Val Babajov

🚨Breaking News: OpenAI's CTO Mira Murati announced she is stepping down, along with several other executives. What does this mean for OpenAI's future? Join me in this video as I break down the full story. #TechNews #OpenAI #WomenInTech #AINews #ChatGPT

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https://lnkd.in/dqbsDPuX New YorkCNN —  The A.I. doomsday clock appears ready to strike midnight for publishers. Google on Tuesday announced that it will infuse its ubiquitous search engine with its powerful artificial intelligence model, Gemini, drawing on the rapidly advancing technology to directly answer user queries at the top of results pages. “Google will do the Googling for you,” the company explained. In other words, users will soon no longer have to click on the links displayed in search results to find the information they are seeking. On its surface that might sound convenient, but for news publishers — many of whom are already struggling with steep traffic declines — the revamped search experience will likely cause an even further decrease in audience, potentially starving them of readers and revenue. Why spend time clicking on a link when Google has already scoured the internet and harvested the relevant information with its A.I.? “Google will take care of the legwork,” executives said. But a lot of that legwork, of course, comes in the form of human-written articles and expertise published across the internet on blogs and media outlets, all built on a foundation of advertising support. Google’s message was heard loud and clear. Within hours of the Mountain View announcement, the news industry began sounding the alarm.

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Vishal Sachdev highlights the strategic integration of open source and proprietary tech in architecting tech stacks, developer ecosystems and resulting business models. The world class companies effectively balance value commoditization in open source and value capture in proprietary tech. This is the strategic challenge for companies operating in #blockchain and #AI. I believe those who operate at the intersection of blockchain *and* AI stand to win this strategic battle...

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I find it hard to believe that with millions of EVs entering the market and the proliferation of AI compute that PGE is actually going to have excess capacity in 2040 without any additional generation from 3rd parties. I am also curious if there are enough transmission lines and if PGE views that as someone else’s problem. Maybe they are planning on AI and ACTUAL figuring it all out! https://lnkd.in/gybsMmaw

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Power Grid is a board game that is a great tool for learning more about energy, the grid, and the power of renewable energy. https://lnkd.in/gHvsSPiD #energy #powergrid #gridoptimization

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**Solar Energy Companies - Avoid These Top Mistakes Make When Trying to Leverage AI** As we push the boundaries of innovation in the solar energy sector, AI continues to be a game-changing tool, offering immense potential. But as many solar companies are exploring AI, common missteps can hinder progress and efficiency. Here are a few to be aware of: 1. **Underestimating Data Quality**: AI thrives on good data. Solar companies often overlook the importance of quality data, which can result in inaccurate AI outputs. Invest time in data management. Your AI is only as good as the data it learns from. 2. **Implementing AI Without a Clear Strategy**: AI isn't a magic wand you wave to fix problems. It requires a robust, strategic approach. Lack of planning can lead to poor execution, low ROI, and even failure of AI initiatives. 3. **Ignoring the Human Element**: AI is a tool to enhance human performance, not replace it. Ignoring the need for training staff to work alongside AI systems leads to resistance, misuse, or disuse. 4. **Expecting Immediate Results**: AI learning and implementation is a process that takes time. Patience is key. Expecting instant results leads to rushed decisions and incomplete learning cycles. 5. **Failure to Iterate and Learn**: AI is continuously evolving and so should its application. Companies that fail to regularly update and fine-tune their AI models miss out on maximizing their efficiency and effectiveness. Remember, while AI holds the promise of revolutionizing solar energy, its successful implementation requires strategy, quality data, patience, and a commitment to continuous learning. #AI #SolarEnergy #Entrepreneurship #SolarMistakes #ArtificialIntelligence #AIinSolarEnergy #communitysolar Dimension Renewable Energy Partners Group EnGen Company

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📈 Top Public AI Stocks for April 2024 - ClearOne Inc. (CLRO): A company specializing in audio, video, and web conferencing applications. Their AI configuration and control software, Console, is gaining attention. 🎙️💻 - B.O.S. Better Online Solutions (BOSC): Focused on supply chain and inventory solutions, BOSC’s Intelligent Robotics division incorporates AI technology. 🤖📦 - Opera Ltd. (OPRA): Known for designing web browsers, Opera has integrated ChatGPT and free VPN functionality into its browsers. 🌐🔒 Remember to consider your investment strategy based on value, growth, and momentum! 💡📊 #AI #Investing https://lnkd.in/gPWFe4PF

