The Secret Hotel Room AI Auction of 2012

Disclaimer: Text in italics has been written by AI.

First and foremost I want to welcome new readers to The Red Brick Renegade. This week our readership has grown by 28% from the previous week. If you’re finding this useful, great. It’s not free. We have a gentlemen’s agreement which is to share this newsletter with your friends. Your colleagues. Your kids. Sharing is caring and is what keeps me going from week to week.

Welcome to The Red Brick Renegade. This one is a rollercoaster.

Today we’re going over:

• Catchup

  • IBM hiring freeze (about to replace 7,800 jobs with AI)

  • Hollywood fights back at AI by not working

  • Web3: JP Morgan tokenizing assets

• Deepest of Dives

  • The Secret Hotel Room AI Auction of 2012 and the Godfather of ‘AI’ blows the whistle

• Go Play 

  • Prompt libraries (no more excuses for extracting full value)

  • AI video creation app hits the iPhone (free)

  • Generate product shots for your next side hustle

• Prompts you can try right now

  • Health plan

  • Sleep Optimization

  • Develop a learning plan for [insert skill here]

• Wanderlust Bonus: A destination you should probably travel to once you leave your screen

Bloomberg reported on IBM this week letting us humans know that they have halted hiring as they are planning on replacing 7,800 jobs with AI. To be honest, I didn’t think it would happen that fast but here we are. Taking this further, 30% of their non-client-facing roles could be replaced with AI within 5 years.

Two takeaways here: Tasks within your role will definitely be replaced, but the operator in many of them will not (…until later). The importance of learning new skills on how to do your job faster with less effort and provide meaningful output is increasing daily, because if you’re not doing it - the (hypothetical) person next to you will.

In some cases, us mortals are fighting back! For example, Hollywood writers have gone on strike for the first time in 15 years to stop ChatGPT from taking their jobs. Ah Hollywood, the land of dreams, green screens, and now... AI-generated sloppy first drafts. The Writers Guild of America (WGA) are wielding their pens and laptops like gladiators in an attempt to stand up against the plagiarism machines. There are two main grievances: they don't want their works turned into AI training data, and they're not keen on fixing AI's messy first drafts. It's like being asked to clean up after a party you weren't even invited to.

I promised this newsletter is not just about AI. Tokenization of digital assets is something I’ve always been real interested in ever since CityDAO opened my horizon on what’s possible back in 2021. CityDAO purchased a plot of land in Wyoming and sold voting rights for what should be done on the land in the form of a DAO. Enter JPMorgan.

The head of digital-assets platform said they are moving forward in spite of the downturn in the crypto market. To date, the digital-asset platform ran by JPMorgan has surpassed $700 billion in transactions doing short-term loans on U.S. Treasuries as well as their JPM Coin (🤯). They project to bring trillions of $ backed by assets into DeFi pools. This version of institutional DeFi (decentralized finance) will have a strict KYC (know your customer) which traditionally hasn’t existed in the majority of the DeFi market. I’ll be watching this space closely.

Time for a little rollercoaster backstory that you definitely did not know about (because I didn’t).

In 2012 there was a chap named Professor Geoff Hinton and by his side, two grad students Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever. Together, they founded DNNresearch at the University of Toronto (coincidentally, down the street from where this newsletter is being written). DNNresearch’s work? They created a system that revolutionized the way computers saw the world. Creating tools that dramatically improved object recognition for example. In December of 2012, the trio head down to Lake Tahoe for the annual Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference. It was from this conference where they had presented, that he had Google, Baido, Microsoft and DeepMind knocking on his door to acquire the startup.

Hinton, realizing the immense value his tiny venture held, decided to turn the tables. He created an auction to maximize the price of his startup, with four major players vying for the prize.

The auction unfolded through email exchanges, with bids coming from corporate executives spread across the globe. Google's top engineers even flew in on a twin-engine plane to meet Hinton and his students, while representatives from Baidu, Microsoft, and DeepMind also joined the battle. Yet, none of the bidders gathered in the same place at the same time, adding to the intrigue of the unfolding drama. The auction was ran from his hotel, room 731. His laptop, sitting on an upside-down trashcan. In the end, the trio halted the bidding at 44 million. Not because they couldn’t get a higher bid, but because they weren’t in it for the money. They wanted to make sure that their research had a good home and that home (and bid) was from Google. This ‘secret’ auction is what ignited the race for AI domination.

(source: wired)

Now, onto the present

AI Pioneer Geoffrey Hinton has quit Google to voice concerns about the dangers of AI. Dr. Hinton, now regrets his life's work and fears the potential negative impacts of AI on society, including misinformation, job losses, and threats to humanity.

After OpenAI released a new version of ChatGPT in March, over 1,000 tech leaders and researchers signed an open letter calling for a six-month moratorium on developing new systems due to the "profound risks" AI technologies pose. Dr. Hinton did not sign these letters, opting to wait until he had quit Google to voice his concerns.

Up until last year, Google has been a “proper steward” for the tech, but ever since Microsoft powered Bing search with AI, Google’s core business is at risk and now the gloves are off. Both Google and OpenAI have built systems that use much larger amounts of data, which is what caused Dr. Hinton’s view to change.

His immediate concern (and definitely mine as well) is that the internet will be flooded with false photos, videos and text, and the average person will “not be able to know what is true anymore.”

Founders’ Toolbox: A Spotlight

Every week, I play with dozens and dozens of new tools and I’ll derive a few that are worthy of your experimentation.

• Snackprompt.com - an amazing resource of prompts to get you started

• Runway launches its Gen1 AI Video creation app on iOS. Gen 2 > Gen 1 but the fact that Gen 1 is available on your mobile device is a massive step in the right direction

• Photoshoot AI - Generate Product shots in Seconds

HEALTH

Create a meal plan for productivity. Prompt: "Develop a weekly meal plan that includes [insert dietary preferences or restrictions] and promotes energy and focus throughout the day."

SLEEP OPTIMIZATION THROUGH PRODUCTIVITY

Prompt: "Given my current sleep habits [insert sleep schedule and habits], provide recommendations to optimize my sleep for better productivity and focus."

DEVELOP A LEARNING PLAN FOR A NEW SKILL

"Create a 6-week learning plan for me to acquire [insert skill] with the available resources [insert specific resources]."

The Renegade Explorer

As some of you may know, I embarked on a backpacking journey across the globe in 2022/2023, and I've been lucky enough to explore some amazing off-the-beaten-path locations along the way. As we all know, life can be overwhelming at times, and it's important to take a break and nurture our sense of curiosity. Each week I feature a breathtaking destination alongside some beautiful photography that will inspire your next adventure.

This week's gem is a hypnotic blend of towering cliffs and verdant forests meeting the brilliant ocean blue. On the other side of the mountains lies ancient redwoods, serene beach coves, and cascading waterfalls. It's an adventurer's playground, with winding roads revealing awe-inspiring panoramas and marine life playing in the waves below.