Ben Thompson: “I would argue that defining “virtual reality” to mean an immersive headset is to miss the point: virtual reality is a digital experience that has fully broken the bounds of human constraints, and in that experience the hardware is a means, not an end. Moreover, a virtual reality experience need not involve vision at all: talking with ChatGPT, for example, is an aural experience that feels more like virtual reality than the majority of experiences I’ve had in a headset. True virtual reality shifts time like media, place like communications, and, crucially, does so with perfect availability and infinite capacity. In this view, virtual reality is AI, and AI is virtual reality. Hardware does matter — that has been the focus of this Article — but it matters as a means to an end, to enable an interactive experience without the constraints of human capacity or the friction of actual reality.”
FT interview with tech entrepreneur Niklas Zennström: “In full promotion mode, he says that Europe boasts more software engineers than the US, has four of the world’s top 10 universities and is the best place to launch a start-up focused on tackling big societal challenges, such as climate change. Last year, Europe attracted 30 per cent of all global funding for early-stage ventures compared with 36 per cent in the US. But the investment flows in Europe are heavily concentrated into what Zennström calls purpose-driven companies. Even the most storied US VC companies, such as Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz, are paying attention and have opened offices in London. Silicon Valley is coming to Europe, rather than the other way round.”
Sequoia Capital report on Gen AI.”Generative AI’s first year out the gate—“Act 1”—came from the technology-out. We discovered a new “hammer”—foundation models—and unleashed a wave of novelty apps that were lightweight demonstrations of cool new technology. We now believe the market is entering “Act 2”—which will be from the customer-back. Act 2 will solve human problems end-to-end. These applications are different in nature than the first apps out of the gate. They tend to use foundation models as a piece of a more comprehensive solution rather than the entire solution. They introduce new editing interfaces, making the workflows stickier and the outputs better. They are often multi-modal.”
Thomas Dohmke: “What we will soon realize is what we were always destined to achieve since the advent of the personal computer: Humankind will be inextricably linked to a machine that operates with us, by us, and for us. [It will be] an age of AI-enabled life that will accelerate human productivity and progress to the order of a magnitude — but only if we embrace it.”
