#AI#GenerativeAI#VCs#CashingOut#AIHype#SPVs: "VCs are clamoring to invest in hot AI companies, willing to pay exorbitant share prices for coveted spots on their cap tables. Even so, most aren’t able to get into such deals at all. Yet, small, unknown investors, including family offices and high-net-worth individuals, have found their own way to get shares of the hottest private startups like Anthropic, Groq, OpenAI, Perplexity, and Elon Musk’s X.ai (the makers of Grok).
They are using special purpose vehicles, or SPVs, where multiple parties pool their money to share an allocation of a single company. SPVs are generally formed by investors who have direct access to the shares of these startups and then turn around and sell a part of their allocation to external backers, often charging significant fees while retaining some profit share (known as carry).
While SPVs aren’t new – smaller investors have relied on them for years – there’s a growing trend of SPVs successfully getting shares from the biggest names in AI.
These investors are finding that the most popular AI companies, except OpenAI, are not all that hard for them to buy at their smaller levels of investing."
"'[…] #git was created as a tool to unblock future #Linux#kernel releases — not intended as a global reinvention of all source code management; Linus’s comments highlight that he explicitly saw source code management as the domain of other tools that would then interface with git. […]'"
I bought the new #Atari#VCS konsole and just tried it out.
The enclosed 10-game cartridge works properly. But the console seems not compatible with #Atari7800 carts and does not suppart the Harnoniy SD cartridge. How disappointing!
#a16z#VCs#AI#GenerativeAI#GeneratedImages#Deepfakes: "Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z, the influential Silicon Valley venture capital firm that was an early investor in Facebook, Lyft, and other tech giants, has invested in Civitai, a giant platform for sharing AI models that enables and profits from the creation of AI generated nonconsensual sexual images of real people. That includes launching a feature where people can list “bounties” for others to create AI models of specific targets.
Civitai said that it raised $5.1 million in a seed funding round led by a16z.
A16z’s official website, which includes a jobs board with open positions at companies in its portfolio, currently lists five jobs at Civitai. According to a16z’s site, these jobs were posted more than 30 days ago."
#Fascism#SiliconValley#VCs#LongTermism#Accelerationism: "The manifesto is grounded in some eyebrow-raising associations, including fascists and reactionaries. Andreesen lists the "patron saints" of techno-optimism, and they include Nick Land, one of the chief architects of modern "accelerationism" who is better known as championing the anti-democratic Dark Enlightenment movement that casts liberal-multicultural-democratic thinking as embodying a nefarious "Cathedral." Andreessen also calls out Filippo Tommaso Marinetti as one of his patron saints. Marinetti is not only the author of the technology- and destruction-worshipping Futurist Manifesto from 1909, but also one of the architects of Italian fascism. Marinetti co-authored the Fascist Manifesto in 1919 and founded a futurist political party that merged with Mussolini's fascists. Other futurist thinkers and artists exist. To call Marinetti in particular a "saint" is a choice.
None of this is new or shocking in itself. What is notable is that the rant is being posted unabridged on the blog of a major Silicon Valley venture capital firm, and parroted obediently and uncritically by the mainstream tech press. It gives further weight to viewing effective accelerationism—and its counterparts, “effective altruism” and “longtermism”—as the official ideology of Silicon Valley."
#AI#AIRegulation#VCs#SiliconValley: "This is not going to stop anyone from calling me a “decel” but I want to state the obvious: Andreessen is fighting a strawman. Like most reasonable human beings, I’m a big fan of “technology” as an abstract concept. I love hammers, my Nintendo Switch, and indoor plumbing, all of which fit under that very large umbrella term. I am also all for the idea that technology can empower people, and that it is possible for it to make the future better than the present and past. Technology can make us healthier, live longer, and have more free time to do things we want most. We can lift more people around the world out of poverty, and empower them to create and enrich all of us. It can do all those things, maybe, should we choose to build it toward that end.
But, as the effective accelerationists love to point out, technology is just a tool. We can build nuclear power plants or nuclear bombs. We can use Facebook to connect, or incite violence. Text-to-image AI tools can allow people to instantly create any image they can imagine, but they can also be used to create non-consensual pornography and racist propaganda with previously unimaginable speed. AI can help us make self-driving cars, but in reality the machine vision technology that powers it is mostly used for surveillance that is biased against minorities.
How we deploy any technology is the result of a bigger conversation between private business, the government, and users, and other stakeholders, a term Andreessen loathes. What he is arguing for is that this conversation can only take place in the “markets,” which favors venture capitalists like him over others."
I’ve had an idea for a few yrs to open a grocery store where everything is organic, sustainable and available in bulk, from laundry soap to pickles. Shoppers could have their glass and steel containers sanitized on site for re-use. No plastic. You just return with your containers. Then I’d franchise the whole operation.
I teach #entrepreneurship and yet with all of my crafty ideas (some I’ve later seen done by others) I never have time to pursue!
@shekinahcancook Thanks! I think so too. I ran it casually by a couple of #VCs I know who just shrugged. “Logistics,” one said. “You’re smart. Just come up with an app and save yourself the headaches,” said another. 🙄
Not sure a #crowdfunding campaign could support such an expensive endeavor.
