Weekly Dose of Optimism #94

GPT-4o, Neuralink Update,Bot Company,GLP-1 Trojan Horse,Quantum Internet

Hi friends 👋,

Happy Friday and welcome back to our 94th Weekly Dose of Optimism.

Just my luck, I got engaged to my fiancé this past Saturday just days before OpenAI launched its very dateable AI. Anyway, it was a big week all around for humanlike robots. We’ll dig into those stories, plus a new Trojan Horse weight loss treatment and a big breakthrough in the quantum internet.

We spend a lot of words every week highlighting the amazing things humans continue to pull off, but sometimes, it’s cool to see it all in one place. Check out this banger video from @petarcopyrock, @gabimoncha & @levelsio with music from @ExtraTerraMusic, and try not to feel optimistic.

Let’s get to it.

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(1) GPT-4o

By this point, you’ve likely already been inundated with Chat-GPT4o demos and threads, but we still think it’s important to emphasize just how magical some of these highlights are. The major updates from OpenAI’s Spring Update were that the company launched its desktop app, released its latest model Chat-GPT4o, and is making this model freely accessible to users. In my view, the main advancement with GPT4o is that it’s much faster and smoother across multiple modalities. On the surface, this may not seem like much — reducing latency isn’t the sexiest thing ever — but it unlocks certain types of interactions with AI that we’re previously to clunky to enjoy.

Take, for example, tutoring. Previous versions of Chat-GPT could certainly be helpful in helping a student on math problems, but you couldn’t really imagine an elementary school student using Chat-GPT as a personalized tutor. Well, with GPT4o it now actually seems pretty natural. As Noah Smith pointed out, this demo basically shows we invented the illustrated primer from “Diamond Age” (and just 30 years after the book was written.)

But it’s not just tutoring. With GPT4o, there’s a whole slew of capabilities that now seem more natural due to the reduced latency and multi-modal flexibility of the model. All of the most recent GPT models have been able to translate language, but GPT4o can do so using voice and with the necessary speed to allow conversations to flow naturally.

GPT4o was certainly not GPT5 (or at least what people expect out of GPT5), but these improvements in speed and flexibility will make AI more human-like and ultimately more useful. Intelligence is only as good as our ability to use it.

(2) Neuralink’s First Patient: ‘It Blows My Mind So Much’

Ashlee Vance for Bloomberg

Arbaugh named his implant Eve in part, he says, because God presented Eve to Adam as his helper. Recently, he’s begun tracing letters on his computer screen with a cursor he controls through the implant. It’s the first stage of training Neuralink’s software to recognize the words that Arbaugh is thinking. The hope for Arbaugh is that he’ll soon be able to think entire sentences and have the software know what he’s trying to say. He’s long dreamed of being a fantasy writer and would like to write a novel.

A few months ago, we covered the story of the first public patient to receive a Neuralink implant. The videos of the patient, Nolan Arbaugh, playing video games with his brain went viral. A few months on, Arbaugh reports that the Neuralink brain implant has changed his life.

Ashlee Vance of Bloomberg Businessweek profiled Arbaugh — how he ended up paralyzed, how we stumbled his way into becoming a celebrity cyborg, and what his life is like today thanks to Nueralink.

Consider this story your gentle reminder that Elon Musk’s third or fourth most notable project is currently transforming the lives of disabled folks and has the potential to totally transform how humans interact with computers and the world around us.

But the emerald mines!!!

(3) The Bot Company

Former Cruise founder and CEO Kyle Voigt announced his next company which plans to use AI and robots to build bots that do chores for you. He didn’t share much about the company beyond the general mission and stacked cap table, but you can imagine the team is working on something like a (maybe humanoid) robot that is specifically designed to do household work like doing the dishes, taking out the trash, and folding laundry. Strong Rosie from the Jetsons vibes.

I personally spend about one hour per day on household chores between cleaning, laundry, cooking, and sprucing — and I live in a 1BR apartment in New York. The average woman in the U.S. spends over 2 hours per day on household chores. I am sure there are plenty of folks out there that value their time at or above $25/hr and would be willing to spend $50/day or $1,500/mo or $18,000/year in order to get hours back that would’ve otherwise been spent on household chores. With those numbers, the chorebot market starts to look a lot like the car market.

What’s more striking than any one bot company is just how many there seem to be. On Wednesday, OpenAI’s Evan Morikawa tweeted that he’s teaming up with two robotics people to launch a new company, presumably building robots.

