Tippets #187
Sora, chip fundraising, loneliness, and more. Enjoy!
A warm welcome to new readers getting this for the first time, and thank you for letting me be a small part of your week! As a reminder, I’m Rishi Taparia, Co-founder and General Partner at Garuda Ventures, a pre-seed focused fund partnering with founders to pull the future into the present. Tippets is a curated set of tidbits and snippets (get it…tippets…) from my reading around the web.
Tippets from Around the Web:
OpenAI’s newest model Sora can generate videos — and they look decent
The AI race keeps accelerating, my head keeps spinning, and it’s admittedly a very fun time to be working with companies at the bleeding edge of technology.
OpenAI, following in the footsteps of startups like Runway and tech giants like Google and Meta, is getting into video generation….OpenAI today unveiled Sora, a generative AI model that creates video from text. Given a brief — or detailed — description or a still image, Sora can generate 1080p movie-like scenes with multiple characters, different types of motion and background details, OpenAI claims…Sora can also “extend” existing video clips — doing its best to fill in the missing details.
(4-minute read - TechCrunch)
Masayoshi Son Seeks to Build a $100 Billion AI Chip Venture
Chips are a big deal, and I don’t mean the potato kind. Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO) is seeking $7 trillion (with a T…yes…) to overhaul the global semiconductor industry. And Softback CEO Masayoshi Son seeks to do the same.
SoftBank Group Corp. founder Masayoshi Son is seeking as much as $100 billion to bankroll a chip venture to compete with Nvidia Corp. and supply semiconductors essential for AI, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
Code-named Izanagi, the project marks the billionaire’s next big endeavor as SoftBank sharply curtails startup investments. Son envisions creating a company that can complement chip design unit Arm Holdings Plc and allow the billionaire to build an AI chip powerhouse, said the people, who requested anonymity because the discussions remain private. In one scenario being considered, SoftBank would provide $30 billion, with $70 billion possibly coming from institutions in the Middle East, one of the people said.
Side note on Masa: I really do wonder how pissed he is about WeWork…
(4-minute read - Bloomberg)
Nat Friedman Embraces AI to Translate the Herculaneum Papyri
Nat Friedman launched a challenge to “solve the problem of the Herculaneum Papyri, a library of scrolls that were flash-fried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD”. It worked.
The Herculaneum papyri are a collection of scrolls whose status among classicists approaches the mythical. The scrolls were buried inside an Italian countryside villa by the same volcanic eruption in 79 A.D. that froze Pompeii in time. To date, only about 800 have been recovered from the small portion of the villa that’s been excavated. But it’s thought that the villa, which historians believe belonged to Julius Caesar’s prosperous father-in-law, had a huge library that could contain thousands or even tens of thousands more. Such a haul would represent the largest collection of ancient texts ever discovered, and the conventional wisdom among scholars is that it would multiply our supply of ancient Greek and Roman poetry, plays and philosophy by manyfold. High on their wish lists are works by the likes of Aeschylus, Sappho and Sophocles, but some say it’s easy to imagine fresh revelations about the earliest years of Christianity.
Friedman and his academic partner Brent Seales, a computer science professor and scroll expert, plan to reveal that a group of contestants has delivered transcriptions of many more than four passages from one of the scrolls. While it’s early to draw any sweeping conclusions from this bit of work, Friedman says he’s confident that the same techniques will deliver far more of the scrolls’ contents. “My goal,” he says, “is to unlock all of them.”
(16-minute read - Bloomberg)
Inventing the Perfect College Applicant
I knew that people paid a lot of money to help their kids get into college. I definitely didn’t know it was a $2.9B industry! A great look into the business of college application consulting, parental anxiety, and what it takes to get into college today.
For the past nine years, Rim, 28, has been working as an “independent education consultant,” helping the one percent navigate the increasingly competitive college-admissions process — the current round of which ends in February. He started by editing college essays from his Yale dorm room for $50 an hour but now charges the parents of his company’s 190 clients — mostly private-school kids, many of them in New York — $120,000 a year to help them create a narrative he believes will appeal to college-admissions officers.
(30-minute read - NYMag - thanks to Tippets reader Tony J. for the recommendation!)
Why Americans Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out
Intuitively it feels like loneliness is on the rise. This is a well-researched read detailing the “Why” behind the intuition.
The rise of aloneness is a part of the erosion of America’s social infrastructure. Someone once told me that the best definition of community is “where people keep showing up.”…Face-to-face rituals and customs are pulling on our time less, and face-to-screen technologies are pulling on our attention more. The inevitable result is a hang-out depression.
(9-minute read - The Atlantic)
Quote I'm thinking about: “Many people reach a point where they realize that the shape their life has taken does not square with the ambitions they once had for it.” John Valiant
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Thanks to Diana B. for the inspiration to get back to doing Tippets again!