A Copilot for the Mind, SVB’s Explosion, LLMs are the new CPUs, and More

Hello and happy Sunday!

The news this week was absolutely wild: from bank collapses to GPT-4's launch.

We hope this week's collection of essays helps you filter through what's important about these pieces of news, and frames for you where things might be heading.

Now, onto the articles!

GPT-4: A Copilot for the Mind

Over the next year or two, Dan expects GPT-4 and its successors to become a copilot for the mind: a digital research assistant that will bring to bear the sum total of everything you’ve read, everything you’ve thought, and everything you’ve forgotten every time you touch a keyboard. 

In this essay, he unpacks how GPT-4 will solve some of the perennial problems in productivity culture, and what's feasible with it today.

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A Dearth of Secrets, an Excess of Capital: SVB's Explosion

Last weekend, the tech sector recently experienced a collective period of crisis when Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapsed.

How did collapse? Evan has an idea: secrets. An inner whisper network of VC's created a crisis, compounded by the way stories spread on the internet, that took down one of the most storied banks in technology.

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LLMs are the new CPUs

If you want to understand how AI progress will unfold over the coming decade, a good thing to do is look at the history of technology.

In this essay, Nathan looks at the history of CPUs and compares their development to Large-Language Models. In the case of CPUs, Intel was able to generate a dominant market position that lasted them decades.

Will OpenAI do the same?

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The Rise of the Silicon Valley Small Business

Historically, you either start a startup or you start a small business. Startups are high-growth, involve technical skill, and require venture capital. Small businesses are staid, slow growth, and low-margin.

In this article, Anu Atluru examines a third option: the Silicon Valley Small Business. It's a hybrid of the two, where teams stay small and mostly bootstrapped—like a small business. But they use the Silicon Valley playbook to grow, and scale efficiently.

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Technology is Good Actually

The technology industry has huge problems, but Evan believes we often forget that it's actually good. Technology allows for permission-less innovation, and drastic cost reductions which improve quality of life and opportunity for people around the world.

In this essay, he examines why technology is good—and also why it's systematically undervalued in our moral discourse.

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