By leveraging the benefits of artificial intelligence and looking at cash flow issues from the consumer’s perspective, Beem has grown to be one of the 50 most-downloaded financial apps in the world.
Within a decade, the form factor for computing will radically change from staring at screens with flat imagery, to participating in embedded virtual worlds with fully navigable, hyper-realistic environments. Those environments will be filled with software agents, some hybrid human and others entirely AI, that are entirely unrecognizable as anything but real to 90% of the population.
A recent book by McKinsey executives details the way to do digital and AI transformation. They enable and augment an existing strategy
In this conversation, we have a really cool conversation on fintech, crypto assets, payments and all the things around it with Ivan Soto-Wright, the CEO and Co-founder of MoonPay.
More specifically, we discuss Liability-driven Investment (LDI), the proliferation of AI in personal finance to drive sound decision-making, innovation in finance is following the same trajectory that resulted in VOIP for the telecommunication industry, the geographical maze of crypto KYC, payment networks, and crypto payment processing.
OpenAI, backed with $1B+ by Elon Musk & MSFT, can now program SQL and write Harry Potter fan-fiction
This week, we look at a breakthrough artificial intelligence release from OpenAI, called GPT-3. It is powered by a machine learning algorithm called a Transformer Model, and has been trained on 8 years of web-crawled text data across 175 billion parameters. GPT-3 likes to do arithmetic, solve SAT analogy questions, write Harry Potter fan fiction, and code CSS and SQL queries. We anchor the analysis of these development in the changing $8 trillion landscape of our public companies, and the tech cold war with China.
This week, we look at:
What it means to ask questions and find answers
From asking simple questions that result in neobanks and roboadvisors. Who will win — Schwab or Robinhood?
To asking macro questions about the finance / high-tech competition. Who will win — Goldman Sachs or Google?
To asking profound questions about the nature of the work, and the art of finding your own questions.
We can't formulate the questions for you. But we can give you a framework of needs for both the individual, and the organization.
The questions that you ask are the answers that you will get.
The image is taken from an AI paper which explains how to use generative adversarial networks (i.e., GANs) to hallucinate hyper realistic-imagery. By training on hundreds of thousands of samples, the model is able to create candidates representing things like “just a normal dude holding a normal fish nothing to see here”, and then edit out the ones that are too egregious.
The reason the stuff above is so scary is actually that you can mathematically transition in the space between images. So for example, you could move between “a normal dude” and “just a normal fish” and have nightmare fish people. Or you could create a DNA root for an image which is part dog, part car, and part jellyfish. Check out the video below and the very accessible https://www.artbreeder.com/ website to see what I mean.
Fraud is rising with the increased reliance on alternative payment methods, and AI could stop it. FIs have difficulties in adopting the tech.
In the long take this week, I try out a contrarian point of view on personal finance chatbots. Trim, a savings chatbot, just withdrew support from Facebook Messenger. While lots of other chatbots are still invested in conversational banking, what could we take away from the counterfactual of chatbots failing to get B2C traction? What is the impact on the rest of the platform wars waged by Amazon, Google, and Tesla for connected homes, cars, and the Internet of Things?
artificial intelligenceaugmented realityCryptodecentralized financeenterprise blockchainMetaverse / xRnarrative zeitgeistNFTs and digital objectsregulation & complianceventure capital
·In this conversation, we talk with Jamie Burke of Outlier Ventures. This is a fascinating and educational conversation that covers frontier technology companies and protocols in blockchain, IoT, and artificial intelligence, and the convergence of these themes in the future. Jamie walks us through the core investment thesis, as well as the commercial model behind shifting from incubation to acceleration of 30+ companies. We pick up on wisdom about marketing timing and fund structure along the way.