Stay ConnectedHi, I’m Eric Newcomer. With this podcast, I dive straight into the heart of the tech industry, interviewing top investors and founders. I’m bringing my sensibility as someone who understands the inside story of Silicon Valley but who is happy to poke and prod as to why the tech world operates like it does.
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We were delighted to kick off the 2nd Cerebral Valley AI Summit with Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks, and Naveen Rao, co-founder of MosaicML.
Their encounter at our debut event in March led to Ghodsi buying Rao’s company, which had little revenue, for $1.3 billion. At our event on Nov. 15, the two discussed how the deal came together quickly after meeting at the conference dinner.
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Ghodsi recounted how he started spending some time with Rao and thought, “these guys are pretty good,” and then by chance noticed an employee he respected poking around with MosaicML and offering a strong endorsement. Soon Ghodsi was on the phone with the head of his deals team, who told him “if you want to buy these guys you have to do it this weekend.” Rao said by that point “you kind of know he’s going to pop the question,” and once they worked out the money, the deal was done.
The two executives certainly seemed to be in harmony as they touted the potential benefits from their combination, which in simple terms will bring MosaicML’s expertise in building specialized generative AI models to Databricks’ corporate data platform products, essentially super-charging Databricks for the generative AI era.
They were eager to defend the idea of open-source foundation models that are specific to certain tasks, rejecting the notion that general-purpose models like ChatGPT-4 will eventually swallow everything. (This conversation took place before OpenAI was thrown into chaos by its board of directors.)
Ghodsi said calls to limit open-source models on the grounds that they’ll be too easily exploited by bad actors a “horrible, horrendous” idea that would “put a stop to all innovation.”
“It’s essential that we have an open-source ecosystem,” he said, noting that even now it’s unclear how a lot of AI models work, and open-source research will be critical to answering those questions.
Rao added that many of the people making predictions about how AI would develop are “full of s**t.” On the safety question, he noted that cost alone would stand in the way of any existential risks for a long time, and in the meantime the focus should be on real threats like disinformation and robot safety.
Give it a listen
If you could amass any five artificial intelligence startup bets right now, which companies would you pick?
My Cerebral Valley co-hosts and I took a stab at answering that question with an artificial intelligence startup draft.
Our startup draft starts at 27:35 after a discussion of some of the biggest themes going into this week’s Cerebral Valley AI Summit.
The draft gave us a chance to dissect some of the most promising startups in artificial intelligence right now.
The goal was to amass five companies with the biggest valuation five years from now. We restricted ourselves to AI startups that had raised more than $100 million.
I encourage you to make your own prediction in the comments.
Give it a listen
For this week’s episode, I spoke with Chris Miller, the author of Chip War, about the rise of Nvidia.
While OpenAI gets the lion’s share of the public adulation for the sudden excitement about generative intelligence, Nvidia’s H100 chips are powering much of the generative AI frenzy. Nvidia’s stock has climbed over 200% over the past 12 months. And the company has become a key investor in generative AI startups.
Miller (who comes on the show around the 41-minute mark) talks through Nvidia’s history and the geopolitical war raging over the production of chips.
In the first part of the episode, Cerebral Valley AI Summit co-hosts Max Child, James Wilsterman, and Idiscuss how big technology companies are working to fend off this new generation of AI startups.
Give it a listen
I’m back from my honeymoon in Japan. Thanks for sticking with the newsletter as I celebrated my wedding this year. Expect more of my newsletter writing soon.
If you have tips or story ideas for me, you can always reach out at eric@newcomer.co.
I hope you’ve been enjoying the Cerebral Valley podcast series while I’ve been gone. If you missed the first three episodes, you can check them out in the links below:
* The Cerebral Valley Podcast: Artificial Intelligence Becomes Reality
* AI Kills Us All (with Daniel H. Wilson)
* Someday That NPC Could Be More Alive Than You Are (w/ Amy Wu & Keith Kawahata)
On this week’s episode of our Cerebral Valley podcast, co-hosts Max Child, James Wilsterman, and I talk about how artificial intelligence is actually affecting our lives today.
