GM Readers! ☀️

Welcome to the 7th 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.

As a friendly reminder:

• On Tuesdays, we will send out our 🧠 Brain Food section as a standalone newsletter, covering one deep dive topic around emerging tech.

• On Fridays, we will send out our Insights newsletter (this newsletter) covering the top stories around emerging tech.

Thanks for reading!

Liang and Dan 🙌

🌰 In a Nutshell

• A new viral social app lets you buy shares in your friends

• Judge rules that AI generated content cannot be copyrighted

• Driverless Taxis began their rollout in San Francisco

• It took 149 years for photography to generate 15 billion images, guess how long it took AI generated images to reach this milestone 👇

💾 Byte-sized Stories

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

1. Friend.Tech Allows You To Buy “Shares” In Your Friends 📈

⚡️ TL;DR: Friend.Tech, a new decentralized social media app powered by crypto allows users to buy shares in their friends and favorite influencers. Once a user buys a share, they are granted certain privileges, like access to a private chat room with that person and other “shareholders.” Friend.Tech has quickly reached ~100K users and has ~$63M worth of crypto deployed onto the app. The app launched on August 10 and is currently in invite-only beta mode.

⚡️ So What: Friend.Tech is a double edged sword and highlights the potential benefits and drawbacks of crypto. On the one hand, a social platform that allows users to support their favorite creators and get access to that creator and their community is one of the big utility uses cases that crypto tokens unlock. If this experiment goes well, creators can lessen their dependency on centralized platforms. On the other hand, there is a risk of over financialization, where the true superfans of a creator might get crowded out and priced out by those looking to speculate in shares of “friends” on the platform.

Even with the early fanfare, the launch of Friend.Tech has not been entirely smooth. There was a bug that revealed the list of 100,000 crypto wallet addresses and their corresponding X (fka Twitter) user names. Other aspects of the interface are still buggy with limited features. Also, it is unclear how decentralized the app actually is and some are concerned that with an anonymous team that controls the platform, funds could be at risk. This will be an interesting one to watch over the coming weeks. 🔍

Read More Here, Here

2. Court Finds That AI Generated Art Cannot be Copyrighted 🎨

⚡️ TL;DR: A US judge ruled that AI-generated artwork cannot be copyrighted. Judge Howell wrote that copyright has never been granted to work “absent any guiding human hand,” further adding that “human authorship is a bedrock of copyright.” This Hollywood Reporter article backs up the judge’s ruling by referencing a photography copyright case saying, “in one of the leading cases on copyright authorship, Burrow-Giles Lithographic Company v. Sarony, the Supreme Court held that there was ‘no doubt’ that protection can be extended to photographs as long as ‘they are representative of original intellectual conceptions of the author.’”

⚡️ So What: At the center of this debate is what is considered human involvement when creating a piece of work. In the photography case, photography is subject to copyright because a human had to mentally conceive of the scene first before they use a camera to reproduce the image. For AI, this boils down to a fairly philosophical question: does writing a prompt to create AI-generated content count as human-guided? Disclaimer: we are not lawyers.

More broadly, this ruling likely will impact how Hollywood studios, music labels, and other creative industries view AI. For example, at the extreme end, if Hollywood studios cannot copyright anything they create with AI (this being a central business case for studios involved in the SAG-AFTRA strike), is it still worth it to pursue the AI strategy? If it is, they will likely need a new business model that evolves from the traditional model of creating, monetizing, and protecting their IP.

Read More Here, Here, Here

3. Driverless Cars Roll out in San Francisco 🚙

⚡️ TL;DR: Waymo and Cruise, two of the largest self-driving car companies, began rolling out robotaxis in San Francisco following the approval by the California Public Utilities Commission. So far, Waymo has a fleet of 250 Jaguar vehicles operating across the city. Each car is worth as much as $200,000. So not your average ridesharing Prius by any means.

