Contrary Research Rundown #117
The cat and mouse game of AI predictions vs. AI distribution, plus new memos on Otter, Tecton, and more
Research Rundown
Founders and investors alike live by the moniker of “dream the dream.” The magic of the beginning of the new year is that everyone takes the time to put those dreams out into the open. Unsurprisingly across dozens of posts about 2025 predictions, AI is at the center of a lot of the dreams people are dreaming. One important note stuck out as critical in framing what else may happen in 2025 around AI:
A lot of the dream factory energy is coming from big lifts around technological progress in AI. From “specialist AI models serving as ‘super staffing’ platforms” to “video generation models will be trained to specific uses,” the push forward in technological capabilities will, almost assuredly, outpace the progress in both people’s ability to understand those capabilities and the typical enterprise’s ability to absorb those capabilities.
Beyond the cat and mouse game of AI revolution and AI distribution, the predictions span a wide spectrum. Will Amazon acquire Lyft to build robotaxis? Will the next generation of software be built by creators who excel at distribution and don’t write a line of code? Is this year the year traditional media finally dies and cedes influence to user-generated media or independent media?
And finally, with the December announcement of Google’s Android XR headset we’ll see the return of the never-ending rebound prediction of the death of smartphones and the universal move to AR glasses.
Here’s to a productive and mind-bending 2025!
Otter is an AI-powered transcription and collaboration tool that transcribes spoken words into text while identifying speakers, summarizing key points, and allowing users to highlight and comment on specific parts of the transcript. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Research Engineer, Model Inference - Mountain View, CA
Senior Software Engineer, Frontend - Mountain View, CA
Tecton provides a feature platform for machine learning with a unified system for defining, managing, and serving features. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Sr. Product Manager, GenAI & Growth - San Francisco, CA
Machine Learning Engineer, Gen AI - Remote (US)
Check out some standout roles from this week.
Hex | San Francisco, CA, New York, NY or Remote - Fullstack Engineer (Hex Magic), Product Engineering Lead, Enterprise Product Lead, Financial Operations Lead
1Password | Remote (US or Canada) - Senior CX Content Developer, Manager (Solutions Engineering), Sr Manager (Product Design - Channels), Director (Product Management - Growth), Director (Data Infrastructure), Senior Developer (Backend)
LaunchDarkly | San Francisco, CA and Remote (US) - Backend Engineer (AI), Lead Data Scientist / Applied Statistician, Senior Platform Engineer, Senior Full Stack Engineer, Senior Product Manager (Feature Management)
Verkada | San Mateo, CA - Senior Product Designer, Hardware Sustaining Engineer, Senior Product Manager (Enterprise Management), Senior Web Frontend Engineer (Access Control), Senior Backend Engineer (Camera Foundation)
The big drama over the holidays, in case you missed it, was the dance with death for accounting startup Bench, which announced it was shutting down after having raised $100 million in funding. The company’s investors had replaced its founding CEO before running into issues with its venture debt and being miraculously acquired by Employer.com to avoid shutdown.
London-based payments startup, Checkout, saw revenue drop by 16% to $212 million after cutting ties with crypto exchange, Binance, over money laundering concerns.
In a conversation with Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that the idea that business applications exist will “collapse” in the age of AI agents that can take over the function of executing business logic.
The team at a16z reviewed dozens of AI apps to build a collective list of the best AI tools for use cases like getting work done, building an audience, and more.
A new report found that Spotify has been seeding its most popular playlists with “stock music attributed to pseudonymous musicians—variously called ghost or fake artists—presumably in an effort to reduce its royalty payouts.”
After years of planning and delays, a TSMC chip fab capable of 4-nanometer node processes is set to open in Phoenix in 2025, hopefully followed by a similar plant in 2028 operating with 2- or 3-nm-node processes.
President-elect Trump announced a request to the Supreme Court to delay the ruling on the ban of TikTok until after his inauguration.
Arctic Wolf has announced its plans to acquire Cylance’s endpoint security solutions from Blackberry, who acquired the startup in 2018 for $1.4 billion in cash.
According to Telegram CEO, Pavel Durov, the company is now profitable after having reached $1 billion of revenue and 12 million subscribers. The business also has $500 million in cash reserves.
A report from a large insurer, Swiss Re, analyzed liability claims from “25.3 million fully autonomous miles driven by Waymo” and came away with the conclusion that “Waymo’s vehicles was safer than that of humans, with an 88% reduction in property damage claims and a 92% reduction in bodily injury claims.”
In our latest episode of Research Radio, we sat down with Base Power Co-Founders Zach Dell (CEO) & Justin Lopas (COO). You can check out the full episode here.
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