AI ancestry seems unfazed by SVB mess

Hello, exchange crew! This episode will be brief as I need to finish preparing for today’s TechCrunch Live with Arianna Huffington of Thrive Global and Mamoon Hamid of Kleiner Perkins. Since we planned the conversation, a little stuff happened so i need to reorganize my notes and questions.

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The tech-narrative boost is actually what I want to talk about this morning. Now that the initial shockwaves of the Silicon Valley banking crisis have seemingly subsided, tech news has become mainstream again. If you read TechCrunch today, you can find meal delivery startups, chip news, funding rounds, and a plot AI news. Call it a return to industry optimism, even if the ground beneath the positive vibes is still a bit shaky.

The bit of AI, however, completely captivated me. The more I read about recent advances in the world of AI, the more it seems that the tools consumers and techs are playing with aren’t gimmicks sitting on little substance, but rather a lot of substance with a few gadgets sitting on the top.

By that I mean the popular things like using ChatGPT to, say, power the narrative of your next run through Crusader Kings or having similar tools for writing silly song lyrics don’t seem to be the main innovation; what lies beneath the user-friendly elements is the real deal.

A lot of things are happening at once. From the recent release of the great GPT-4 language model, to the popularity and rapid deployment of new AI-powered search tools for companies like Quora and Duolingo finding ways to take advantage of the technology, we are seeing both the rapid development of AI technology and the speed to market.