In today’s issue:

  • It’s not AI that will change everything… but this might
  • Tesla is killing everything
  • DogePirate

Editor’s note: Today, we bring you a guest piece by Sam Volkering from his publication AI Collision which was first published on Tuesday 17 December.

You can hear from Sam more often at AI Collision and learn more about the latest developments in AI by simply clicking here to sign up for free.

Welcome to AI Collision 💥,

In 2016 I was working on a series of big ideas for the next decade with a colleague. He sent me a series of questions and I sent him back a series of answers – completely raw, off the cuff, where my state of mind was at the time.

The precise date was 21 January 2016.

I won’t go into everything, but here’s one question he asked in this ideas session:

Sam, I was thinking of driverless cars, cyber security and… I think IoT might be a bit familiar now… if you could pick a third big trend, what would it be? If you are adamant it’s IoT, no problem!

Here’s my reply, verbatim (remember, January 2016)…

So, one of the most revolutionary changes to the world is going to be quantum computing. This is going to properly set off the era of real artificial intelligence as it will give machines the ability to reason and to not be so binary. Now every major economy around the world has a quantum computing development program – I’d suspect though for more self-interest than anything else. 

Quantum computing would crack any cyber defence that existed today in the blink of an eye.  

But it would also allow scientific research to supercharge. It would mean science could model and simulate results and tests faster and more accurately than any existing method. What a supercomputer today could do in a couple of months today an early-stage quantum computer would be able to do in a few minutes. That’s where the hockey stick exponential increase in technology capabilities will really come into play. 

Quantum computing will change EVERYTHING. 

However it’s not like out of the box in five years we’ll have a quantum computing company you can invest in. Where it’s going to come from is the companies that will benefit from quantum computing accessibility. I think it’s going to come from companies that are getting into cognitive computing and ‘deep learning’ right now. So there are some companies that are in this space but many are private. Still there are some companies that are developing new kinds of ‘smart technology’ new kinds of neural network capabilities that are pushing the boundaries of ‘artificial intelligence now’. I think of it like the tape machine computers that existed before the PC – you know the tech is there and it’s a highly investable prospect – but then soon enough there will be the ‘Apple’ that comes along and blows it all away. 

Not sure who my ‘Apple’ is in the quantum computing world just yet, but I know there will be one, it might not even be a public company yet, but it’s coming and it’s coming soon, and I’ve spent three years trying to find one that’s investible and will continue to do so. But short term as I said it’s those companies developing the platform, maybe software, algorithms and support technology that quantum computing will use to accelerate technological process faster than at any period in the history of humanity.

Well, those quantum computing (QC) companies did come, and there’s a handful on the US markets that are absolutely flying in price already. That’s because corners of the market are quickly realising what I’ve been writing about for some time: that AI and quantum computing go hand in hand – and it will change everything.

In fact, with increasingly good QCs, we’ll see an acceleration in AI – and with an acceleration in AI, we’ll see increasingly good AI.

I bring up quantum computing, because while everyone is still talking about AI, I think that it’s quantum computing companies that could end up being the darlings of the market in 2025.

They might be shooting in price now, but I think it’s just a precursor as to what comes next. AI is wide and varied with many different companies working on it, from little niche tech players to the mega-cap giants. Quantum computing will very much end up the same way.

There are niche players. Then there’s the mega-cap giants – like Google, who has been at quantum computing for years.

It may end up that Google’s AI might not be the best, but maybe its quantum computing chips are.

Meet its latest and best progress in quantum computing yet, Willow.

This is a massive development. It’s a nice little reminder to the likes of Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta and others that while AI is all the rage, don’t forget about arguably an even bigger game-changing tech.

It’s such a leap that Google even stated in its announcement that what it had been able to achieve is, “… in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse…”

AI gone wild 🤪

In 2015 I was CES in Las Vegas – the world’s largest consumer tech show. It always has the latest and greatest in tech from GPUs and computers to VR, gaming, AI and automotive.

In fact, there have been times over the years where I’ve thought it more of an autoshow than a tech show, such was the dominance of the world’s big car companies. Hyundai, Toyota, Ford, Volkswagen, Mercedes, Audi, all the big car companies would go to great lengths to show off their next-gen car tech.

Back in 2015 the big thing was Audi and its partnership with Nvidia for its autonomous driving platform. On display it had a self-driving Audi Q7 which you could schedule a time to take a ride in.

So, I did.

From that moment on, I had no doubt our future would proliferate with self-driving cars. It would take time, but it was a certainty.

I still stand by my claim at the time that my kids, when they’re old enough to get their drivers licences, won’t need to (if they don’t want to) because they’ll be able to use our family self-driving car to get around.

