Good morning and welcome to Sunday CET.
Week 20 is here - we’ve already passed one third of the year and we have the best NBA playoffs in a long time, it’s finally spring in Stockholm and boats are out, the economy is shitty and the macro forecast looks grim, there’s still war in Ukraine and VCs stopped spending money in Europe but talk incessantly about the new AI revolution. And so will I in today’s edition.
I will be in London next week, so a meet up is in order. Nothing fancy, just mingling, exchanging ideas and getting to know each other. Sign up here if you want to join.
Observations
I’ve mostly stayed quiet about the AI thingie as I am a bit overwhelmed by the number of the overnight specialists literally flooding all the media channels with ‘expert’ opinions on the topic. So.Much.Noise.
In a different life, I have actually built a commercial product incorporating primary data sets we collected automatically for powering AI models we have built from scratch, so I have an idea about how those things work - but now I simply find it funny seeing how the 2017 blockchain and the 2020-2022 metaverse & web3 have turned into the 2023 AI saves the world revolution meme. A different name for the same tune, same actors, with all sorts of playing parts, including groups and committees analysing the danger of it to the society. So much energy and resources wasted for marginal gains or plain empty talks, people have lost their cool, ffs, it’s not about imagining threats and damages AI can pose, but about progress and what we can pragmatically achieve with it. And it’s not about people losing jobs it’s about higher productivity - faster horses ftw.