Then at the 34:40 mark, I talk with DoNotPay CEO Joshua Browder. His company is helping consumers cancel their gym memberships, dispute charges, and otherwise stand up to big corporations.
Browder got some heat for planning to have an artificial intelligence-powered lawyer argue in court. Ultimately, he reversed course under pressure from the legal world.
Browder envisions a world where AI is fighting other AIs. Companies use artificial intelligence to power their chatbots and to handle customer support. Consumers need to be armed with similarly powerful AI-powered tools to resist those companies.
Give it a listen
Video games often represent the frontier of any new technology. Many of the most popular applications in the initial iPhone app store were games. Today’s virtual reality devices are dominated by video games.
Artificial intelligence seems poised to upend the video game business and entertainment more broadly.
On the third episode of our six-part Cerebral Valley podcast series, Max Child, James Wilsterman, and I game out how artificial intelligence could reshape the media we consume.
It helps that Max and James are the co-founders of Volley, which builds AI-enabled games. They develop many of the most popular voice games on the Amazon Alexa and smart TV platforms like Roku.
Max and James have been deep in the trenches of conversational-style gaming and have spent a lot of time thinking about how humans interact with ever smarter computers.
In the second half of the episode, I talk with Menlo Ventures partner Amy Wu, who focuses on gaming and consumer investments, and Keith Kawahata, a former executive at Wargaming, AppLovin, and Kabam, who now has a stealth artificial intelligence gaming startup.
Wu helps to articulate a three-part thesis on how artificial intelligence might change the gaming business. (1) artificial intelligence will help with the creation of the game art and graphics, (2) AI can create more sophisticated non-player characters, and (3) AI can help write the code of the game itself.
One of the things that I was struck by from the conversation is that games may have a big leg up in implementing artificial intelligence over movies — because people interact so much more with a gaming, giving it tons of data to react to. While TikToks can learn what small populations of people like and what an individual likes over a long time, a game could learn a lot about a user in a single play session.
Of course, there are real hurdles left standing. Most notably, text-to-image generation so far is mostly two-dimensional. Despite everything that’s happened, image generation models aren’t just whipping out 3-D levels that are ready to play.
And it could be a while until non-player characters are as smart as humans. But imagine playing a game of Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption and the characters roaming around the game are self-aware agents with their own thoughts and drives.
Give it a listen
P.S. I’m on my honeymoon right now in Japan. I was working frantically to record these episodes before I left. My chief of staff Riley Konsella is sending the episodes out for me while I’m gone. If you need anything while I’m away, you should email Riley.
Thanks in advance for being understanding that this newsletter is slowing down for my honeymoon. I’m going to dedicate myself to relaxing over the next two weeks so that I come back hungrier than ever.
What’s so crazy about this moment in artificial intelligence is that many of the most credible voices in AI think there’s a real chance that this all turns out really, really badly.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently pegged his “chance that something goes really quite catastrophically wrong on the scale of human civilization” between 10% and 25%.
That’s comforting.
Applications to attend the Cerebral Valley AI Summit close TODAY October 17.
Apply right now to be considered for an invitation!
On the series’ first episode we reflect on how generative artificial intelligence and large language models took Silicon Valley by storm.
So in our second episode of the six-part Cerebral Valley podcast, Max Child, James Wilsterman, and I played out the doomsday scenarios. We talked a lot about science fiction and how writers have imagined artificial intelligence turning dystopian.
In the second half of the episode, I talked with science fiction author Daniel H. Wilson. He wrote the books How to Survive a Robot Uprising, Where’s My Jetpack?, and How to Build a Robot Army. Wilson has also consulted with the military to help them game out how dystopian technologies might unfold.
Of course, even in the Anthropic CEO’s estimation, the most likely scenario is probably a more boring one: artificial intelligence doesn’t try to secretly destroy us as we sleep in our beds.
But the fact that there’s a chance is certainly worth considering.
I open our conversation with the parable “The unfinished fable of the sparrows” from Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence.
