- Will's Weekly Roundup
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- Will's Weekly Roundup
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)...
Apple - Apple is finally launching 'Apple Pay Later.' LINK
Bitcoin - Bitcoin’s correlation with stocks is at its lowest since 2021. LINK
Eggs - America’s biggest egg producer sees 718% profit increase. LINK
AMC - Amazon held talks about buying the movie theater chain AMC. LINK
Airbnb - A major decline in Airbnb bookings ('The Airbnbust') proves the wild west days of online vacation rentals might be over, even though last year was Airbnb’s first profitable year ever. LINK
TikTok - ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, is pushing their Instagram competitor Lemon8. Is this ByteDance’s backup plan if TikTok gets banned in the US? LINK
Apple - Apple reportedly demoed their mixed-reality headset to executives in the Steve Jobs Theater last week. LINK
Asia - Private equity deals in Asia plunged 44% in 2022. LINK
Twitter - Elon Musk reportedly halved Twitter’s valuation in an internal memo. LINK
Employment - Half of all American employees have a side hustle. LINK
Brady - Tom Brady acquired part ownership of the WNBA's Las Vegas Aces. LINK
IKEA - A Russian special purpose vehicle, Invest Plus, is nearing a deal to buy IKEA’s largest Russian factory. LINK
3D-Printing - The US will soon be home to the world’s first 3D-printed hotel. LINK
Gates - Bill Gates recently published a 7-page letter about AI. Here are the takeaways. LINK
Plastics - Scientists created a new recyclable plastic not made from crude oil. LINK
Metaverse - Disney is shutting down their metaverse division. LINK
Space - Lockheed Martin is launching a lunar-infrastructure division, with the mission of providing communications for Moon missions. LINK
Risk - 12 charts that explain financial risk. LINK
Layoffs - Disney will begin laying off 7,000 employees. LINK
Sports - Monarch Collective raises $100 million to fund women's pro sports. LINK
Twitter - Twitter says source code was leaked on GitHub, and now it’s trying to find the culprit. LINK
Neuralink - Elon Musk’s brain chip company Neuralink is seeking a partner for clinical trials. LINK
Ideas
Some ideas I'm thinking about...
Attention is the new oil. - The new war is over distribution, and there’s a formula to build a distribution machine. LINK
Best Pitch Decks - 12 pitch decks that raised $17.8 Billion. LINK
Putting Sails back on Ships - Norse Power is a company bringing sails back to the shipping industry with a new onboard wind power solution. LINK
Smart Basketball Hoops - Huupe is the world's first smart basketball hoop. LINK
Newsletters - You only need to be slightly ahead on information to create value for other people with an email newsletter. LINK
Tool for Zoom - If your team uses Zoom, you need this AI tool called Grain. LINK
Delivery Robots - Serve Robotics has launched autonomous delivery robots that look like shopping carts. LINK
Lawn Care - Irrigreen is a lawn irrigation system that digitally maps out your lawn so it can 'print' water precisely where it’s needed. LINK
Air Taxis Arriving by 2024 - Electric air taxis will be here by 2024. The reason for their delayed arrival is attributed to the lengthy certification process. To reduce the time to certification, companies like Volcopter are using a cheat code - they're utilizing existing aircraft parts that have already been certified by the FAA to accelerate the process of certifying the air taxi as a whole. Autonomous flight is expected to arrive in the next decade; however, the certification pathway for it is considerably more challenging. LINK
Math Suggests to Always Shoot Big - Projects with big outcomes when compared to those with small outcomes both take up about the same amount of your time and have quite similar chances of success. If you’re going all in, you might as well pick the project that will yield the largest outcome. LINK
ChatGPT & AI
ChatGPT and AI news, tools, tips, and tricks…
GPT Plugins - Last week, OpenAI released 'GPT Plugins,' which allows ChatGPT to now search the internet and take action on requests, such as booking dinner reservations through OpenTable from within a ChatGPT conversation. This new feature is not yet available to everyone. LINK
How GPT Works - Here’s an article on how the GPT model works. LINK
Reasoning Engine - ChatGPT is essentially a reasoning engine. LINK
AI Image Generator - Playground AI is a free and easy-to-use online AI image generator that you need to try. LINK
Invest in Vector Databases - Vector databases are a type of database that store and search data based on mathematical representations of objects, and they are the backbone of much of the current and future AI tech. Vector database companies are raising millions of dollars in capital, which is not surprising. LINK
OpenAI v Apple - OpenAI just laid out the foundation for the next era of computing just like Apple did with the iPhone. Here are the comparisons: Apple = OpenAI, iPhone = GPT-4, iOS = ChatGPT, Apple Store = ChatGPT Plugins. Masterful execution. LINK
Text-to-3D Environment - Here’s a demo of an AI tool by OpusAI that creates 3D environments as you type. LINK
Brain Waves to Images - Researchers were able to translate brain waves into scarily accurate images using Stable Diffusion AI (a 'ChatGPT' for images). LINK
Collaborative Writing with ChatGPT - Here’s a good video example of how to write collaboratively with ChatGPT (ft. David Sacks). LINK
Picks
Articles and videos worth a read/watch...
How big companies choose who is laid off. LINK
Five lesser-known benefits of thinking out loud. LINK
The secret history of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and OpenAI. LINK
An explanation of the pitch deck I used to make millions. LINK
Why does no one sound exactly like you? LINK
Outside Interest
Beeple - The digital artist Beeple who sold an NFT for $69 million back in March 2021 opened a digital art gallery in Charleston, SC. LINK
Car AC Upgrade - Tesla has introduced a new feature that prevents cold air from blowing out of the AC vents when the car's heating system is starting up. LINK
Cinematography - Eyecandyy is a catalog of cinematic video clips sorted by 'shot type' if you need some creative inspiration. LINK
Backward Shoes - Top trollsters MSCHF recently released the 'BWD Shoe.' It offers wearers two ways to wear the shoes - traditionally with the toes hanging out or reversed with the toes snuggled up to the sneaker's heel. LINK
Screen Sharing - Muzzle is a simple mac app to silence embarrassing notifications while screen sharing. LINK
Chrome Extension - Anori is a browser extension that lets you customize the screen that appears when you open a new tab. LINK
Ivy League Tuition - Ivy League prices are pushing $90,000 a year. LINK
Twitter Verification - Elon Musk says Twitter’s For You Page will soon only recommend verified accounts. LINK
Trump Arrest - Donald Trump will be the first former US president to face criminal charges. LINK
Pink Panther - An ultra-rare pink diamond is expected to sell for more than $35 million at an auction. LINK
Cool Website - The Drope Store is a hypothetical grocery store selling high-quality water products (1 tablespoon of clean water for $198), showing how bad things could get if our water crisis worsens. The products are creative masterpieces. You need to take a look. LINK
Tesla Accessory - This device adds an extra storage unit under the screen in Teslas. LINK
Visuals
The purchasing power of the US dollar overtime.
Visualization of AI Image-to-Image Conversion: “Recreate this landscape in the style of the Starry Night.”
"This Is Pointless"
Quotes
"Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers." ― Voltaire
"Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else." ― Peter Drucker
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