Five Things Tech: Humane, Smart Rings, Climate Tech IPO, Patents, Predictions
Let's kick off the weekend with some good insights about current tech developments!
Well, hello again! It’s good to have you back for another edition of Five Things Tech - your curated weekly reading list that will help you get a better understanding of what is really going on in the world of tech. Well, at least according to me. My name is Nico Lumma and I haven’t been offline since 1995 and I have been working in tech ever since.
Let’s predict something: I think Musk is wrong concerning his predictions on Artificial General Intelligence. What I predict is: we’re getting close to peak hype and soon we will collectively realize that those huge AI models are really, really expensive and that we need to find a sustainable way to create business around them. This will lead to lots of broken dreams and crushed valuations, but ultimately we will see lots of new companies evolve in the AI space, building upon the experiences and mishaps of the companies that currently dominate all the stories on AI.
Let’s revisit this in a year or two. :)
In the meantime, read these five articles and make sure to subscribe to this newsletter if you haven’t already. And go paid, I have to pay for plenty of AI tokens, even though this newsletter is completely written by myself, every single typo is crafted by hand.
Humane AI Pin review: not even close
I’m always rooting for those who try out new things. I mentioned Humane on Five Things Tech in November and now The Verge wrote a review that basically rips the whole concept apart and it is not pretty.
Smart rings are meant to be invisible, and that’s the problem
My Oura ring died on me a few weeks ago and when I got the replacement ring (great customer support at Oura!) a few days ago, I quipped to my wife: “know I know again how I feel!” and she said: “I was going to say that about you first!” - anyhow, I like the idea of rings as they are just not there at all, but are still providing interesting data for me to interpret.
Climate tech has an IPO problem
The last few years have seen a huge surge in investments into climate tech or green tech and this has also let to lots of new startups trying to grow in this new market. If this doesn’t produce great IPO soon, VC will lose interest again, which would suck for our climate.
Can we learn about innovation from patent data?
“To sum up: a large share, likely the majority, of inventions are not part of the patent record. And a large share of patents, possibly the majority, don’t describe important components of technological progress. Other stuff besides invention drives a lot of patenting decisions. But innovation is also in the mix, and so in aggregate, patent data is correlated with other measures of innovation, albeit with a lot of noise.” - this is an interesting deep dive into patents and innovation by
!Elon Musk and Jamie Dimon’s AI Predictions and What They Mean for the Future of Humanity
I like to read predictions of the impact of tech developments and also its timing. I have been doing these predictions myself for a number of years now and even unsuccessfully launched three startups by predicting something to happen quickly, which then took years longer to happen… also, I’m predisposed not to believe anything Musk postulates.
That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:
— Nico