It was the nest-building season, but after days of long hard work, the sparrows sat in the evening glow, relaxing and chirping away.
“We are all so small and weak. Imagine how easy life would be if we had an owl who could help us build our nests!”
“Yes!” said another. “And we could use it to look after our elderly and our young.”
“It could give us advice and keep an eye out for the neighborhood cat,” added a third.
Then Pastus, the elder-bird, spoke: “Let us send out scouts in all directions and try to find an abandoned owlet somewhere, or maybe an egg. A crow chick might also do, or a baby weasel. This could be the best thing that ever happened to us, at least since the opening of the Pavilion of Unlimited Grain in yonder backyard.”
The flock was exhilarated, and sparrows everywhere started chirping at the top of their lungs.
Only Scronkfinkle, a one-eyed sparrow with a fretful temperament, was unconvinced of the wisdom of the endeavor. Quoth he: “This will surely be our undoing. Should we not give some thought to the art of owl-domestication and owl-taming first, before we bring such a creature into our midst?”
Replied Pastus: “Taming an owl sounds like an exceedingly difficult thing to do. It will be difficult enough to find an owl egg. So let us start there. After we have succeeded in raising an owl, then we can think about taking on this other challenge.”
“There is a flaw in that plan!” squeaked Scronkfinkle; but his protests were in vain as the flock had already lifted off to start implementing the directives set out by Pastus.
Just two or three sparrows remained behind. Together they began to try to work out how owls might be tamed or domesticated. They soon realized that Pastus had been right: this was an exceedingly difficult challenge, especially in the absence of an actual owl to practice on. Nevertheless they pressed on as best they could, constantly fearing that the flock might return with an owl egg before a solution to the control problem had been found.
Give it a listen.
P.S. I’m on my honeymoon right now in Japan. I was working frantically to record these episodes before I left. My chief of staff Riley Konsella is sending the episodes out for me while I’m gone. If you need anything while I’m away, you should email Riley.
Thanks in advance for being understanding that this newsletter is slowing down for my honeymoon. I’m going to dedicate myself to relaxing over the next two weeks so that I come back hungrier than ever.
In the past 12 months, it has felt like “AI” transformed from a pair of letters that companies affixed to their latest product announcements to get some extra marketing luster to the shorthand for a genuine technology revolution.
ChatGPT, Dall-E, Midjourney, and more showed the world what artificial intelligence is now capable of doing.
Then, the funding started pouring in for every startup that had anything to do with those two letters. Every venture firm needed to bet on their own foundational model and every startup needed to get its hands on Nvidia’s H100s to train their own foundation models.
Ahead of the 2nd Cerebral Valley AI Summit on Nov. 15, I wanted to really take stock of how we got here. So I teamed up with my conference co-hosts Max Child and James Wilsterman to bring you a six-part podcast series on the rise of generative artificial intelligence.
You can apply to attend the Cerebral Valley AI Summit here. Applications close Oct. 16.
On the series’ first episode we reflect on how generative artificial intelligence and large language models took Silicon Valley by storm.
With the help of ChatGPT, we consider the top research papers that brought us here, the most important historic milestones along the journey, the key artificial intelligence products on the market today, and how artificial intelligence is already impacting our lives.
The show is fun and and lighthearted. I hope it’s a little more accessible than the usual fodder on the Newcomer podcast. For instance, on a future Cerebral Valley episode, we’re going to do a draft pick of what we think will be the most valuable AI startups. On upcoming episodes, I interview guests like Daniel H. Wilson — author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising, Where's My Jetpack? and How to Build a Robot Army — and DoNotPay CEO Joshua Browder.
If you’ve never listened to the Newcomer podcast before, this is a good time to give it a shot. Die-hard podcast listeners will remember Max and James, who are the founders of the AI voice games company Volley, from my January episode on augmented reality.
Whether you can make it to Cerebral Valley in person or not, my hope is that this series is a solid primer as to what exactly has been going on in the business of artificial intelligence. I follow this stuff super closely and until we got organized for this podcast series there was so much that I hadn’t learned.
