How Sora Works (and What It Means), How to Find Your Next Big Idea Hiding on the Internet, and More

Hello, and happy Sunday! 

ICYMI, you can listen to Evan’s latest essay if you prefer audio to text. Like and subscribe to Every on Spotify so you can get our essays in your feed, and let us know what you think in the comments.

Now, on to everything we published this week, along with our take on the latest tech and business news.

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Our stories

“How Sora Works (And What It Means)” by Dan Shipper/Chain of Thought: Sora is a new model from OpenAI that can make 60-seconds videos that, when prompted well, are indistinguishable from reality. Frightening? Exciting? Yes. Dan writes about not just the implications of the technology (are we all George Lucas now?) but also how it works. Read this if you want to be reminded of why you pay for Every—timely, accurate analysis that you can’t get anywhere else. 

🎧 “How to Find Your Next Big Idea Hiding on the Internet” by Dan Shipper/Chain of Thought: The internet is a stormy, white-capped sea, awash with data and signals. In this episode of How Do You Use ChatGPT? guest Steph Smith—a16z podcast host, author, and the creator of Internet Pipes—discusses how she uses AI to navigate the online world. Dan and Steph then vet two business ideas live on the show using various tools. Watch this if you are on the hunt for your next big idea and want to use AI to help find it. 🔏Paid subscribers have exclusive access to the transcript of this episode.

“Autonomous Vehicles Have a Problem of Narrative” by Evan Armstrong/Napkin Math: A crowd of arsonists recently burned a Waymo autonomous vehicle down to its frame, and public perception of tech is at an all-time low. How did it come to this? How did the industry of the future lose the trust of the present? In this piece, Evan uses the history of autonomous vehicles to better understand this loss of trust and, most importantly, offers solutions on what we can do about it. Read this if you want to learn more about tech’s role in America. 

“How to Use Twitter” by Nabeel Qureshi: X is a smidge like cocaine—almost certainly harmful to your health, but if used correctly, it can accelerate your career (see Wall Street in the 1980s). Nabeel Qureshi is one of those addicts who uses his habit for good. He has used the platform to improve his career, learning, and happiness. Read this article if you want tips on transforming your X habit into something useful, with practical tips on topics like search functionality and feed cultivation.

“Economist Tyler Cowen Thinks ChatGPT Will Change Your Job” by Rhea Purohit: One of the more interesting and disturbing philosophical questions around AI tools is their ability to emulate an individual’s thought processes. For those of who put most of our thoughts online, is our identity and intellect consumed by the machine? And even if that’s true, what are you to do about it? Economics professor Tyler Cowen has learned to embrace the machine, using it to translate while traveling and encouraging students to use the tool, among other ways. Read this if you want to see how one of the brightest minds in the world finds value in GPT-4. 

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Chain of links

A Russian doll of AI companies. Former co-CEO of Salesforce and current OpenAI chairman of the board of OpenAI Bret Taylor raised $85 million for a new customer service AI agent startup. What makes this complicated is that OpenAI is working on products that would be competitive with those of Taylor’s new company. He says he’ll recuse himself, but man, OpenAI has a talent for complicated corporate governance problems.

No Internet, no problem. Nvidia released an LLM that can run entirely locally on your computer, keeping your data private. I think we’ll see lots more devices trying to embed a local LLM going forward. 

Google published a blog post. The company has a talent for putting out incredibly impressive benchmarks but seems reluctant to allow many people to test out what it’s made. This week it announced the release of Gemini 1.5, which has a context window of up to 1 million tokens—about 7.5x more than GPT4. This is really cool! It would also be cool if they let people, you know, use it. 

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The napkin math

1,000 apps to scroll in the metaverse. Apple announced that there were already over 1,000 apps on the Vision Pro while TikTok released a native app for the device. By comparison, the Meta Quest Store has fewer than 500. The Apple ecosystem stays winning, bb. 

Valuation? Where we’re going, we don’t need valuation. Nvidia became the third most valuable American company, surpassing both Google and Amazon, on the basis that generative AI is almost wholly reliant on the chips it makes. It does so with a price-to-earnings ratio of 174, as compared to Apple’s (the next highest on the list) of 28.5. 

Walmart wants some TVs. The company is in talks to purchase TV marker Vizio for $2 billion. This is really a story of advertising. Amazon’s Fire TV line has been beneficial for its ad division, and Walmart would very much like a piece of that action. It turns out that advertising is maybe the ultimate business model for any company that touches the internet. 

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The examined life

TANGK you very much. My favorite band right now, Idles, just released a new album called TANGK. The group is a delightful scream of rage and joy and empathy and care. In contrast with most rock groups, they decry racism and love immigrants. Listening to them is akin to swapping your blood with motor oil—you’re ready to go fast. I’m looking forward to moshing in a pit at their Boston show in September, but in the meantime, I invite you to join me in cranking the album in the car and driving real, real fast. —Evan Armstrong

That’s all for this week!