Ashu Garg: “In 2013, consumer startups made up 62% of the unicorn cohort and were responsible for 80% of its total value. Today, the scenario has flipped: enterprise unicorns number 416, representing 78% of the total unicorn population. Their collective valuation stands at $1.2T, accounting for 80% of all unicorn value. This shift to enterprise is driven first and foremost by the scale of the opportunity. Enterprises spend $5T (yes, trillion) annually on IT, and this market is experiencing multiple disruptions, including the shift to cloud, the rise of digital assets, and the growing severity of security threats. This creates a massive opportunity for startups. Public market investors have also come to appreciate the compounding power of the SaaS business model and are rewarding these companies with higher multiples. In my opinion, enterprise software will continue to dominate value creation in the venture ecosystem, especially as AI drives a new multi-decade cycle of innovation and automation across industries.”
WSJ: “Neuralink makes a brain-reading implant that aims to help people with severe spinal cord injuries use computers, and perhaps one day regain lost motor control. A quarter-size hole is bored into the skull above the motor cortex, a region of the brain that helps direct voluntary movement. The chip has 64 threads that are each thinner than a human hair and are inserted into the brain. Then the chip is implanted in the hole. Each of the threads is inserted into the brain’s motor cortex by a special surgical robot. Each thread has 16 electrodes that monitor electrical signals as they fire among nearby neurons, relaying the information back to the chip. The chip digitizes the data and sends it to Neuralink’s app on a computer, which translates it into actions such as moving a computer cursor or left-clicking a mouse. One of Neuralink’s big advantages is the device transmits data wirelessly and can be worn without being attached to external computers. As a result, people can use their device at home, unlike older tech that has generally been used in a lab setting.”
HBR: “We’re already seeing this in how AI is being used as a tool, but more profoundly, AI as an idea is showing us our businesses and our world in a new light. Every important new technology does this, from the 17th century when watches were the peak technology and people saw the universe as clockwork, to the Computer Age in which so many of our fundamental ideas — from DNA to blackholes, to the heat death of the universe — were reinterpreted in terms of information being transformed from inputs into outputs via a set logic. Now it’s AI’s turn. As we’ll describe, AI as an idea is making the world visible to us in its ever-changing specificity and details: an overwhelming riot of particulars, each related to all else in a landscape of creative chaos and emergence, finding patterns beyond our comprehension. In short, it’s a world in which everything is an exception.”
Nicholas Carlini on using AI: “If I were to categorize these examples into two broad categories, they would be “helping me learn” and “automating boring tasks”. Helping me learn is obviously important because it means that I can now do things I previously would have found challenging; but automating boring tasks is (to me) actually equally important because it lets me focus on what I do best, and solve the hard problems. Most importantly, these examples are real ways I’ve used LLMs to help me. They’re not designed to showcase some impressive capabiltiy; they come from my need to get actual work done. This means the examples aren’t glamorous, but a large fraction of the work I do every day isn’t, and the LLMs that are available to me today let me automate away almost all of that work.”