⚡️ So What: A few NYTimes reporters tested the robo taxi experience this week. In the article below, one Times reporter mentioned, “my ride was so smooth, the novelty began to wear off, turning a trip to the future into just another journey across town. The car was precise and deliberate, albeit without the flexibility or interactions you would have with a human driver. It paused for pedestrians and yielded to emergency vehicles.”

While the experience for the rider might feel relatively similar to traditional ridesharing programs (Uber et al.), this rollout is a crucial step for Waymo and Cruise to begin recouping their investments. The hope is that without the cost of drivers, they will be able to reach breakeven and then profitability faster than the current ridesharing incumbents. To put Waymo and Cruise’s financial goal in perspective, Uber’s first quarterly operating profit was announced just this month–nearly 14.5 years after the company’s founding.

Both Waymo and Cruise have spent billions of dollars to build out the technology and acquire their fleets of driverless vehicles, investments which, according to the Times, are “going to take years — if not decades” to recoup. It is good that driverless cars don’t have a need for speed, but one thing is for sure, Waymo and Cruise’s investors certainly do when it comes to getting sizable returns on their investments. 🏎️

Read More Here, Here

📊 Let’s Get Graphic

One visual we couldn’t stop thinking about.

Time It Took To Reach 15 Billion Images: AI vs Photography 🤖📷

⚡️ Takeaway: It took humans engaged in photography 149 years to generate 15 billion images. It took humans using AI only 1.5 years to generate the same amount of images. Just like the internet created an exponential scale effect in the distribution of content, AI is enabling infinite creation and is accessible to a wider part of the global population. 📈🌐🧑‍💻

🧠 Brain Food

One focus topic to feed your brain.

In the next 🧠 Brain Food newsletter, we will cover how consulting firms are using their proprietary data plus AI to create a new source of competitive advantage.

Subscribe to get it straight to your inbox on Tuesday, you’ll want to read this one 👀

🐇 Down the Rabbit Hole

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

1. US AI Rules Deep Dive: A breakdown of the different rules that US policymakers are considering.

2. Stable Diffusion's 12M Training Images: A great deep dive that highlights the different types of images that went into training Stable Diffusion, one of the leading AI image generators.

3. Human Creativity in Age of AI: A great essay highlighting the importance of human-led writing in the crowded world of AI generated content.

🌊 Watercooler Talk

Overheard from our community.

We are grateful for the shoutouts we got this week on Linkedin, especially from founders and builders like Sebastian Mourra and Tricia Jose.

If you find our content valuable, consider giving us a shoutout on Linkedin! It goes a long way!

We are going to continue to bring you the best stories and our insights!

We are just getting started 🦾🚀

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] Founding Engineer at Karma3 Labs

• What: Karma3 Labs is building the reputation layer for the Internet. As more of our lives continue to move online, knowing who can be trusted and who cannot will be critical.

• Who: Founding team has experience launching and scaling Web2 and crypto startups with successful exits. Deep technical and research talent. One of the Cofounders wrote the algorithm that powers how Google ranks pages. 🤯

⚡️[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 🤓

⚡️[Operating Role] Strategist, Operator and 3x Founder looking for strategic projects / consulting work. Meet Tricia Jose

• Who: Mission-driven concept-to-execution strategist and operator for impactful products and solutions with 10+ years of experience. 3x founder in fintech/web3 x Future of Work. Started her first company during her MASc in Biomedical Engineering, and her most recent company generated $9M in enterprise value for Canada’s largest bank.

• Secret sauce: Tricia’s multidisciplinary background across startups, corporate, biomedical engineering, product/ops, community and the arts has allowed her to adapt and solve important problems from unique angles.

• Fun fact: Outside of work, Tricia co-wrote and directed an original musical composed entirely of volunteers that was shown 8 times across 4 cities and raised $300k for local and international charities. During the pandemic she wrote and published 3 children’s books that made it to the top of Amazon’s recommended list within weeks of publishing. 📚

📣 Call to Action

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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).