A Battle of The Titans

🌅 Today’s Topics

Good Morning, today we’re delving into:

• Musk Vs OpenAI

• Aella’s unusual party, OnlyFans, and what it means for humanity.

• Chart: US Military Budget

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Elon Musk is suing OpenAI?

The world’s richest man suing the world's most promising company. Now that sounds like a story I want to follow.

What’s happened?

It’s been revealed by court documents that Elon is taking the makers of ChatGPT to court. Why? Well because Elon maintains that OpenAI is not quite as ‘open’ as it might sound.

Why does this matter?

Well you can read about the specifics of the court case here, but the general landscape is this—OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Sam Altman and Elon Musk as a co-founder and their biggest financier. The name OpenAI wasn’t chosen by accident: the company’s original mission was to create artificial intelligence for the benefit of all humanity. The code was supposed to have been open source (available publicly).

Why would anyone open source?

Open-sourcing projects can be done for several reasons, that might seem counter-intuitive to begin with - why would anyone give their product away for free?

Well, in the case of software, the benefits can include creating a thriving community around a product - a software language called React was open-source and is now used to build almost half the websites on the internet - or to encourage highly talented, but morally principled people to work on exciting community projects.

Back to the court case

Now we know what principles OpenAI was founded upon and why - what changed?

Well, some think the huge wads of potential cash offered to the winners of the AI race were too tempting for Sam Altman, his compatriots and Microsoft (who own 49% of the company) to ignore. I mean their recent valuation was almost $100 billion.

OpenAI makes the argument that open sourcing is actually bad for humanity as it can put the technology in the hands of potentially malicious actors. This is certainly a reasonable argument but I somehow doubt its validity.

Whatever you think of Elon, it’s tough to argue he hasn’t been a long-time proponent for considering the risks of AI. There is a fantastic story of him losing his one-time best friend Sergey (founder of Google) as he wouldn’t take the risks of AI seriously - read here. 

So Elon believes that he was misled in giving them a load of money on the grounds that they would share their research with all, instead of locking it behind a wall and making an astonishing amount of money off it.

What does this say about the future?

While the court case will be interesting the follow, I think the really interesting part here is where the AI community goes.

OpenAI - ClosedAI? - is winning at the moment but there are incredible open-source projects being built (Mistral AI is a name to remember here). There will certainly be a place for commercialised applications for specific use cases, but in my view, the future for mass-adopted use cases (e.g. general chatbots, like ChatGPT) will be open, and so it should.

This technology will impact the world in an enormous way and giving all the power to single corporations will be too much for single individuals to wield. A disaster waiting to happen.

Sex party, OnlyFans, and the Global World Order

That title is ridiculous but somewhat true, forewarning this post is about some sexual topics. If you don’t want to read then we’ll see you on Thursday.  

What happened?

This week, a post by someone called Aella, went semi-viral on Twitter amassing over 2 million views in 48 hours.

In the thread Aella, goes on to describe how she and her partner organized a sex party for her birthday. 

“Ok Jack, what is going on here? And why are you writing about it?”

Let me explain. I am not going to break down this Twitter thread but it is an unusual read. I came across this because for some reason Aella is big in the tech community and a prolific investor tweeted about it.

I am generally uninterested in who she is but the broader theme she represents is worth exploring. Aella represents a generation of people whose values around relationships, sex, and families are changing.

Aella is a top creator on Onlyfans and has made a lot of money from it. In 2022, Onlyfans paid out around $10 billion to creators. To give you a sense of scale that is more than Spotify paid to all music artists in 2023. It has between 200 and 300 million users - that’s more users than Snapchat had on any given day in 2021. It is more profitable than Spotify, Snapchat, Reddit, Twitter, and the list goes on. 

Onlyfans is an incredible business, but what it and its creators like Aella represent is worth looking into.

Why does this matter?

Selling one's body for money is no new thing. The first documented form of “sex work” was by the Samarians in 2300 BC where, ironically, priests operated a brothel. What has changed is the culture around sex and what people perceive as normal. 

Alongside the growth of Onlyfans and sites like Pornhub, the number of people reporting regular sex and the desire for long-term relationships is dropping. 

There are also fewer people reporting not wanting to have kids.

People not wanting to have children is a problem. Why? You have a smaller number of young people needing to pay and look after a lot of old people. Just ask Japan why that’s a problem. Also, as I wrote in a previous newsletter “The fewer humans in total, the smaller the number of great people there are working on tough problems. A world with fewer Albert Einsteins, Leonardo Da Vincis, and Florence Nightingales is not a good one.”

Admittedly it is slightly farfetched to say that Aella’s birthday sex party is the cause of our population's demise. What can be said is that the internet has and is affecting the way humans interact. How we build relationships, find pleasure, meet partners, and build families is changing. We live in a world where the rate of change is only increasing and our mammalian brains might be struggling to keep up.

This raises some interesting questions about what the future looks like. How will software continue to affect relationships? If you can code your dream partner, why settle for a real one? Can you simulate a relationship using AI? Probably.

My Grandma met my Grandpa in Boston in the 1950s, and 3 weeks later they were married. Maybe marriage for my kids will look more like this scene from Blade Runner 2049.

Chart of the week:

Everyone knows the US loves their military but crikey this really shows just how much.

You can see why Trump lost his cool in these meetings trying to tell other leaders to spend more - watch here