The Angle (Newsletter)

At HumanX this past week, I watched eight different tech leaders – including the CEO of AWS, the co-founder of Cursor, and the head of Anthropic Labs – describe essentially the same phenomenon without any of them naming it. A Novo Nordisk scientist asks a Databricks agent about adverse effects in an obesity study and gets referenced, percentiled answers in minutes; work that previously required routing through a data team over months.

At this point in the AI arms race, there are a few new things that are considered table stakes – basically while they also remain the bleeding edge of the state of the art. Chain-of-thought is one, and the other is ‘deep research,’ which comes under different branding depending on which model maker you go to, but which amounts to an undergraduate level introductory topic-based survey paper about whatever you want to learn more about.

Last week, OpenAI announced a new feature relatively quietly, without the usual fanfare it assigns to product introductions or capability expansions: ChatGPT Record, a fairly innocuous new ability for its LLM-based chatbot that’s very limited in scope and availability at launch – but that seems symptomatic of a potentially significant issue for anyone building on top of OpenAI (or other model makers’) foundations.

Chris Lattner / Composition by Darrell Etherington Modular AI founder Chris Lattner has a storied career, with industry-changing stints at some of the biggest tech companies in the world, including at Apple, where he helped create the Swift programming language that the company uses across its platforms today. He also created LLVM, and both the Clang and MLIR compilers, so he may be the single-best global authority on low-level software tooling development working today.

I’m coming off my first week on the job at OMERS Ventures, but it was plenty busy in the tech news cycle, too: New cars, new Claude, new controversy around Apple’s App Store and new congressional TikTok drama. The lead: New Rivians — times two! This week had a lot of mess, but the biggest headlines came from EV-maker Rivian unveiling its new, more affordable mid-sized SUV.

People who I speak with often know I’m extremely bullish on this being the time for an exciting new period in the evolution of consumer hardware (and, at the same time, software and experiences). I’ve written before here about some of the recent entrants in the field focused specifically on building consumer devices from an AI-first perspective, including Humane (RIP) and Limitless – as well as rabbit, the company behind the r1.

This was yet another week of all the major players in AI – Google, Meta and OpenAI in particular – falling over themselves trying to one-up the others with announcements of splashy new advances. OpenAI came out as the clear winner in terms of attention, however. OpenAI’s massive splash in generative AI video OpenAI revealed Sora, an AI model that can generate realistic looking video based on text prompts.

San Francisco – and the surrounding Bay Area – has been the global home of tech startups and venture capital since it spawned the silicon microprocessor revolution in the 1970s. Maybe the biggest threat to that ongoing centralized dominance of the innovation economy came via COVID, which saw a necessary shift away from the value of in-person working arrangements and towards distributed workforces.

The iPhone’s ‘killer app’ didn’t launch with the original hardware – it came later, when Apple changed course from an original vision of allowing only first-party native applications to run on the device, to opening up access to third-party developers who wanted to build locally-installed, downloadable ‘apps.’ Apple’s App Store, combined with new technological capabilities ushered in by, and unique to the smartphone – like location services and cellular connectivity – resulted in an explosion...

We are, of course, deeply enmeshed in the age of AI startup enthusiasm, so it’s no surprise that it’s become a focus of investment firms and startup studios around the world. New York’s Betaworks, however, has better claim than most to being a trendsetter rather than a consensus-follower when it comes to providing a solid foundation upon which world-changing startups are built.