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
Anna Kazlauskas, founder of Vana, proposes creating a "user-owned foundation model" where individuals contribute their personal data from across platforms to collectively train a large AI model they co-own and govern.
Techstars' $80 million partnership with J.P. Morgan to fund underrepresented founders through the Advancing Cities program is in jeopardy due to a series of missteps by Techstars, including issues with program management, differing definitions of diversity, and struggles to meet J.P. Morgan's diversity targets.
The House unanimously approved a bill that could ban TikTok within the next 5 months, aiming to address the national security risks posed by apps like TikTok that are controlled by foreign adversaries such as China.
💡 Ideas
A 45 year old painter in Delhi who lost both his hands in a tragic train accident in 2020 has successfully received a bilateral hand transplant.The transplant was made possible by the organ donation from a former school administrator who was declared brain dead. The surgery took over 12 hours and involved connecting every artery, muscle, tendon and nerve between the donor's hands and the recipient's arms.
Cognition AI just dropped Devin, the world’s first fully autonomous AI software engineer. With Devin, engineers can focus on more interesting problems and engineering teams can strive for more ambitious goals.
Apple's Vision Pro headset has been utilized in spinal surgery procedures at Cromwell Hospital in London, marking a significant step in the integration of mixed-reality technology in healthcare.
📊 Market data
Harlem Capital shared their 2023 Diverse Founder Report, spotlighting 1,256 Black and Latino startups that have each raised over $1M in venture capital, collectively raising $48.3B in funding.
For startups in 2023, the overall acquisition rate was 1.4%, peaking at 3.1% for Series B companies. Acquisition rates by series: Pre-Seed: 0.7%,Seed: 1.7%,Series A: 2.5%,Series B: 3.1%,Series C: 2.6%,Series D: 2.2%.
Meta announced two new 24,576 GPU clusters to power their latest AI models like Llama 3. By the end of 2024, Meta aims to grow their AI infrastructure to include 350,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs as part of a portfolio with compute power equivalent to nearly 600,000 H100 GPUs.