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Friends, Q2 was a quarter of progress and learning for us at HawkTower, where we invest in early-stage startups applying breakthrough computing technologies to maximize California's natural resource markets. Our focus is on technology-enabled interventions (e.g., AI-enabled geospatial radars for lithium-ion batteries in the waste stream) for critical, market-level imperatives (e.g., disaster prevention) that can drive rapid commercial adoption (e.g., placed on every recycling truck in the world). Our current investment priorities are: - Agricultural productivity and efficiency - Biomanufacturing - Labor and mobility automation - Waste stream optimization and decarbonization - Disaster prevention and management Here’s a snapshot of what we’ve been up to: Milestones and Investments: - In late April, we officially launched our fund, filing with the SEC. Yay. - By June, we completed our first fund close ahead of schedule, with backing from family offices, foundations, high-net-worth individuals, and organizations aligned with California's future. - Our portfolio now includes three early-stage investments (Farm-ng, Agriful Software, and Nexstera Tech). Strategic Partnerships: - We believe that startups operating closer to their customers and resources, especially in agriculture and biomanufacturing, have a strategic advantage. For instance, the Salinas Valley, a major agricultural hub, is less than an hour from Silicon Valley and serves as a center of thought leadership in the convergence of agriculture and AI (from Western Growers, Taylor Farms, and others). - Similarly, the North San Joaquin Valley is emerging as a biotech and agtech innovation hub, and we are proud to support BEAM Circular, a startup hub for the circular bioeconomy. Key Relationships: - Karen Warner, CEO of BEAM Circular, joined HawkTower as a strategic advisor. - Jackie Cruz, Ed. D. Cruz, Hartnell College’s VP of Advancement, advises on Salinas Valley and workforce development. - Ben Palone from Western Growers, with his technical background in agriculture, became a trusted advisor. - Matthew Hoffman from Driscoll's Global R&D team provides insights on global agriculture, product positioning, and investment strategy. - We collaborated with Monterey Bay DART for workforce development and automation in agtech. - Dominic Milano and the Milano Technical Group from Merced collaborated on key initiatives and advised us on investments. - HawkTower is participating in Santa Cruz Works's accelerator cohort as a mentor and advisor. Thank you Doug Erickson. - We published an overview of entrepreneurship across the UC system with input from across the University of California system. Moving into the fall, we remain deeply committed to supporting founders shaping California's future natural resource markets. Stay tuned and be in touch! : ) Db

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WAYMO -- WAYCOOL or GHOST RIDER? If you preside in San Francisco, Santa Monica or Phoenix you are now seeing driverless Waymo taxies making their way through town on an ever-increasing basis. The network is expanding, and I can honestly say that in the Santa Monica / West Los Angeles area I have not driven anywhere in the last two months without seeing one of them on the road every time. In fact, sometimes they are so prevalent that there might be three in a row waiting at a stop light. It still is kind of spooky seeing cars moving around with no driver, or anyone for that matter, in the front seat. It's not exactly the same as the Headless Horseman but it does conjure up that image in my imagination. I have not taken a ride in one, but several family members have and report their satisfaction. Waymo is a division of Alphabet (GOOGL). I have not seen any visible evidence of General Motors (GM) Cruise vehicles which I understand are still being road tested, while Tesla (TSLA) has been projecting their autonomous vehicle vision for some time. For now, Tesla seems to be behind but that could change quickly. GM is likely to use their own branded vehicles, and it would seem that Tesla will likely do the same. However, Waymo technology could be outfitted on any cars. That seems like a big advantage, staying out of the car business and just being like the "Intel/Microsoft" inside personal computers which is a much higher margin business. There has been a lot of noise in the business journals and chat rooms about a Waymo initial public offering but nothing from Alphabet itself. They recently concluded a $5.6 billion investment round; see TechCrunch post below. The autonomous race is on, and it will be expanding rapidly from here on out. I just wonder if we will ever see an autonomous police vehicle stop a wayward autonomous taxi and write it up for some violation as yet unknown. Will traffic school be an option? #waymo, #autonomousvehicles, #selfdrivingcars, #GM, #Generalmotors, #tesla, #Investing, #business,

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Must founders think in 3D? Maybe 4D? I believe that 90% of startups fail because founders (and #VCs) only think in 2D. When my tech co-founders and I were building one of the first satellite TV receiver companies in San Jose, I was also designing buildings for commercial contractors. I ran across this sketch I did for a project in Los Gatos. After learning the requirements, the design details came to me in a dream (literally - like most of my inventions). It took 10 minutes to sketch out the design, and the project was built in the following 3 weeks. -> I believe that ALL durable structures MUST be designed in 3D -> physical: products, buildings, processes -> especially technical ecosystems -> organizational - for meritocratic efficiency, especially startups -> There's a 4th dimension that's required of mega-successful startups. I'll discuss that in another post. -> My current startup is a complex #AIecosystem that will only succeed using a 3D development process. Lessons learned: - EVERY product, system or company that I've started or developed NOT following a 3D development approach has failed. - But EVERY company and product fully envisioned in 3D has succeeded.