VCs can be shortsighted. I ran the idea of period panties by a group of them in 2012. They scoffed. Guess what happened next? I cried so hard.
Auch wir stehen hinter dem Referendum gegen den wahnsinnigen #Autobahn-Ausbau, der für 5 Milliarden Franken noch mehr zerstörerischen Verkehr in die Stadt führen soll.
Unterschreib jetzt das Referendum und unterstütze @umverkehr und #VCS beim Sammeln: https://www.autobahnwahn.ch
Remember #Patreon set up new on-by-default sharing of your account information with every other Patreon user (and maybe the world)? Remember people posting how to turn it off, because they were using confusing language/dark patterns to try to #trick you into oversharing?
I got the "welcome to the new Patreon" today, and ... they've turned the "Community Profile" setting back on after I deliberately turned it off.
"We gotta get our #engagement numbers up somehow, so the #VCs will give us more #money and maybe help us get to our #IPO, so we can retire #rich".
Ya, by #spamming your users? Jebus, don't they have at least one #adult in the room to ride herd on the ninny #MBAs that make these kinds of #stupid decisions?
“I’m not confident in even their ability to deal with the old types of threats,” said David Evan Harris, an AI researcher and ethics adviser to the Psychology of Technology Institute, who previously worked on responsible AI at Facebook-parent Meta. “And now there are new threats.”
The major platforms told CNN they have existing policies and practices in place related to misinformation and, in some cases, specifically targeting “synthetic” or computer-generated content, that they say will help them identify and address any AI-generated misinformation. None of the companies agreed to make anyone working on generative AI detection efforts available for an interview.
The platforms “haven’t been ready in the past, and there’s absolutely no reason for us to believe that they’re going to be ready now,” Bhaskar Chakravorti, dean of global business at The Fletcher School at Tufts University, told CNN."
@remixtures
Considering politicians are still struggling with #socialmedia expecting meaningful results around #AI seems optimistic. I am assuming this is why so many of the #VCs calling for restrictions think they can play them and encourage increased barriers to entry now they have established a nascent market
#BigTech#SiliconValley#VCs "Tech bros appear to be especially susceptible to brain-rotting contrarianism. As I wrote in my newsletter, their financial success all too often convinces them that they’re uniquely brilliant, able to instantly master any subject, without any need to consult people who’ve actually worked hard to understand the issues. And in many cases they became wealthy by defying conventional wisdom, which predisposes them to believe that such defiance is justified across the board.
Add to this the fact that great wealth makes it all too easy to surround yourself with people who tell you what you want to hear, validating your belief in your own brilliance — a sort of intellectual version of the emperor’s new clothes.
And to the extent that contrarian tech bros talk to anyone else, it’s to one another. The tech entrepreneur and writer Anil Dash tells us that “it’s impossible to overstate the degree to which many big tech C.E.O.s and venture capitalists are being radicalized by living within their own cultural and social bubble.” He calls this phenomenon of venture capitalism “VC QAnon,” a concept that I find helps explain many of the strange positions taken by tech billionaires lately."
#UK#Crypto#Cryptocurrencies#VCs#a16z: "That might be where the U.K., especially under an increasingly desperate Sunak, comes in. The U.K. has not harmonized with the EU on MiCA and is actively deharmonizing on various other financial regulations.
The problem for Sunak and his Conservative government is that the U.K. is not doing well. The British economy took severe damage from Brexit, but retreating from Brexit would alienate the Tory base. Rampant inflation has outstripped wages, leading to widespread industrial unrest. Inequality is increasing: The Trussell Trust, the single largest organizer of food banks in the U.K., reported in April that more than 760,000 people had used a food bank for the first time in the last year.
The opposition Labour Party has consistently polled 10 to 20 points ahead of the Tories since early 2022, even without clear policies. Culture wars and jingoism aren’t turning the tide for the Conservatives. They’re desperate to find something, anything, in time for the 2024 election. They know they need a miracle."
Many people seem to agree that part of what makes #git (& #dvcs in general) so difficult to get a really effective handle on is that applying patches is a lot like working with pre-processor macros (ie #define in #C), and that there oughta be a more well-bounded, lexically concise means of code collaboration to establish. But the only work I've seen in this direction is Arun Isaac's tree-diff[1]. #TreeSitter[2] seems like a tool that can greatly ease experimentation in this direction, but what other work has been done on this problem?
Gopher2600 Release v0.31.0 (github.com)
Gopher2600 is an emulator for the Atari 2600 games console...
EMU7800 Release v5.4.0.1 (github.com)
Classic Atari 2600 and 7800 games emulator...
Emu7800 Release (github.com)
Classic Atari 2600 and 7800 games...
Gopher2600 Release v0.26.2b (github.com)
Gopher2600 is an emulator for the Atari 2600 games console...
emu7800 - Release v5.4.0.0 (github.com)
Classic Atari 2600 and 7800 games...
Gopher2600 Release v0.26.0 (github.com)
Changes from v0.25.0...
Gopher2600 Release v0.25.0 (github.com)
Changes from v0.24.2...