Robotaxis coming soon, OpenAI pleads the GPT-5th
And Amazon can't stop replacing 10s of jobs with 1000s of workers and calling it AI
Hello again.
As a reminder, I’m Chris Bakke, a Twitterer X-er, and I write about hiring, careers, investing, finance, web5, and tech.
Let’s dive into the good, the bad, and the ugly from the past few days. As always, we’ll flip it so we don’t end the newsletter on a bad note.
The ugly
Amazon invented “AI” that replaced the jobs of 70 grocery cashiers (by hiring 1,000 people in India). The headline reads “Amazon gives up on Just Walk Out technology, which lets customers put groceries in their cart and then just leave the store.” The real story is much better - there were 1000 workers in India behind Amazon’s fancy algorithm to detect which items customers picked. And there you have it, doomers: 1,000 jobs that AI couldn’t steal.
Apple shifts gears from self-driving cars to in-home robots. What do the best entrepreneurs do? They PIVOT. Apple’s self-driving car metaphorically went up in flames when they canned the project last month. Like a Roomba phoenix rising from the ashes, they’re rumored to be pivoting to in-home assistant robots. No idea what this will be, but it’s made by Apple, so I just preordered 3.
The bad
Yahoo (which is still a pretty big company) buys AI-news startup Artifact (which is no longer a company). Sit down for this one, there’s a lot of information you probably weren’t expecting. The Instagram co-founders made an AI-news app. It shut down. Then, Yahoo scooped up the technology and team to make their news better. Yahoo’s distribution + Artifact’s tech = better news?
OpenAI trained GPT-4 on 1M hours of YouTube videos. The dirty secret of AI seems to be that there’s no good data anymore. OpenAI ran into this problem in 2021 and resorted to a legally questionable tactic: transcribing YouTube videos. YouTube found out, and when they pressed Sam Altman for answers, he just kept saying, “I’m sorry, as a large-scale language model, I can’t answer that question.”
The good
Tesla’s robotaxi finally coming to a driveway near you. Music to the ears of every Tesla owner. The ceiling is, “cars that can generate passive income for you while you’re at home” by doing rideshare autonomously. The floor is flipping off driverless cars when they cut you off. Who knows where we’ll end up?
Alphabet might acquire HubSpot, maybe. Like a rich tech exec entering mid-life crisis, Google’s parent company Alphabet wants to drop some cash on something flashy in a desperate attempt to feel young again. Enter HubSpot, the go-to CRM for small businesses. On paper, this could be a good id- actually, who am I kidding? This will get blocked by the FTC. So. Fast. Might want to use some of that cash to sponsor an emerging lightly-sassy tech newsletter instead. Holler at me, Sundar.
Okay, that’s all.
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PS: A few months ago - as a fun (and accidental) side project - I co-founded a ghostwriting company where we help founders use social media and content to drive more customers.
My previous company drove $3M+/yr in net new revenue from content, and we’re helping other founders do the same.
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