Contrary Research Rundown #87
Building an AI-Native Company, plus new memos on Rappi, Neuralink, and more
Research Rundown
In our latest deep dive, we unpacked the evolving infrastructure companies are using to more effectively leverage AI in their products. The building blocks of a company look very different when AI isn’t just something used as part of a product, but becomes a central component of the product. Here’s an excerpt from our piece:
“With the launch of GPT-3 in 2020, there was a notable shift in the way people thought about how to use AI in their products. AI could increasingly serve as the heart of a company’s product, not just an appendage to it. Transformer architecture, increased volumes of data, and improved levels of performance all set the stage for AI-native products.
Where, historically, AI might be used by a bank, for example, to improve their fraud detection algorithm. Take away the AI, and you just have a worse algorithm. But now, you have companies like Writer and Jasper built copywriting products with AI models at the center of their business. Companies like Harvey and EvenUp built legal tech with AI at their center. Companies like DeepScribe and Freed built medical transcription with AI at their center.
As AI-native companies increase in number and scale, the need for tooling that supports AI-native use cases increases. The first wave of companies building with AI at the core largely focused on inference with existing models.
"But with increasingly performant models (especially open-source ones that are readily accessible), companies can go deeper in building their capabilities as AI-native businesses. That expansibility opens up a world of opportunities for what the AI-native tech stack looks like.”
In our piece, we dive deeper into the history of databases, how the evolution of data infrastructure has followed every new generation of building products, and the introduction of vector databases represent the first step from a dumb database to a context-rich compute engine. You can read the full deep dive here.
Rappi is a Latin American super app that began with food delivery and has since expanded to provide ecommerce, travel, and banking services. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Backend Developer - Java - Remote, Mexico
Software Developer - Remote, Mexico
Clari offers a suite of products designed to support the revenue management process. The company focuses on providing actionable insights for forecasting, revenue intelligence, and pipeline management. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Principal Software Engineer, Data Platform - Remote, San Francisco Bay Area
Staff Machine Learning Platform Engineer - Remote, San Francisco Bay Area / New York, NY / Seattle, WA
Neuralink, an invasive BCI company with a short-term goal of treating various neurological disorders such as quadriplegia, was founded by Elon Musk in 2016 with the intention of creating another “layer” to the brain to complement the functions of existing layers like the limbic system and the cortex. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Embedded Software Engineer - Austin, TX
Software Engineer, Implant - Fremont, CA
Check out some standout roles from this week.
Arize AI | U.S. Remote - Backend Engineer, Frontend Engineer
Cribl | U.S. Remote, Canada Remote - Principal Software Engineer, Backend, Senior Software Engineer, Stream (Backend)
Weaviate | Remote - Machine Learning Engineer, Senior Software Engineer Database
Tyler Cowen declared May 2024 as the month when AI safety died. After three years, Jan Leike resigned from OpenAI where he served as their head of alignment.
In the same month, Anthropic released a paper on how it wants to make AI models safer and more reliable. “Anthropic wants to make models safe in a broad sense, including everything from mitigating bias to ensuring an AI is acting honestly to preventing misuse - including in scenarios of catastrophic risk.”
Meanwhile, regulators are making the counter argument that AI safety is alive and well. The Senate ‘passed’ (still has several months before it becomes law) SB 1047, a bill around AI safety & innovation. CA Senator Scott Weiner tweeted, “SB 1047 promotes innovation & ensures developers of the largest, most powerful AI models keep safety in mind.” Others argue the legislation is indicative of California’s adeptness to kill innovation and its ineptitude to cultivate technical excellence and want to shut down the bill immediately.
John Luttig, at Founders Fund, reignited the open-source v. closed source debate with his article advocating that the future of AI is closed-source as open-source models will become financially unsustainable and inferior to closed-source alternatives: "If centralizing forces hold, scale advantages will compound and leave open-source alternatives behind." Others strongly disagree.
A woman got scammed out of more than $250,000 from a man using fake profiles and images. The romance scam industry is shockingly large, generating $2-3 billion annually through sophisticated criminal networks that exploit vulnerable individuals by using stolen photos and identities to build fake profiles across multiple platforms.
SpaceX plans to launch Starship from at least two sites - one at Kennedy Space Center in Florida and one at Starbase in Texas - to support the rapid cadence of tanker flights needed to refuel the Starship lunar lander in orbit. Musk tweeted, “We’re aiming to build two towers at the Cape for Starship, one at 39A and another TBD (we don’t have final approval yet)”. This comes off the heels of the FAA kicking off a new environmental review of SpaceX’s Starship launch.
Two states — Florida, followed by Alabama — have banned lab-grown meat. Cultivated meat differs from alternative protein companies like Impossible Foods in that it requires taking a single cell of meat, feeding it nutrients over a two to three week period, then harvesting it which could reduce global emissions dramatically.
Scarlett Johansson alleged that OpenAI intentionally modeled their new ChatGPT voice, "Sky," to closely mimic the voice of the actress who portrayed an AI that formed an intimate relationship with a human in the film "Her," despite previously declining an offer to voice the AI themselves, raising concerns about consent and intellectual property rights in the age of deepfakes. Though, some wonder if this another one of OpenAI’s “manufactured controversies”.
SpaceX’s Starlink now has more than 3 million customers globally. “Starlink is connecting more than 3M people with high-speed internet across nearly 100 countries, territories, and many other markets.”
This week also marked the first video call on X completed through Starlink’s Direct-to-Cell satellites. The product is launching live with T-Mobile later this year.
Anduril has had early talks to raise about $1.5 billion in a new funding round that would increase the company’s valuation to $12.5 billion from $8.5 billion.
Customers can now check out with Amazon without leaving Instagram or Facebook. The partnership between the two tech giants allows for a more seamless checkout experience and to be served more relevant ads.
Scale AI has raised $1 billion in a new funding round, doubling the startup’s valuation to about $14 billion and paving the way for an initial public offering.
Canva is no longer a startup. The $26 billion graphic design behemoth has reached $2 billion in ARR while growing 50-60% and remaining cash flow positive. The company expects AI to play a meaningful part in future growth.
Ramp announced its newest AI agent — Ramp Tour Guide. It can show you how to do anything on Ramp. Co-Founder Eric Glyman tweeted about the launch: “New UX pattern — never seen this before and it’s a joy to use; both how you use software, and how software will do work for you, will radically change.”
Humane, the wearable AI startup, is exploring a sale seeking $750 million to $1 billion. The company was valued at $850 million last year and launched its AI pin in April 2024 which wasn’t well received. YouTube tech reviewer Marques Brownlee titled his video about the pin: "The Worst Product I've Ever Reviewed… For Now.”
Flexport set its own all time record of chargeable weight on a single 747 flight at 125 tons. Flexport Founder and CEO, Ryan Petersen, tweeted: “Demand for air freight from Asia to the US is surging right now as some shippers who can't get cargo moved fast enough by ocean are deciding to switch some of it to air.”
WHOOP announced its global partnership with Cristiano Ronaldo. “Cristiano has been a WHOOP member for a number of years…[his] relentless pursuit of improvement and perfection mirrors our mission. Together, we'll unveil exciting product collaborations to enhance the WHOOP experience for our members.” said Will Ahmed, WHOOP Founder and CEO.
China launches military drills as it completely surrounded Taiwan in all directions, with over 30 ships and 40+ fighter jets active in training.
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