At five and three years old, that looks to be an increasing reality for them. That’s mainly due to the ferocious pace at which Tesla is developing its “FSD” (full self-driving) technology and the impending release of the “Cybercab”.

The thing about self-driving cars is that the more of them there is on the road, the more miles they “log” and the better they get. That’s because every data point collected is more knowledge for their AI “brains”.

Tesla knows this. It’s why Cybercab is likely to be available for sale in 2025. It’s why its FSD is rolling out to more Teslas, and why the race is on for other car makers to catch up or shut up and shut down.

Once again Tesla is forcing the hand of the legacy car industry. And last week we saw exactly what that looks like.

Cruise is… was… a robotaxi division of GM. In 2016 GM bought the self-driving taxi start-up for around $2.1 billion and is said to have pumped in around $10 billion in investment in the subsequent years.

(Interesting note: Cruise was part of the incubator Y Combinator. When it was bought in 2016, the president of Y Combinator at the time, and investor in Cruise, was none other than Sam Altman… yes, that Sam Altman of OpenAI fame.)

Cruise has continued to develop its self-driving taxi fleets until, last week, when GM decided to shut down the entire division and absorb it into GM so the company could,

… realign its autonomous driving strategy and prioritize development of advanced driver assistance systems on a path to fully autonomous personal vehicles.

GM went on to say,

GM will no longer fund Cruise’s robotaxi development work given the considerable time and resources that would be needed to scale the business, along with an increasingly competitive robotaxi market.

“Increasingly competitive robotaxi market.”

I read that as, “There’s no way we can compete with what Tesla is bringing to market and what Waymo is doing.”

It does mean though, expect to see GM brands fast pushing their “Super Cruise” self-driving features (that’s also what they call their version of FSD) into all new models just to keep up with Tesla.

Say what you want about Elon, but you can’t deny what he’s done with Tesla is changing the entire automotive industry, akin to the revolution that Henry Ford sparked.

Boomers & Busters 💰

AI and AI-related stocks moving and shaking up the markets this week. (All performance data below over the rolling week.) [Figures correct at time of writing.]

Boom 📈

  • Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO) up 25%
  • Appen (ASX:APX) up 19%
  • Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) up 12%

Bust 📉

  • Cyngn (NYSNASDAQE:CYN) down 44%
  • BigBear.ai (NYSE:BBAI) down 25%
  • Western Digital (NASDAQ:WDC) down 9%

From the hive mind 🧠

  • Donald Trump wants to dominate AI. Xi Jinping wants to dominate AI. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin and the BRICS don’t want to be left behind, so in Avengers-style, they’re teaming up.
  • Every part of this is confusing, wild and funny. It’s also a sign of how the line between real news, fake news, AI news and broadcast news is going to blur in the near future.
  • Ilya Sutskever co-founded OpenAI, the left/was given the boot. He started his own AI company then too. And he is clearly one of the prescient minds in modern AI. Here’s a talk he just did over the weekend on neural networks, AGI (artificial general intelligence) and the progress of AI.

Artificial Polltelligence 🗳️

I knew I had a good feeling about most of you…

Last week’s poll was on the idea of investing in defence companies (apologies for the US spelling of defence by the way. Using some quotes from US-based companies means the spell checker gets throw into a tailspin).

I don’t necessarily like the idea of defence companies, but I’m also pragmatic enough to know that the war machines is quite literally one of the constants throughout the entirety of human history, so it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.

For me, adding AI into the mix actually might make defence better, more accurate, more precise, with less errors, mistakes and collateral damage. If you can’t avoid war, then at least avoid the f***ups.

So, as I see companies like Palantir and Anduril getting cosy and watching Peter Jackson’s trilogy back-to-back, the idea of investment in these does look far more appealing.

Here’s how you voted – and on the balance, I think it’s a fair outcome for readers of AI Collision.

Weirdest AI image of the day

Military recruitment poster for the Imperial Doge of Mars – r/weirddalle

ChatGPT’s random quote of the day

“Information wants to be free, but it also wants to be expensive.”
– Stewart Brand, 1984

Thanks for reading, see you next time!

Sam Volkering
Editor-in-Chief, AI Collision

PS With bitcoin recently shooting over $100k… I’m busy preparing an urgent new broadcast. Why so urgent? Because I believe a potentially huge catalyst in January could ignite the next big price eruption. I’ve uncovered three ways you could take advantage from the next big move – without buying a single cryptocurrency. It’s clever – and it’s coming soon. Watch your inbox at 2pm on Friday, 20 December, for all the details.

Capital at risk.

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