Contrary Research Rundown #60
The death of knowledge and expertise, plus new memos on Weights & Biases, Reddit, and more
Research Rundown
In March 2023, a lot of people online were getting their first real experiences using tools like ChatGPT for everything from copywriting to coding. As the quality of those tools started to sink in, a lot of people found themselves sharing similar sentiment to Peter Nixey:
“I'm in the top 2% of users on StackOverflow. My content there has been viewed by over 1.7M people. And it's unlikely I'll ever write anything there again. Which may be a much bigger problem than it seems. Because it may be the canary in the mine of our collective knowledge.”
We’ve talked before about how ~80% of content online is user-generated. Think of websites like Wikipedia, Reddit, and Stack Overflow. Those are collective knowledge communities. Billions of data points all collected by people willing to contribute to a collective good in order to benefit from the underlying knowledge.
But what else do all of those communities have in common? They also happen to be the largest sources of training data for models like GPT-3.
So much of the internet, and the global economy, have operated off of knowledge and expertise that particular people hold. The main function of the internet for its first 30 years, or so, could be summed up in one word: distribution.
And what was it distributing? Knowledge and expertise. With the launch of ChatGPT, you’ve seen a decline in the number and earnings of freelance writing and editing jobs.
Now, that doesn’t mean that AI will replace every writing job at every level. But the impact is undeniable. Whatever happens with the continued march of AI progress, or the doomerism-driven slowing of that progress, the reality is that the old model of the internet (e.g. collecting and distributing the collective knowledge and expertise of humanity) is going to have to evolve.
MasterClass offers an online library of structured lessons from celebrities, industry leaders, and cultural icons, capitalizing on demand for unique online learning experiences. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Product Designer - Waterloo
Reddit is a social news aggregator and discussion platform, touted as the “front page of the Internet.” To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Engineering Manager, Ads Bidding and Pacing - US (Remote)
Principal Mobile Engineer, Core Experience - US (Remote)
Weights & Biases has built a machine learning platform that provides tooling for experiment tracking, collaboration, performance visualization, hyperparameter tuning, and more. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Customer Success Manager - Germany (Remote)
Staff Software Engineer, Backend - SF (Remote)
Lacework is a cloud security services provider that automates cloud security at scale so customers can innovate with speed and safety. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Software Engineer (Full Stack) - US (Remote)
Partner Sales Director - Atlanta
GoCardless offers a direct debit solution that directly connects merchants to banks, enabling them to bypass the high fees and failure rates associated with cards and digital wallets. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Senior Product Manager - London
Product Marketing Manager - London
Check out some standout roles from this week.
Ramp | NY / Miami (Remote) - SWE (Frontend), SWE (Backend)
Vareto | US / Canada / Brazil (Remote) - SWE (Backend)
OneSchema | SF - Senior SWE
The talk of the town this past week was OpenAI’s DevDay developer conference in SF. From product launches like an AI agent API to a potential future app store. To learn more about OpenAI’s history, check out our memo.
Elon Musk’s X.ai launched its first AI product, called Grok, a large-language model estimated to be 70 billion parameters trained over the course of 2 months. One unique factor is the model has access to real-time data from posts on X.
Replit announced an additional $20 million in funding from Craft Ventures and, uniquely, the funding was focused on providing early employees liquditiy. To learn more about Replit, check out our memo.
Reportedly, investors have cut OpenSea’s valuation by 90% to $1.4 billion, down from a high of $13.3 billion during 2021. OpenSea’s trading volume has dropped by 98% since its high at the end of 2021.
What was to be the first small nuclear reactor project has been cancelled after costs had risen 50%+ above estimates. While nuclear remains an elusive energy source, there’s still hope. You can learn more in our coverage on companies like Helion Energy, or our Foundations & Frontier deep dive on the space.
A Forbes profile unpacked Glean, the enterprise search company, and how the company has reached 200 enterprise customers, such as Databricks and Niantic, with 40% of its users turning to the product daily. To learn more about Glean, check out our memo.
Deel, the global HR company, reportedly has surpassed $400 million in ARR. This comes as the company continues to expand its competitive landscape beyond just other global employment companies, like Remote and Papaya, and more with companies like Rippling and Gusto as well. To learn more about Deel, check out our memo.
In this week’s episode of Research Radio, we sat down with Persona CEO and co-founder Rick Song. You can check out the full episode here.