💣 Is AI akin to the Atom Bomb?

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Greetings, fellow humans. 👋

This is Not A Bot - the newsletter about AI that was definitely not written by AI. I’m Haroon, CEO of Autoblocks and founder of AI For Anyone, and I share the latest news, tools, and resources from the AI space.

Happy Monday! I asked ChatGPT to give me some cat poster-esque Monday motivation - it came up with "Start your week off on the right paw!"

Not too shabby, but still some work to do there.

Let’s dive into it…

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🧵 In today's edition:

• 💣 Is AI akin to the Atom Bomb?

• 👂Cochlear wants to be heard

• 🤑 ChatGPT ain’t cheap

• 💰️ AI Fundraising News

🤖 Top AI News

💣 Is AI akin to the Atom Bomb?

This past weekend, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger hosted their annual Berkshire Hathaway investor meeting, and they spoke on a variety of topics:

• US currency and its role in the global reserve

• How Apple is the literal 🐐

• Diversification and how to do it right

But the one that caught our attention (obviously) was their thoughts on AI. Munger hit us with a one-and-done statement, saying that he’s “skeptical” about the hype surrounding AI, considering "old-fashioned intelligence works pretty well."

The Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett, gave us a little more nuance, stating that he was quite impressed with AI’s ability to perform certain tasks but is apprehensive about the technology and its implications for the future. What took the cake was his comparison of AI to the creation of the atomic bomb - yikes!

That’s quite a bombastic comparison to be made, but not one that should shock us anymore.

While some tech billionaires and luminaries have sung praises for AI, others have voiced concerns about the rapid advancement of the space, signing petitions or simply sharing the worst-case scenarios surrounding the tech.

What does the future hold? Only time will tell.

Read more: NDTV

👂Cochlear wants to be heard

At the risk of sounding repetitive and boring, let’s do this one elevator-pitch style.

The problem: Hearing loss is a growing problem. Currently, ~1.5B suffer from it, and it’s predicted that 1 in 10 people will have some degree of hearing loss by 2050. It’s the 3rd most common chronic illness and causes a 3-5x increased risk of dementia. 

Most of the solutions today are of the “one-size-fits-all” variety, leading to a 46% increase in healthcare costs.

The Opportunity (“why now?”): Technology has advanced to the point where these issues can have effective solutions at a low cost. We are, of course, talking about AI.

The Solution: Enter Cochlear. Cochlear is working with Google to “improve existing hearing-assistance technologies” by developing new solutions for folks experiencing hearing loss. They plan to use AI to help “identify, categorize, and segregate sound sources,” which will help eliminate background noise and make sounds clearer. This will be particularly useful for people in busy environments, such as restaurants or music concerts, helping people follow conversations in crowded rooms.

Sharks, if this were a startup, would you invest?

Read more: WIRED

🤑 ChatGPT ain’t cheap

Money might not be growing on trees just yet for OpenAI and the prodigal ChatGPT.

According to The Information, OpenAI’s losses reached $540 million last year in its pursuit to develop ChatGPT, almost double the previous year.

Where is the money going?

• OpenAI hired top AI minds nationwide to make ChatGPT a success. That could not have been cheap.

• The chatbot needs some serious computing power. Dylan Patel, chief analyst SemiAnalysis, estimated that it could cost OpenAI around $700,000 per day to run ChatGPT.

That’s a lot of dough. Despite these costs, OpenAI is projected to do $200M in revenue this year and $1B by 2024.

The numbers make sense, given the backing of Microsoft, as well as the introduction of ChatGPT+ and ChatGPT Business. It also helps that they are the fastest-growing consumer app in history!

Sam believes that OpenAI will be the most “capital-intensive startup” in Silicon Valley history. With all the recent advancements in AI since the start of the year, what’s the over/under on total costs for FY23?

Let us know your thoughts in the comments or by replying to this email!

Read more: Yahoo Finance

🤑 AI Fundraising News

BioCatch, a behavioral biometric intelligence and fraud detection company, secures a $40 Million minority stake Investment from Permira Growth.

Nashville-based GoodShip raises $5 million in seed funding. GoodShip's platform consolidates and contextualizes shippers' data to streamline business check-ins and drive cost savings and performance improvements.

🗞️ Byte size: AI article summaries

Disclaimer: AI is (partially) used to summarize these articles.

Google Bard might be coming to Pixel phones as a widget [Mashable] - Google is reportedly developing a home screen widget for Bard, which may offer more features than the current Bard chatbot available on web browsers. The Bard widget is expected to be integrated into Android in the near future, but the feature's purpose has yet to be announced. (Read more)

Amazon quietly acquired audio content discovery engine Snackable AI to boost its podcast projects [TechCrunch] - Amazon acquired Snackable AI, a New York-based audio content discovery engine, last December to improve its podcast projects. Snackable AI specialized in using AI-generated chapters and highlights to provide an "at a glance" view of content and raised $3.1 million in funding before being acquired by Amazon. (Read more)

🐦️ Tweet of the day

Some of these are really quite crazy 🤯 

And that does it for today's issue.

As always, thanks for reading. Have a great day, and see you next time! ✌️

— Haroon: (definitely) Not A Robot and @haroonchoudery on Twitter