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Google Fiber is getting outrageously fast 20Gbps service

Plus: OpenAI forms team to study ‘catastrophic’ AI risks

Author

Cash Nut
October 27, 2023

In Today’s Edition

  • Confessions of a Middle-Class Founder

  • The Ideation Flywheel

  • SpaceX’s Starship Can Fly In November Hint NASA, Coast Guard Notices

  • OpenAI forms team to study ‘catastrophic’ AI risks, including nuclear threats

  • Meet Nightshade, the new tool allowing artists to ‘poison’ AI models with corrupted training data

  • Low-calorie sugar breakthrough could make allulose a household name

🚀Startups Nuts

Every founder either wants to be rich, with their wealth in service of some end, or they want to be king, with the money as a mere byproduct of trying to make the world the way they want it to be. Venture capitals are looking for startups with the potential to generate hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue per year. Most winners win big because most startups fail. The industry looks down on bootstrapped companies without scale potential and this prevents some startups from exiting.

The Ideation Flywheel is a mental model for thinking about which startup ideas are worth pursuing and how to improve ideas by testing them without bias. The first step is to forget about startup ideas entirely and focus on solving problems. Once you have a list of possible problems, they need to be ranked. After choosing a problem to solve, the problem needs to be further defined with real users. Most problems will be unsolvable or not worth solving, so you will likely need to repeat the process many times before finding a good startup idea.

🏭Business Nuts

Google Fiber plans to upgrade some of its users to a 20Gbps service by the end of the year. The new service is made possible via Nokia's 25G passive optical network technology. Google is one of the first Internet service providers to adopt the technology for consumers. The 20Gbps service will eventually roll out to most of Google Fiber's network.

we bare bears GIF by SplatMag

Gif by splatmag on Giphy

The Coast Guard has warned mariners of a potential rocket launch in Boca Chica, Texas, during the first week of November. The notice coincided with a test of Starship's preflight systems by SpaceX and a visit by the Fish and Wildlife Service to the Starship launch pad. These events, along with a placeholder set by NASA, indicate that the next Starship test will be soon. SpaceX is still waiting for clearance from the FAA.

📱Tech Nuts

OpenAI has created a new team called 'Preparedness' to assess, evaluate, and probe AI models to protect against catastrophic risks. Preparedness' chief responsibilities will be tracking, forecasting, and protecting against the dangers of future AI systems. Some of the listed risk categories include chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats. OpenAI is soliciting ideas for risk studies from the community and is offering $25,000 and a job at Preparedness for the top ten submissions. A link to the contest is available in the article.

A new tool called Nightshade alters pixels in images in a way that's invisible to the human eye but poisons the art for any AI models that are trained on it. It causes AI models to learn the wrong names of the objects and scenery they are looking at. The technique is difficult to defend against as it forces AI model developers to remove poisoned images, which by design are difficult to detect. AI models trained on poisoned images will likely need to be retrained.

🎁Miscellaneous

Allulose is a sugar substitute that is around 70% as sweet as sucrose but contains just 10% of the calories. It has been shown to improve blood glucose levels and help in weight loss in people with type 2 diabetes. The compound was previously difficult to produce. Scientists at the University of California, Davis, have made a breakthrough and developed a manufacturing technique that offers both a high-quality yield and viable sustainability. The technique uses modified E. coli in a process that is already established industrially.

💡What else are we reading and seeing?

😎Fun Fact

The first recorded use of a vending machine for selling life insurance policies dates back to the early 1900s

🔥 Hot Book of the Day

Robert Sapolsky’s Behave, his now classic account of why humans do good and why they do bad, pointed toward an unsettling conclusion: We may not grasp the precise marriage of nature and nurture that creates the physics and chemistry at the base of human behavior, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

Now, in Determined, Sapolsky takes his argument all the way, mounting a full-frontal assault on the pleasant fantasy that there is some separate self telling our biology what to do.

Determined offers a marvelous synthesis of what we know about how consciousness works—the tight weave between reason and emotion and between stimulus and response in the moment and over a life.

One by one, Sapolsky tackles all the major arguments for free will and takes them out, cutting a path through the thickets of chaos and complexity science and quantum physics, as well as touching ground on some of the wilder shores of philosophy.

“One of our great behavioral scientists plumbs the depths of the science and philosophy of decision-making to mount a devastating case against free will.”

🐦Joke of the Day

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