Sparks and surprises from last week...

Exploring the edges of our awareness to uncover the unevenly distributed future that most of us can barely imagine.

📚 Key reads

• Adobe’s Scott Belsky on the internet in an age of abstraction and synthesis by generative AI.

• TikTok has made a game out of human connection — and it’s making millions as some users feel sucked into a “wormhole” of addiction.

• Aaron Slodov, CEO of Atomic Industries, published a “techno-industrialist manifesto” highlighting the opportunity for hard tech startups.

💡 Ideas

• If you want results, you need to approach things like a professional, not an amateur. It all comes down to your approach, and there’s a difference between a professional and an amateur.

• This concept is no longer science fiction. Brain-computer interfaces are already here. As of 2023, there are around 50 people in the world with chips implanted in their brains, allowing them to retrieve lost faculties of vision, speech, and motor skills.

• The Shift from Models to Compound AI Systems. Why state-of-the-art AI results are increasingly obtained by compound systems with multiple components, not just monolithic models.

📊 Market data

• Walmart is buying Vizio, one of the leading smart TV markets, to build its advertising business. Smart TV advertising is now about 20% of US spend (depending on deviations) and Walmart sold $3.4bn of ads in 2023, up almost 30% Y-on-Y.

• An analysis of 5M freelance jobs to see what jobs are being replaced by AI. Writing jobs declined 33%, translation jobs declined 19%, and customer service jobs declined 16%.

• Nvidia reached a $2T market cap with 40% of their revenue coming from inference. But many are starting to believe this startup could challenge their position. Groq, an AI chip startup, recently achieved up to 4x the speed of other inference services while also charging less than a third. They are currently valued at $1B.