New sections may appear every week or just when I have something new to share.
The Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max is great. The annual upgrade plan is really easy. It is financially a lease. $58.25 per month for an incredibly powerful supercomputer in your pocket. The blue titanium of the phone is very nice. The phone is slightly lighter than the prior stainless steel phone. The mute switch on the left side is now a button. You can configure what you want a push of the button to do. One push and ready to take a picture is what I tried for starters. They send you an empty pre-paid box to return your “old” one. One year later you do the same thing. The Apple Watch Series 9 is much faster which is nice for software updates. It has a really neat feature called TapTap. When the watch is asking you to press a button, you can just go tap tap with your thumb and index finger. The Watch detects that and presses the button for you.
The startup I am sharing about this week is Statum Systems, a healthcare startup where I invested in 2020. After three years the company failed. The notice below is typical. I expect most startups to fail. My experience has been out of 10 startups, five or six will fail, a couple will do well, and one or two will do great, far making up for the losses on the failed companies. As always, never invest in a startup unless you are prepared to lose every penny you invest.
To Our Regulation CF Shareholders,
In December 2022, Statum had determined its best path was to closeoperations and seek a buyer or licensor for its intellectual property assets. The
Company reached that decision following its inability to attract adequate financing, and the complexities of selling to large medical centers following the staffing, budgeting and other impacts of the COVID pandemic.
For the past six months, management and founders have reached out to many key industry players ranging from global organizations like Microsoft and
Oracle to smaller more specialized businesses, including competitors. Weconducted three detailed discussions and evaluations with potential partners and/or buyers, including in-depth demonstrations and detailed technical discussions. In the end, no one was willing to proceed to a purchase or license commitment.
At this point, there is no option left but to dissolve the corporation, and weexpect the corporate entity to be completely dissolved and all shares canceled by the end of September 2023. There are no remaining assets within the Company and the common shares have no residual value.
We are profoundly disappointed to have reached this point and thankful foryour support throughout this process.
Warmest regards,
Statum Systems
According to Bard AI, following are some of the latest developments in AI. As usual, the list contains some very positive things along with some scary things.
Here are some of the new developments in AI this week:
- Google AI launches an updated Bard, a new large language model that is more informative and comprehensive than its predecessor, GPT-3. Bard can generate different creative text formats, like poems, code, scripts, musical pieces, email, letters, etc. It will try its best to fulfill all your requirements.
- Meta AI releases a new dataset of 10 million code snippets and their corresponding natural language descriptions. The dataset is designed to help AI models learn to understand and generate code.
- OpenAI announces plans to release a new version of its ChatGPT language model in the coming months. The new model is expected to be more powerful and capable than the current version.
- Microsoft researchers develop a new AI model that can generate realistic images of people from text descriptions. The model, called Imagen, can generate images of people from different cultures, races, and ethnicities.
- Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley develop a new AI model that can predict the likelihood of a person developing Alzheimer’s disease. The model is more accurate than previous models and could help to identify people who are at risk for the disease earlier.
These are just a few of the many new developments in AI this week. AI is a rapidly evolving field, and new discoveries are being made all the time. I am excited to see what the future holds for AI and the impact it will have on our world.
Ukrainian people are very innovative in technology. They are making drones from cardboard and other materials which Russian radar cannot see. Using these homegrown, and cheap, drones they were able to knock out two Russian ships.
The Fed announcement has wreaked havoc on markets and crypto is not immune. Despite this, BTC broke the $27,000 mark for the first time in a month and notched its first weekly gain in the same period. BTC has always been the biggest cryptocurrency by market cap. It rose above 50% of the market cap of all crypto for the first time in a month. It finished at 49.1%.
Stocks struggled at the end of a up and down week. Seems like investors are positioning for a higher-for-longer Fed stance. The S&P 500 had its worst week since March. Bloomberg said, “Traders are still very concerned about inflation and the path of policy amid the recent oil rally and the Fed’s signal that rates are not going to come down any time soon”. Looks like we have not hit bottom yet.
Following are videos of talks I gave this year. I have been fortunate to be able to share my thoughts on technology with a number of groups.
On September 14, I gave a talk on AI at the Ridgefield Library in Ridgefield, CT.
On July 21, I gave a lecture on AI @FoundersHallCT. I wan’t sure how many would turn out. It was a lot. Great interest in the topic. In addition to current events and outlooks, I told the audience about Robot Attitude: How Robots and Artificial Intelligence Will Make Our Lives Better.
On March 8th I was the guest speaker at the first meeting of Probus in Palm Coast, Florida on March 8. Probus is a worldwide organization of retired and semi-retired men and women who come together to make new friends, learn new things, and have fun. There are over 4,000 Probus clubs in more than 100 countries, with over 400,000 members. Probus clubs are non-political, non-sectarian, and non-profit. They are self-governing and autonomous, and each club sets its own policies and activities.
On March 30, I gave my 12th annual lecture called Tech Talk at Hammock Dunes Club in Palm Coast, Florida where I live in the winter.
On March 23, gave a town hall-like speech and Q&A with the IT special interest group (SIG) of the New York Executive Forum. The event was via Zoom.
On April 19, I gave a talk and Q&A with a group of Union Carbide retirees. Some years ago, Union Carbide had its headquarters about a mile from where I live in Connecticut. The event was via Zoom.
There are many more videos of my lectures, interviews, etc. on my YouTube channel which you can find here.
