set of issues are figured out, AI (in all likelihood) will have evolved a few times over and bring about a new set of issues. Recently, Fable, an AI startup, unveiled its AI showrunner technology. AI Showrunner Agents “can write, produce, direct, cast, edit, voice, and animate episodes of TV.” Fable released an episode of South Park created entirely with AI. The vision for Fable is to have a future where fans can put themselves in their favorite TV shows, and the characters would use AI to “organically” interact with each other. While this technology is early, if it gets adopted, studios might also have to fight another similar battle that actors and writers are fighting now to defend their IP from AI tools.

⚡️ So What: If we zoom out, what is happening in Hollywood will take place across all the other industries because AI is a core technology that touches multiple aspects of one’s life. Some of how this unravels in Hollywood will be used as precedent for other media and entertainment industries. For AI to become truly mainstream and well-received, we have to figure out all these important non-tech issues. Ironically, the non-tech issues are harder to solve than the tech issues.

Additional Readings: Here, Here, Here

🐇 Down the Rabbit Hole

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

1. The 3 Person Unicorn: Blog post highlighting how the future unicorns and billion dollar companies can be built by small, three-person teams leveraging AI tools.

2. Hope, Fear and AI: Report highlighting how people are using AI and their general sentiments towards AI. Chock full of insights and data.

3. Status as a Service: Long Read highlighting how social media platforms are structured to capture our need for status seeking and why there are multiple platforms in social media.

🌊 Watercooler Talk

Overheard from our community.

This week, our friends from The Continent were reacting to this CNBC Africa piece regarding measures the public and private sectors could take to “accelerate Africa’s AI revolution.” Here were some of the best takes we saw in our WhatsApps groups:

• “I truly hope the government realizes the pros and cons that come with the potential of AI and can empower the youth accordingly.”

• “AI as a technology could be such an invaluable tool particularly to educate the African youth.”

• “Since data labeling is an important component to removing the toxicity and bias from AI chatbot search results, I hope that these AI companies move to ethically employ laborers on the continent for this important work.”

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

📝 Elite Jobs Corner

From our networks, we curate and connect top founders and companies to rockstar recruits.

⚡️[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 experience in AI, venture backed startups, consulting, both HBS grads 🤓

⚡️[VC] Post-Wharton MBA with Early-stage VC Investor Experience Looking for Full-time Role. Meet Stephanie Michael Silva 🇨🇱

• Who: Brings extensive global investment experience from early-stage venture capital to private equity, having interned at L’Attitude Ventures, Gilgamesh Ventures, and 1616 Ventures during her MBA and worked at MLC on late-stage and buyout deals across the fintech, SaaS, healthcare, and consumer sectors in the US and Europe

• Secret Sauce: While much of her career has been as an industry generalist, Stephanie utilized her MBA/MA to deepen her knowledge on Latin America fintech and emerging markets venture capital

• Fun Fact: She was a critical piece in an investment in Comp, a promising Brazilian pre-seed HR tech startup backed by the preeminent VCs in the region. Stephanie led market diligence, wrote the investment memo, participated in the IC, and assisted in allocation negotiations.

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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).