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<< Is AI truly worth $10T investment? >> by Jeffrey Funk. ---------------------------------------------- “The introduction of generative AI products in late 2022 caused a runup in the share prices for the biggest suppliers of AI, most notably the so-called magnificent seven: Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, and Tesla. Their combined market capitalizations rose more than $10 trillion between January 2023 and their peaks in late 2023. They have since fallen leading some to claim that the bubble has begun to burst (see table in article).” Ten trillion is nothing to scoff at. Only the U.S. and China have gross national products that are bigger than $10 trillion. Applied across American citizens, it implies a per capita wealth of roughly $30,000, and that was just for the increases since January 2023. The biggest winners have been Nvidia and the cloud suppliers, but there are also data centers, and electricity providers and other semiconductor suppliers. In other words, the impact of generative AI on the market capitalization of companies is much bigger than the $10 trillion figure. Is this a new dawn in America for productivity growth? Investors are starting to question the $10 trillion figure. David Cahn, a partner at venture firm Sequoia Capital, wrote in a blog post last month, “The tech industry would need to generate around $600 billion in revenue a year to make up for all the money being invested in AI right now, yet it is far from close to that number,” OpenAI reportedly has a few billion in revenues but that is far from the $600 billion that David Cahn says is needed. The CIO, a website that provides advice on these issues to chief technology officers and chief information officers says: “In the enterprise, huge expectations have been partly driven by the major consumer reaction following the release of ChatGPT in late 2022” while meanwhile, “traditional hashtag #AI hashtag #technologies in use at the time, including machine learning, deep learning, and predictive analysis, continue to prove their value to many organizations.” Gary Marcus says the “collapse of the Generative AI bubble may be imminent” and Paris Marx asks “What comes after the AI crash?” On the other hand, one optimistic Forbes article claims that “Small Wins Prove AI Isn’t A Bubble,” the Wall Street Journal said on August 16th that “Stocks Rebound to Notch Best Week of 2024,” and share prices further rose the following week as interest rates continued to fall. For me, the key is to get your arms around the notion of a $10 trillion increase in the market capitalization of the magnificent seven. Is AI truly worth that much? When even optimists talk of “small wins,” $10 trillion should be something we equate with Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and a communist utopia. AI is here to stay, just not in the form of stratospheric share prices.

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No hardware? No connectivity? No problem! 🙌 I’m excited that we finally get to unveil Optimus LT—our latest AI-powered technology that enables agencies of any size, with any infrastructure, to automatically generate signal timing plans and recommendations. 🚦 No need for expensive hardware, connectivity, or exhausting fieldwork—just pure AI-powered insights ready in a single click. Ready to optimize signals without breaking the bank? Let’s talk about how Optimus LT can transform your city's traffic management. 💡 Curious? Get in touch for a demo!

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Excellent article about the latest direction of AI from Sequoia. Enjoyed it so much, i read it twice and had Siri "read" it to me once. I found their explanation of the latest "reasoning" that OpenAI is touting to be helpful, as well as their thoughts on where investors and startups should focus in the AI value chain. https://lnkd.in/eDWNMpGV First, they explain that the new "reasoning" of the OpenAI o1 models is simply search over scored possibilities - with a "value function" scoring possibilities, which for me hearkens back to IBM cursive handwriting recognition days. They make a comparison to how the DeepMind algorithm that played Go (AlphaGo) worked. (For the excellent documentary on AlphaGo, watch https://lnkd.in/eGQpJAvh.) Here are some excerpts from their explanation of "reasoning" from the article: "At inference time, the model runs a search or simulation across a wide range of potential future scenarios, scores those scenarios, and then responds with the scenario (or answer) that has the highest expected value. What’s hard about replicating AlphaGo here is constructing the value function, or the function by which the responses are scored. If you’re playing Go, it’s more straightforward: you can simulate the game all the way to the end, see who wins, and then calculate an expected value of the next move. If you’re coding, it’s somewhat straightforward: you can test the code and see if it works. But how do you score the first draft of an essay? This is what makes reasoning hard with current methods, and it’s why Strawberry (Open AI o1) is comparatively strong on domains proximate to logic (e.g. coding, math, the sciences) and not as strong in domains that are more open-ended and unstructured (e.g. writing)." Their summary of how they think about investment and startup opportunities in AI will get the most press: "The cloud transition was software-as-a-service. Software companies became cloud service providers. This was a $350B opportunity. Thanks to agentic reasoning, the AI transition is service-as-a-software. Software companies turn labor into software. That means the addressable market is not the software market, but the services market measured in the trillions of dollars. Cloud companies sold software ($ / seat). AI companies sell work ($ / outcome). The primary opportunity for startups is not to replace incumbent software companies—it’s to go after automatable pools of work.  [Discussion of VC interest in the various areas of software tech] Apps: The most interesting layer for venture capital. ~20 application layer companies with $1Bn+ in revenue were created during the cloud transition, another ~20 were created during the mobile transition, and we suspect the same will be true here."