I know most of you won’t be able to come to the conference in person, but there will be a virtual conference in this newsletter. We will publish recordings from the summit on our YouTube channel and send out some of our favorites over the podcast feed. So this is your lively refresher on all the crazy stuff that happened in Silicon Valley artificial intelligence startups this year.
Give it a listen.
Apply to attend the Cerebral Valley AI Summit here. Applications close Oct. 16.
P.S. I’m on my honeymoon right now in Japan. I was working frantically to record these episodes before I left. My chief of staff Riley Konsella is sending the episodes out for me while I’m gone. If you need anything while I’m away, you should email Riley.
Thanks in advance for being understanding that this newsletter is slowing down for my honeymoon. I’m going to dedicate myself to relaxing over the next two weeks so that I come back hungrier than ever.
I brought two top Silicon Valley entrepreneurs working on extending lifespans on the Newcomer podcast this week.
One of them is trying to help people live longer. The other, their dogs.
James Peyer, the CEO of Cambrian Bio, is acquiring majority stakes in drugs that could combat a particular illness while showing promise for broader use among healthy humans. Meanwhile, Celine Halioua, the CEO of Loyal, is developing drugs to make dogs live longer.
Fundamentally life extension, or longevity, is about finding drugs and treatments that can be given to healthy humans to help them live longer, healthier lives. Instead of just treating illnesses, entrepreneurs in the space want to find ways to stave off aging in already healthy people.
The space has long been a fascination of mine. In February 2022, I profiled Elad Gil’s investments in an array of companies looking to make healthy humans live longer, healthier lives.
The HBO show Silicon Valley helped popularize the idea that Silicon Valley elites were pumping their veins with younger people’s blood. (I’ve yet to get anyone to confess to me that they’re buying plasma.)
To the chagrin of this week’s guests, one tech mogul desperate to avoid death has received a lot of the attention recently. That’s Braintree founder Bryan Johnson.
Time magazine just profiled Johnson under the headline “The Man Who Thinks He Can Live Forever.”
Johnson, 46, is a centimillionaire tech entrepreneur who has spent most of the last three years in pursuit of a singular goal: don’t die. During that time, he’s spent more than $4 million developing a life-extension system called Blueprint, in which he outsources every decision involving his body to a team of doctors, who use data to develop a strict health regimen to reduce what Johnson calls his “biological age.” That system includes downing 111 pills every day, wearing a baseball cap that shoots red light into his scalp, collecting his own stool samples, and sleeping with a tiny jet pack attached to his penis to monitor his nighttime erections. Johnson thinks of any act that accelerates aging—like eating a cookie, or getting less than eight hours of sleep—as an “act of violence.”
Even as Johnson is getting a lot of attention for his self-experimentation, there’s a growing view that there could be something credible behind Silicon Valley’s interest in life extension. The Economist just wrote that “slowing human ageing is now the subject of serious research.”
Many in mainstream science and medicine look at all this slightly askance. That is understandable. It is an area which attracts chancers and charlatans as well as those with more decent motives, and its history is littered with “breakthroughs” that have led more or less nowhere. America’s Food and Drug Administration does not recognise “old age” as a disease state, and thus as a suitable target for therapy. Nevertheless, evidence has been accumulating that such research might have something to offer.
Some established drugs really do seem to extend life, at least in mice. That offers both the possibility that they might do so in people and some insight into the processes involved. The ever-greater ease with which genes can be edited helps such investigations, as does access to large amounts of gene-sequence data. The ability to produce personalised stem cells, which stay forever young, has opened up new therapeutic options. And new diagnostic tools are now offering scientists means to calculate the “biological ages” of bodies and organs and compare them with actual calendar ages. In principle this allows longevity studies to achieve convincing results in less than a lifetime.
I dug in with Halioua and Peyer about where they saw the most opportunities, how their own companies were progressing, and why they thought Johnson’s publicity campaign was doing a disservice to companies working on longevity.
