The Sturdy AI Bubble and AI Life Hacks

Happy New Year of the Rabbit

Author

Matthew J. Sánchez
February 06, 2023

Happy Chinese/Lunar New Year! It's Year of the Rabbit 🧧🐇 the festivities are still going on here in California, so I imagine this must be the case elsewhere. Stay warm out there. I see a few of our readers are experiencing negative double digits brrrr 🥶

What do we have for you today?

AI time-saver: how VCs are automating the game, giving them time to do the things they’re best atA bubble made of Tit(AI)nium: AI is forming a new bubble but this one is poised to last (+ new Siri, who dis?)Microsoft’s new reign: already benefitting from its OpenAI investment, Microsoft’s new bets with Teams

AI automations in your life, what are you going to do with all this new time saved?

One VC shares how he’s using GPT-3 to automate his world to handle the business as usual tasks of his job. Yohei Nakajima, GP of Untapped Capital, shares how he’s slowly eliminating the monotony out of his job one AI-fulfilled task at a time.

He shares how he’s been able to utilize GPT-3 to summarize his email interactions for memory retention and easy recall especially before meetings with LPs and founders. For Yohei, his GPT-3 bot has also taken on the roll of an FAQ page. “Mini Yohei” as the email AI is affectionately called responds to founder questions via email and cc’s Yohei giving him an opportunity to add context (or correct since we know these models still need some training). Yohei also shares he’s used GPT-3 for crafting rough investment memos! His bot is able to include key data points like: product/service, value proposition, audience, market & competitor analysis, and even its Product Hunt sentiment.

For venture capitalists (and most careers, let’s be real), “If you can unlock time, you’re instantly better at your job.” This is precisely what we’re seeing AI enable thousands, like Yohei, to do and will continue to see 2023 and beyond. Now can we program an in-home AI to do my laundry, I’m begging.

The AI bubble, but it’s different than the housing or crypto ones

Since you’re here chances are you knew this already. AI startups are the private industry’s new favorite sector with VC dollars pouring into these companies more than ever before. Of Y Combinator’s recent class, 40 of the 142 public launches were AI startups (plus around 150 AI startups in YC right now are in stealth).

Generative AI as a sector to invest in is so novel the rules are being written as we go. There’s no precedent to follow. As a result, we’re seeing many infant AI startups get hefty VC investments for relatively unproven companies. Companies like 6 months old, AI search engine startup, Perplexity, is raising $15M in seed funding while another Gen AI company secured $8M from Thrive Capital and it literally doesn’t have a name yet! What makes AI different than crypto?

For starters, people aren’t having to constantly explain the value proposition of AI to the public (which is a helpful indicator it’s nothing like crypto). Popular AI specialist, Robert Scoble, believes the AI bubble won’t be popping either thanks to Apple. Yep! Robert’s bullish that Apple has something delightfully mesmerizing up its sleeves with Siri which the tech giant will reveal by the end of the year. Tim Cook approved. New Siri, who dis? 💅

No more, “write that down, write that down!” panic

Microsoft announced it’s integrating LLMs into Teams. Want more? Hot off the presses, the alleged first-look at Microsoft’s new Bing search powered by GPT-4. Last week we mentioned Supernormal, the AI company transcribing and summarizing meetings, raised $10M in seed funding. Well, it seems like enterprise culture is a top audience for AI investors.

With the release, Microsoft says it wants users to “cut costs and add AI-powered productivity.” AI enables Teams to generate meeting notes, action items, and is able to highlight automatically. The GPT-3.5 technology is here to “make meetings [of all sizes] more intelligent, personalized, and protected.” Capabilities include its “intelligent recap”, which even breaks meetings into chapters allowing users to go to sections most relevant to them. It’s also integrated with newer voice-to-text providing live language translations during meetings.

At the moment it’s widely available and is included in Teams Premium for $7/mo. It’s interesting to see the wide range of AI pricing models so far. Everything from $7 to $42 a month with ChatGPT Pro. What do you think? What’s too much and what’s too low? Do you think big tech (like Microsoft) launching their own versions (like meeting transcription and summarization) are huge threats to the rising stars?

Gen AI Deals that make your eyes (and mouth) water 💰

What caught our eye? 👀The NYC based company raises a $11M Series A and $2.2 seed seemingly back-to-back. The new funds will help Lavender with its revenue clients understand why they’re experiencing stagnancy and "provide actionable coaching to improve productivity and generate faster responses.” Lavender emphasizes the user experience by coaching with a human-centered approach.

What caught our eye? 👀Our friends from Denmark partner up with the Netherlands in this seed raise. Founded in 2010, this new strategic partnership enables EasyTranslate to grow its market share by actualizing strategic acquisitions. Thanks to Pride Capital Partners' healthy reputation with software and IT backing and experience, EasyTranslate can begin working on localization efforts and advancing their capabilities.

New developments to spam your #random Slack channel 💬

Things to learn when you need a raise

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Before you go

A generative polaroid camera — except it outputs poems 📸 beautiful, beautiful stuff y’all. Love “poetry camera”, Kelin Carolyn Zhang + Ryan Mather 💖

Au revoir mes amis. We’re hitting new milestones it seems every issue. We couldn’t do it without you! Stories, companies, launches, tips, things along these lines you want to share? Slide in our Twitter DMs.

— Matthew J. Sánchez (@matthewjsanchez)