A Simple Question to Help Your Team Define Success
What many companies, large and small, new and young, fail to do is envision what success looks like. The “champagne question” (I prefer the 25-year-old Single Malt Question) gets to the heart of where you’re going. Without a goal, your journey could go anywhere or nowhere.
How NVIDIA and Jeff Bezos Are Reshaping the Future of AI and Search Technology
(Medium Paywall) This article is brief. Let me give you the punchline. Go check out Perplexity.ai. When ChatGPT first came out, I wrote that LLMs could be the Google killer. Nobody is doing this better than Perplexity. I don’t know what their revenue model will be. Subscriptions? Advertising? Both? The real open question is, will content owners go along with this when they’re not getting traffic? I’ll write about Perplexity next week in the B2BWins Newsletter.
US Seed Investment Actually Held Up Pretty Well For The Past 2 Years. Here’s What That Means For 2024
Despite venture being way down in 2023, if you could spell “LLM,” you could get a million dollars. So, where are things going now? Well, Seed rounds remain the least affected even though they’re down significantly. The big news is investors are reluctant to fund Series A. You’re going to need a lot more proof before doing a more significant raise. Raise a bigger Seed to get you through to A. The second half of the story is here.
Amazon announces Rufus, a new generative AI-powered conversational shopping experience.
Is it me, or does Rufus rhyme with Doofus? It seems like a risky branding move. I’m not in the beta, so I won’t be able to tell you how well this works, but it seems consistent with Amazon’s “eat-you-own-dogfood so software developers will buy it” strategy. As long as it isn’t hallucinating on prices, I’m all for it.
As AI Costs Soar, Some Startups Consider Selling
(The Information Paywall) Running a business on LLMs is stunningly expensive. Developing and running your own LLM will require a few billionaires in your wallet. AI investment appears to be deep in the Trough of Disillusionment. You have to be delivering value to customers, remember that old-timey thing, and not just building technology. If you can demonstrate value, raise. If you can’t, sell.