The duo helped break down the space, discussing which types of companies they think are innovators, which efforts are more speculative moonshots, and which ones are simply snake oil.
Give it a listen.
Chris Lehane was once the consummate Democratic spin man and campaign wonk. He introduced the world to the vast right-wing conspiracy against the Clintons.
In 2015, Lehane dove into the high-growth startup world. He joined Airbnb to run policy and communications. He taught the home sharing company how to fight nicely with cities, dishing out data and tax cooperation in exchange for favorable local regulations. Unlike Uber’s confrontational approach that had it going to war with Bill de Blasio in New York City, Airbnb tried to foster a cozy relationship with urban policymakers.Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky and President Barack Obama built a tight relationship.
A year ago, just as the crypto winter was starting, Lehane joined Katie Haun’s self-named venture fund, which had raised $1.5 billion. Haun Ventures positioned itself as a leader in regulation, policy, and communications. Haun is a former assistant U.S. attorney. Rachael Horwitz, the firm’s chief marketing officer, once ran communications for Coinbase. And Lehane brought the political experience, especially with Democrats.
But there’s only so much one firm can do to change crypto’s reputation in Washington, especially with Democrats. Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of FTX, had become the crypto world’s standard bearer with Democrats, donating to their campaigns and speaking to their values. Then when Bankman-Fried’s empire unraveled and he headed to jail, many Democrats grew disillusioned with crypto.
This year, two Republican-led House committees moved forward crypto-friendly legislation that would clarify the regulation of crypto currencies and give the Commodities Futures Trading Commission more power to regulate crypto (denying the SEC some of that power). Meanwhile, the Biden appointed SEC chair Gary Gensler has sued crypto exchange Coinbase and Binance for failing to register their exchanges with the SEC.
I invited Lehane on the Newcomer podcast to take stock of crypto’s status in Washington. We talked about the bills working their way through Congress, the SEC lawsuits, and the crypto winter. Lehane and I also talked about how he believed that America needed to embrace a “common sector” that served as a hybrid between government regulation and corporate self-regulation. Think Airbnb data sharing with cities or Facebook’s oversight board. We also commiserated over co-existing with Silicon Valley Republicans in the MAGA era.
I spend most of my time here talking about how people earn their money.
Rey Flemings, the chief executive of the YC-backed startup Myria, is an expert at helping people spend it.
For several years, Flemings ran a luxury services consultancy for family offices. In other words, he threw parties in Las Vegas, introduced billionaires to celebrities, rented out private mansions, and helped people acquire things money can’t usually buy.
These days, Flemings is building a startup around the same concept. Letting rich people buy what isn’t on the market. He’s building a marketplace for off-market travel and accommodations. On top of that, he’s spinning up a social network for the ultra wealthy.
Flemings says his average member’s net worth is about $600 million.
I sat down with Flemings to talk about his startup and to understand how Silicon Valley’s most successful people are spending the fantastical sums that they’ve earned in the past few years.
He warned about the unhappiness that sudden fortune can bring, calling it “the success condition.”
We’re all humans. We’re all chasing the American Dream. We’re all chasing success. And when you achieve it, one of the first discoveries that people are shocked by is that you have to pump the brakes. Money doesn’t buy happiness. I was talking with a new client the other day and he said, “Ray, I can’t talk about this publicly, the world would play the world’s smallest violin, but the day I exited triggered the deepest and greatest period of depression in my life.”
Give it a listen.
Highlighted Excerpts
The transcript has been edited for clarity.
There is a phenomenon in Silicon Valley where someone suddenly becomes rich, especially when their entire net worth is tied up in a startup. Finally, they sell the company and now have all this money, but don't really know how to be wealthy or what to buy. What typically happens when somebody sells their company for a billion dollars and gets 300 million of it?
Rey Flemings: First of all, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer, right? We’re different. Significant, sudden, great wealth does come with a particular set of challenges. Zooming out across 15-17 years in this space and looking at all of the folks that work here, zoom all the way out. Let’s just focus on first-generation people who are operating a business and/or they’re doing something presently to amass that wealth. I’ve worked with probably 100-125 folks in that category. I hear the same things over and over, so often that we have even coined a name for it — we call it the Success Condition.
