Google launches Gemini

Plus: The SaaS fundraising napkin

Author

Cash Nut
December 07, 2023

In Today’s Edition 

  • Reid Hoffman on the Psychology of Great Founders 

  • The SaaS fundraising napkin 

  • Google launches Gemini—a powerful AI model it says can surpass GPT-4 

  • Pilotless FedEx, Reliable Robotics Plane Completes Flight 

  • Enabling next-generation AI workloads: Announcing TPU v5p and AI Hypercomputer

  • AI Alliance Launches as an International Community for Safe and Open AI 

  • Generating Power on Earth From the Coldness of Deep Space 

🚀Startups Nuts

What makes an exceptional founder? This long read contains Reid Hoffman’s (Partner at Greylock and the co-founder of LinkedIn) thoughts on this. The central theme is all around the right founder, at the right time, in the right market. These three elements together create special things.

Broader commentary on the state of software funding and growth metric benchmarks. As you’d expect, growth rates and NDR are generally down versus previous years and startups are being pushed to reach breakeven at the later stages. If all the Series C and D startups break even, you could argue the only reason they’d need growth investors is for M&A.

🏭Business Nuts 

Google's Gemini is a multimodal AI model that the company says will power a new era in computing. The largest version of the model exceeds current state-of-the-art results on 30 of the 32 widely used academic benchmarks used in large language model research and development. A specially tuned English version of the mid-level model is available now in 170 countries as part of Google's Bard chatbot. The smallest version of the model is designed to run locally on consumer devices.

Reliable Robotics Corp. has flown a small cargo plane without a human on board. The 12-minute flight, made with a plane on loan from FedEx, was Reliable Robotics' second automated flight. The startup is working to gain full approval from the FAA. Its system will restrict remote pilots to only supervising one aircraft at a time rather than managing multiple autonomous flights. Remote piloting will boost efficiency and allow planes to be repositioned more easily to match where demand is strongest.

📱Tech Nuts

Google has announced Cloud TPU v5p, its most powerful, scalable, and flexible AI accelerator yet. TPUs are used for training and serving AI-powered products. Google has also announced AI Hypercomputer from Google Cloud, a supercomputer architecture that uses an integrated system of performance-optimized hardware, open software, leading ML frameworks, and flexible consumption models. AI Hypercomputer employs systems-level co-design to boost efficiency and productivity across AI training, tuning, and serving.

The AI Alliance, led by IBM and Meta, unites over 50 global organizations to foster open, responsible AI development. It focuses on setting AI standards, advancing hardware, and promoting AI education and skills. Members include major tech firms, universities, and research institutions. The Alliance emphasizes safety, diversity, and equitable access to AI innovation.

🔥Newsletter Spotlight

🎁Miscellaneous

The coldness of space is a largely untapped thermodynamic resource. Advances in technology could soon result in solar panels that work at night as well as day. Scientists have already demonstrated that it is possible to chill water to cool buildings by as much as 5 degrees Celsius during the day directly using power generated by the cold universe. This article looks at some current ideas and prototypes in the field.

💡What else are we reading and seeing?

😎Fun Fact

The term "bull market" originated from the way a bull attacks—lifting its horns upward, symbolizing a rising market

🔥 Hot Book of the Day

Created in the aftermath of World War II, the Central Intelligence Agency relied on women even as it attempted to channel their talents and keep them down. Women sent cables, made dead drops, and maintained the agency’s secrets. Despite discrimination—even because of it—women who started as clerks, secretaries, or unpaid spouses rose to become some of the CIA’s shrewdest operatives.

They were unlikely spies—and that’s exactly what made them perfect for the role. Because women were seen as unimportant, pioneering female intelligence officers moved unnoticed around Bonn, Geneva, and Moscow, stealing secrets from under the noses of their KGB adversaries.

Back at headquarters, women built the CIA’s critical archives—first by hand, then by computer. And they noticed things that the men at the top didn’t see. As the CIA faced an identity crisis after the Cold War, it was a close-knit network of female analysts who spotted the rising threat of al-Qaeda—though their warnings were repeatedly brushed aside. 

After the 9/11 attacks, more women joined the agency as a new job, targeter, came to prominence. They showed that data analysis would be crucial to the post-9/11 national security landscape—an effort that culminated spectacularly in the CIA’s successful effort to track down bin Laden in his Pakistani compound. 

Propelled by the same meticulous reporting and vivid storytelling that infused Code Girls, The Sisterhood offers a riveting new perspective on history, revealing how women at the CIA ushered in the modern intelligence age, and how their silencing made the world more dangerous.

“A rip-roaring read that rewrites and enlarges the history of America’s iconic intelligence service.”

🐦Joke of the Day

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