😺 Sequoia vs a16z chip battle

PLUS: Why The Neuron is funnier than AI...

Welcome, humans.

Here’s what y’all had to say about AI’s future in comedy:

We’ve discovered that Claude 3 Sonnet can occasionally crack funny punchlines with the right setup and examples, but it’s just not as willing to go there like your boys at The Neuron are.

AI generally sticks to those safe, vanilla jokes you’d expect from your boss during a Monday morning Zoom call, like, "I know I'm the only thing standing between you and lunch, so I'll try to keep this brief."

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

Sequoia and a16z are at odds about the need for more AI chips.
OpenAI + Los Alamos National Laboratory team up on bioscientific research.
Change of plans: Apple and Microsoft will not take seats on OpenAI’s board.
Amazon has launched a new text-to-enterprise-app platform.

Chips Ahoy—The Great AI Chip Debate.

this hardware sets you back $10,000…

There's a chip situation in AI right now, and the fact that two major VCs can't agree on it highlights why it's a biggie.

Specialized chips are to AI what oil was to the Industrial Revolution. You need a lot of expensive chips to run AI applications like ChatGPT because they demand immense computational power (imagine needing to crunch tons of numbers simultaneously).

This is why companies like NVIDIA are thriving—they produce those chips and provide the infrastructure to use them.

So, startups building AI applications need a lot of chips. But here's where things get interesting.

One school of thought, let's call it the a16z school, says: "Hey, we're going to get a ton of chips—more than 20,000 of them—and rent them to the AI startups we're funding."

It's like a GPU bank for startups. And by startups, we mean pretty much any venture these days…a16z is known for funding just about any pitch deck that mentions “AI” (it used to be “web3”).

In the other corner, Sequoia's preaching caution. Their stance is: hey, we already have enough chips for the time being—let's not treat these chips like they're the last rolls of Charmin in a pandemic.

This fits neatly with their recent reality check: AI startups need to generate an impressive $600B in revenue to justify the expenses on AI chips and data centers. Spoiler: AI startups are far from that mark.

It's like watching two parents argue over how many toys to buy for Christmas. One says "More is better!" while the other insists, "We've got plenty already!" Meanwhile, the AI youngsters (that’s us!) just hope to play with something exciting.

Why it matters: At the heart of the debate is this question: Can current and future AI applications actually deliver enough value to justify this massive investment in digital horsepower?

What's your take on the AI chips showdown?

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Around the Horn.

pictured: Sam Altman

OpenAI announced a partnership with Los Alamos National Laboratory to use AI to accelerate bioscientific research.
Change of plans: Apple and Microsoft have opted out of taking seats on OpenAI’s board due to antitrust concerns.
Bumble is having users report AI-generated profiles on its dating app.

Treats To Try.

sheeeeesh

*Neighborhood Sun is a cleantech startup connecting everyone to affordable solar energy. Invest as little as $250 in Neighborhood Sun before its early bird terms end.
Claude 3 Haiku is Anthropic’s fastest and cheapest AI model and can now be fine-tuned on Amazon Bedrock.
Silo AI is a platform that helps enterprises build custom AI models and products (sold to AMD for $665M).
Amazon App Studio lets you build enterprise applications in minutes from text prompts.
Writer lets you upload as many as 10M words of files to a chatbot and then search that info.

*This is sponsored content. Advertise in The Neuron here.

Intelligent Insights.

Listen to Noah and Pete on the UNinvested podcast—425,000 Readers Later: The Neuron's Secrets to Success (link).
Ray Kurzweil Still Says He Will Merge With A.I. (link).
The Fuzzy Math Behind Scale AI’s Valuation (link).
To See the Future of AI on iPhones, Check Out Samsung (link).
Sequoia, Andreessen at Odds Over Chip Shortage (link).