It goes something like this: We’re all humans. We’re all chasing the American Dream. We’re all chasing success. And when you achieve it, one of the first discoveries that people are shocked by is that you have to pump the brakes. Money doesn’t buy happiness. I was talking with a new client the other day and he said, “Ray, I can’t talk about this publicly, the world would play the world’s smallest violin, but the day I exited triggered the deepest and greatest period of depression in my life.”
What ends up happening is we chase the American Dream only to realize it and then we’re like “Wait, why am I not happy? What’s missing here?”
Rich people get sad, depressed and commit suicide just like anyone else. Studies show that beyond about $100,000 a year, any more money doesn’t actually contribute to human happiness. The wealthier and more successful you become, the harder it is to form close interpersonal relationships with people that aren’t in your network.
Break down what was the motivation to do Y Combinator and build more of a tech platform for Myria?
Rey: Fantastic question, Eric. I’d love to sound like I had this all planned out and was so smart with so much foresight. I knew I wanted to build a scalable business with my background. But when I started The Blue, I ran it for 5-6 years before we could start Myria. It was complicated. How do you scale services? Many say you can’t scale services. If so, what do you scale and how? How do you keep customers happy who want white glove service and personalization? How do you provide that special touch at scale? These are really hard problems to solve.
I grew that business bootstrapped to about $60 million GMV annually. If you do that, you stay busy. I didn’t know my kids, family, or myself. I was always on a plane, just work, work, work. That’s not sustainable.
At least you get to go to parties sometimes?
Rey: Yeah, almost always in that business. I just celebrated my 50th birthday. I don’t have to tell you I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life on a plane in a suit. That’s no way to live.
It turns out that when we started Myria, we asked clients what they wanted. Ninety-two percent of requests fell into just three categories.
People wanted our global travel product — not just booking a flight or kayak to Toledo. Really crazy, experiential travel beyond a private jet. When you get off the private jet, what happens? The best things in the world you can’t find on Google. If you can’t search for them, how do you know what’s on the menu? There’s a whole universe of off-market awesomeness in every category, but no one tells you about them because they aren’t online.
Travel experiences, people, and assets. When you’re running a big company, you have an amazing team. When you hit $300 million net worth, you probably move to a single family office with teams managing your wealth. But for your personal life, even with household employees, you want to relax at home. A person worth $3 billion wouldn’t run their company with one person, but their personal life becomes a multi-billion dollar enterprise with homes, kids, divorce, assets everywhere. Assistants work hard but can’t be experts in everything billionaires need help in.
We asked clients what they wanted and 92% of requests were in three categories. Also, there are about 20 markets ultra wealthy care about. If we have great coverage in those categories in those markets, we’ve covered nearly all use cases.
I’ve always wondered — if I’m at Bezos’ level of wealth, do I try to get everybody who interacts with me to sign an NDA? Especially if I’m out partying on a yacht, is everybody at that party signing something to keep things confidential?
Rey: On the Myria platform, everyone who sells to our members is automatically under binding arbitration. The wealthy are targets for frivolous litigation. We try to prevent that.
In real life, if you’re hosting a party, many will request or demand NDAs and lock up phones, like Dave Chappelle style with magnetically locked bags. I think that’s good considering phone addiction. You’ve thrown a million dollar party for people’s enjoyment but they just look at their phones. But there are gaps. I can share a horror story.
We did an expensive, innocent party at an incredible estate with famous people relaxing and having fun — nothing unprintable. But no one wanted cameras in their face while relaxing Someone who signed the NDA went to the press implying we discriminated by only having women sign NDAs, not the men. The men were dear friends of the client, so they didn't have to sign. Sometimes NDAs can backfire.
Do you require NDAs for everything?
Rey: We try to on the platform but nothing substitutes for having a good group of trustworthy people, which is harder as you become more successful. It’s become a sport to vilify the rich, making it harder to form close relationships outside your network.
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