Silver Bullets

Editor's Note

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Growth companies often talk about silver bullets, the ideas that are going to transform the company. Historically a silver bullet was something that acted as a magical weapon, that instantly solves a long-standing problem. And in literature, you'll read about silver bullets being the only weapon to kill a werewolf.

The reality is that, in life and in business, silver bullets are one of many different bullets that have tried to solve the problem before it, and both timing are strategy as well as the composition of the idea are important. Basically, silver bullets are mostly fictional, just like werewolves.

Last week, in the UK we saw the "new" incumbent chancellor almost do a reverse silver bullet, destroying the UK economy in one failed (mini) swoop. And as you will see in the "Near" articles today, silver bullets are rare.

• Open AI has been developing AI tech to help humanity for many years. Dall-E has been a long time coming.

• In 2007, genomic sequencing was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's now sub-$200.

• Algorithms that power companies like Google and Tiktok require billions if not trillions of data points over many years

Know of any actual silver bullets? I can only think of Penicillin - and this one.

Stay Curious,

Onward! - Rahim

PS. Greatest TV Show of All time?

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Now

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Near

Reid Hoffman interviews OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The AI research and deployment company's primary mission is to develop and promote AI technology that benefits humanity. A deepish but acccessible dive to understand GPT - 3, which uses deep learning to produce human-like text, and its image-creation platform DALL-E.

Illumina just announced a machine that can crack genomes twice as fast as its current version—and drive the cost down to $200 a pop. This will mean that we will have the data to prepare for our future care - and thus longevity and higher quality life.

Arm’s chips are in your iPhone — but what exactly does Arm do? CEO Rene Haas explains, diving into the company’s relationship with Apple and how it survived the chip shortage.

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End Note

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