Will's Weekly Roundup

March 13th - 19th

Will Sullivan
March 20, 2023

Will's Weekly Roundup is a weekly newsletter of curated tech, business, and startup news (and what I'm thinking about).

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Headlines

The tech and business headlines you missed (or need to see again)...

Chick-fil-A is planning a $1B Asia/Europe expansion. LINK

EndeavorRx, the first video game to treat ADHD, was approved by the FDA. LINK

Ryan Reynolds sold Mint Mobile for $1.35 billion to T-Mobile. LINK

Meta is laying off 10,000 employees in their latest round of staff cuts. LINK

Payments giant Stripe raised $6.5 billion at a $50 billion valuation. LINK

Microsoft announced Copilot, a modern AI assistant that will help Microsoft 365 users create Office documents. LINK

The world’s first mRNA vaccine against a deadly plague bacteria is 100% effective. LINK

Insulin prices have risen over 600% in the past 20 years, with 14% of US insulin users spending at least 40% of their income on the drug. LINK

FDA approved a new nasal spray to treat migraine headaches in adults. LINK

U.S. officials demand that ByteDance sells TikTok because of security concerns. LINK

Amazon plans to test a satellite internet service starting next year. LINK

SpaceX Starlink rolls out a $200 per month 'global' satellite internet package. LINK

NASA unveils new spacesuits that astronauts will wear on the next Moon mission. LINK

Mark Zuckerberg says engineers who joined Meta "in-person" perform better than those who joined remotely. LINK

The White House approved an $8B Alaska oil project. LINK

Amazon and Rivian will revise their exclusive EV delivery truck deal. LINK

Ideas

Some ideas I'm thinking about...

St. Patrick’s Day - With about 33 million people of Irish descent in the US, St. Patrick's Day is understandably a big deal. Interestingly, the population of Ireland is only 5 million. LINK

AI-Generated PowerPoints - Beautiful AI creates an entire PowerPoint slide given only a text prompt. LINK

A more practical Duolingo - Toucan is a browser extension that automatically translates select words and phrases on web pages into your target language, allowing you to learn within the context of a familiar language. LINK

Time-Based Internet - The internet will likely evolve to include time as a crucial dimension, with specific apps and networks only being available during designated hours - like BeReal or the dating app 'Thursday' (which is only available to use on Thursdays). LINK

Upgrade to Instant Ramen - Immi Eats has released a new instant ramen line with 21g protein, 6g net carbs, and is 100% plant-based. LINK

Nuke a Tweet - MegaBlock lets you nuke a Tweet. Don't like a bad tweet? Block the Tweet, its author, and every single person who liked it—in one click. LINK

Apple Commercials - The production quality of Apple Commercials is incredible. Here’s a recent one for the new AirPods Pro. LINK

Dave Ramsey - Dave Ramsey is the Dr. Phil of money. LINK

Renting & Income - 3 million U.S. households making over $150k are still renting. LINK

ChatGTP

ChatGTP-4, the latest version of ChatGTP, was released earlier this week.

Currently, the only way to use GTP-4 is to pay for OpenAI’s $20/month “ChatGTP Plus” subscription. However, a 3rd party will likely make GTP-4 accessible for free shortly.

Here are some details on GTP-4 and how it compares to GTP-3. LINK

Larger Word Limit - GPT-4 has a much larger word limit than GPT-3 at 25,000 words vs just 3,000. That means you can feed it large amounts of documentation as input, or ask it to generate large amounts of text as output.

Unknown Training Method & Data Size - OpenAI, the maker of ChatGTP, did not disclose how large the training model (the data that is powering the technology) is nor how they trained their model.

GTP-3 is Sometimes Still Preferred - 30% of people still prefer the answer outputs of GTP-3.5 over the new ChatGTP-4.

Foreign Language Improvement - GTP-4 is better in languages like Spanish and Italian than other AI models are in English.

Photo Inputs - GPT-4 understands photos. It can even turn a rough sketch into a working website.

Bar Exam Performance - GTP-4 performed in the 90th percentile on the Bar Exam instead of the 10th with GTP-3.

Improved Factual Accuracy - GTP-4 is about 20% more factually accurate than GTP-3.

Data Stops in 2021 - All the data GTP-4 is trained on stops on September 2021, which means it doesn't know what happened in the world after that date.