Maybe we’re in a robotics bubble, but this is the kind of productive bubble we’re here for. Whether in this cycle or the next, we’ll have dozens of genius-run companies competing to give us the lowest-cost, highest-performance robots they can to do all the work — like laundry, dishes, box-packing, heavy object lifting, whatever — that we don’t want to do. All this capital and talent will speed up development and spin up supply chains. There will be some absolutely massive winners — labor is a $45 trillion market globally — but consumers will be the biggest winners of all.

(4) GLP-1-directed NMDA receptor antagonism for obesity treatment

Petersen et al in Nature

In summary, our approach demonstrates the feasibility of using peptide-mediated targeting to achieve cell-specific ionotropic receptor modulation and highlights the therapeutic potential of unimolecular mixed GLP-1 receptor agonism and NMDA receptor antagonism for safe and effective obesity treatment.

At this point, we’re all pretty aware of how effective GLP-1s are as an obesity treatment — frankly, more effective than really anyone could have imagined just a few years ago. But we may be at the very beginning of this story. A new drug that combines a gut-hormone-mimicking peptide with a small molecule and targets the brain cells controlling appetite has shown promising results and may potentially outperforming existing GLP-1s.

The novel drug employs a “Trojan Horse” strategy by hiding a small molecule that blocks the NMDA receptor within a gut-hormone-mimicking peptide used in GLP-1s. This allows the drug to specifically target and act on neurons in the brain that regulate appetite, potentially enhancing weight-loss effects while minimizing side effects. We’re still only working with mice here, but damn, those are some skinny mice.

(5) ‘Quantum internet’ demonstration in cities is most advanced yet

Davide Castelvecchi for Nature

Three separate research groups have demonstrated quantum entanglement — in which two or more objects are linked so that they contain the same information even if they are far apart — over several kilometres of existing optical fibres in real urban areas. The feat is a key step towards a future quantum internet, a network that could allow information to be exchanged while encoded in quantum states.

Quantum internet here we come! Three separate research groups demonstrated quantum entanglement over several kilometers of existing optical fibers in real urban areas, accomplishing a major milestone towards creating a quantum internet: transmitting information encoded in quantum states.

But what is the quantum internet? It promises nearly unbreakable cryptographic security and the ability to connect quantum computers into a powerful network. It could also enable advanced scientific experiments, like creating extensive telescope networks with unparalleled resolution.

The quantum internet is still in the early stages and needs to overcome some significant technical challenges — with estimated practical rollouts not happening for at least a decade — but this entanglement represents a quantum leap in the development of the quantum internet. Get it?

Bonus: Senate Votes to Overturn SAB 121

Democratic Senators Who Voted to Repeal SAB 121 via Bankless

Packy here. I love the smell of the democratic process working in the morning!

Yesterday, the Senate voted to repeal the SEC’s Staff Accounting Bulletin No. 121 (SAB 121), which Gary Gensler’s SEC hastily rushed out in April 2022. SAB 121 directed companies that custody digital assets to record them as liabilities on their balance sheets, along with the corresponding assets, which made it more difficult for banks to offer crypto custody services. Which was Gensler’s point: SAB 121 was part of an effort to cut crypto off from the traditional banking system.

Republicans, led by Congressman Patrick McHenry in the House and Senator Cynthia Lummis in the Senate, introduced a bill to overturn SAB 121 because Gensler’s SEC issued it without consulting regulators like the Fed, didn’t go through the standard notice-and-comment process, and because while the SEC characterized it as “guidance,” a Government Accountability Office report found that it constituted a new rule that should have been approved by Congress.

What made yesterday’s vote particularly notable was that 12 Democratic Senators, including Chuck Schumer, Cory Booker, and Kristen Gillibrand, crossed the aisle to vote to repeal SAB 121. That’s a healthy dose of egg on the face of Senator Elizabeth Warren and the latest in a series of losses for Gensler. Turns out, this is America, and there are laws and processes that even the most ambitious regulators must follow.

Now, it’s up to President Biden to sign it. He originally vowed to veto the resolution, but given that so many powerful party members broke ranks, vetoing it now would be a weird move sure to lose him whatever crypto community support he has left. Just sign it, Joe.

Pro-Innovation Bipartisanship. You love to see it. Maybe wagmi after all.

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We’ll be back in your inbox on Tuesday. If you have some time this weekend, checkout Hubspot’s free report on AI GTM.

Thanks for reading,

Packy + Dan