tompetry

Is the $200 price tag there to simply steer you to the $20 plan rather than the free plan?

Now this is what I call taste.

Cool concept. Anybody know of a project with realtime spontaneous interactions like this that fits a defined use case?

I've thought about this topic a lot before. The concept of a founder vs manager "mode" doesn't resonate with me, but the message boils down to this: founders have more freedom to approve high risk/high reward initiatives, while shielding everybody else on downside. It's "their company" and their job can stomach some turmoil in the name of winning.

Managers don't have this safety net; failures will be evaluated more critically and they probably aren't the types to win at all costs. So they are more focused on avoiding fatal mistakes that will lose them their jobs, but don't end up achieving as much on average.

In a sports analogy, founders play to win and managers play not to lose.

But it's a spectrum not black and white. Every founder has to delegate and every founder has to bring on great people to do the work and let them breathe. I think its about freely enabling bold projects while minimizing the fear and anxiety at all levels, and figuring out the decision making and execution structure that works the best.

>> By some estimates, more than 80 percent of AI projects fail — twice the rate of failure for information technology projects that do not involve AI.

So 40% of projects with more proven/experienced technologies fail? That's super high. Replace "AI" with any other project "type" in the root causes and sounds about right. So this feels more of a commentary on corporate "waste" in general than AI.

This was awesome

> The founder in this scenario was offered $400,000 of liquidity at Series A and $750,000 at Series B and encouraged to do so by their board of investors to de-risk their own life.

This is from the article. I would tend to agree with you.

The single data point here is Adam Neuman, so I have a hard time taking this seriously.

I have raised 6 equity rounds as a founder of 2 companies. Never took a dime off the table, was never offered it, never asked for it. We actually did have early employees ask about it, and we encouraged them to not sell.

Why would you, especially at early stage valuations? You're either bad at math, or you know you're about to fail. And who is buying these secondary shares? I don't know a VC or angel who would "de-risk" an early founder like this; it's not aligned with their model. It also complicates QSBS status if I recall correctly.

I've worked quite a bit with STT and TTS over the past ~7 years, and this is the most impressive and even startling demo I've seen.

But I would like to see how this is integrated into applications by third party developers where the AI is doing a specific job. Is it still as impressive?

The biggest challenge I've had with building any autonomous "agents" with generic LLM's is they are overly gullible and accommodating, requiring the need to revert back to legacy chatbot logic trees etc. to stay on task and perform a job. Also STT is rife with speaker interjections, leading to significant user frustrations and they just want to talk to a person. Hard to see if this is really solved yet.

Fair question. People have kept pictures, paintings, art, belongings, etc of their family members for countless generations. AI will surely be used to create new ways to remember loved ones. I think that is a big difference than "keeping around grandma as an AI version of herself", and pretending they are still alive, which I agree feels unhealthy.

I have the same concerns generally. But one non-evil popped into my head...

My dad passed away a few months ago. Going through his things, I found all of his old papers and writings; they have great meaning to me. It would be so cool to have them as audio files, my dad as the narrator. And for shits, try it with a British accent.

This may not abate the concerns, but I'm sure good things will come too.

If he's earning just 5% a year on that $16B net worth, that's about ~$2.2m per day. Yet he used this info to gain $500k?

Not so sure about that. It reads to me like there is a personal scandal on the horizon that has come to the board's attention, and the board feels their hands are tied. Hard for me to believe its business decision related; Sam is elite in this regard, and is not really incentivized to violate their charter.

Bummer in any situation... the progress in this domain is truly exciting, and OpenAI was executing so well. This will slow things down considerably.