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【Tech Events in SF Bay Area from 9/28 to 10/12】 I have summarized the 175 Tech Events in SF from 9/28 to 10/12 in a Air Table, and I will share it with you. If you have any other exciting tech events to recommend, please feel free to share them on the comment:) Event list👇️(There are tabs for AI events,VC and Investor events and Hackathon) https://lnkd.in/ePDFAiM7 - 126 Ai Event - 18 VCs & investors Event - 6 Hackathon Event I would greatly appreciate it if you could share or like this with others in the SF community. 【Kyosuke's Newsletter】 https://lnkd.in/e5X896ZG It's a weekly newsletter where I provide updates on tech events happening in the SF Bay Area. Additionally, you can expect to receive complimentary tickets to conferences, recommendations for must-attend events, and exclusive invitations to SF's premier gatherings. 【Upcoming Event】 『MELT』Founders x Investors Dynamic Network Event https://lu.ma/7zypq83u 💎 VIP Sponsored by - Kyle Hudson, Founder of Stacks, Inc ​​Social bookmarking platform to save cross-platform and share with anyone - Akash Saraf , Founder of ScaleGenAI Universal Computing Infrastructure for Generative AI #Sanfrancisco #SF #Bayarea #Techevent #YCombinator #Stanford #founders #VC #Investors #Networking

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Two weeks ago I spent 3 days with brilliant human beings discussing the state of AI investment with other angel syndicate leads, angel investors and VCs at Hustle Fund's #camphustle in Los Gatos. It was brilliant. Truly awesome to learn so much from insanely accomplished investors. But was so clear to me again is that the US and the UK are two countries divided by separate languages of ambition. Aspiration and ambition underlined by the cluster effect of successful exits, incredible talent and venture capital driven by operators and founders rather than accountants. But one reason why the US often trumps (pun not intended) the UK is they learn from failure. Run a startup that didn't reach the dizzying heights of venture-scale returns? Learn, reset and go again. What they certainly do not do is look at failure with glee and an "I told you so" attitude. Which is what I sense when I read most of the narrative around the failure of Cazoo. Alex Chesterman swung and missed. The business was flawed, unit economics didn't add up and in reality - there was very little innovation outside the vertical alignment of a well-understood business. But when we look down upon what he tried to do and 💩 💩 it all we're doing is making it harder for someone else to be equally as ambitious. Focus on what went wrong. Focus on the fundamental underlying business models that drive efficient use of capital and the push for profitability. But let's celebrate people shooting their shot and not celebrate the failures.

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Google Faces $2.5 Decillion Fine Over Media Restrictions. That’s $2,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. With that; Google has almost entirely pulled out of Russia with the Russian subsidiary of the company declaring bankruptcy more than a year ago. This Seems fake. First question comes to mind; “what’s behind it” and “what’s the core reason for this besides what they are telling the media?” #Google #Decillion #PrivateEquity

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Anand Thaker (aka The Galahad of GPUs) and I spent a more than a few good minutes talking about the potential impact of Andreessen Horowitz and other #VCs stockpiling GPUs as currency to attract #startups to be apart of their portfolio companies. And in this short clip we get into how this may impact the way enterprise software vendors operate their venture arms, and what that could mean for the way they operate in the future. You can check out the full ep at https://lnkd.in/e5_xbhvU #AFGM

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Contract Information Redactor - free web app Just published a free (for now) web app on Jigo Labs. Use it to remove information you want to hide before you share your contract. Upload your contract (PDF), type in the words you want redacted, download the redacted version of your contract. https://jigo.ai/labs

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