For artificial intelligence, 2022 was a year of breakthroughs. Image generation models such as DALL-E, MidJourney and StableDiffusion came in early in the year, garnering much attention, and ChatGPT went viral near the end.
Riding on the euphoria generated by these technological developments, about $49 billion in venture capital was invested in AI in 2022 — 40% more than a year earlier, per CB Insights.
Yet, there has been little conversation about how AI will play a growing role in real estate, a more than $50 trillion asset class, and one of the key drivers of the global economy. We believe this represents a significant opportunity for real estate tech entrepreneurs.
In case you haven’t heard, artificial intelligence is the hot new thing. Generative AI seems to be on the lips of every venture capitalist, entrepreneur, Fortune 500 CEO and journalist these days, from Silicon Valley to Davos.
To those who started paying real attention to AI in 2022, it may seem that technologies like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion came out of nowhere to take the world by storm. They didn’t.
Since at least the release of GPT-2 in 2019, it has been clear to those working in the field that generative language models were poised to unleash vast economic and societal transformation. Similarly, while text-to-image models only captured the public’s attention last summer, the technology’s ascendance has appeared inevitable since OpenAI released the original DALL-E in January 2021. (We wrote an article making this argument days after the release of the original DALL-E.)
By this same token, it is important to remember that the current state of the art in AI is far from an end state for AI’s capabilities. On the contrary, the frontiers of artificial intelligence have never advanced more rapidly than they are right now. As amazing as ChatGPT seems to us at the moment, it is a mere stepping stone to what comes next.
In every downturn, we tend to measure the pain by counting layoffs. (Dell is the latest, announcing it will cut 6,650 jobs or 5% of its workforce.) According to Layoffs.fyi, a smart if incomplete tracker of job cuts, tech companies laid off almost 95,000 workers in the first five weeks of this year, which is already about 60% of the layoffs it reported for all of 2022.
While job cuts are normal, there’s something different about this economic dip. To start, as Jena McGregor reports, the advent of remote work has cemented the digital pink slip.
We may measure the pain by counting layoffs but how we hire determines the recovery — and generative AI like Chat GPT changes the game.
Connor Leahy from Conjecture joins the podcast for a lightning round on a variety of topics ranging from aliens to education. Learn more about Connor’s work at https://conjecture.dev.
Basically I underestimated chat gpt it is Basically much more powerful than I realized not just a Jetson society but it could even bring realities like we have seen in star trek the next generation where one can ask an AI anything and it can do anything given a task. This could also bring upon a superintelligence once programmed much like a wolfram alpha is for homework but for everything. It can nearly do any job and can replace all tech jobs eventually to get to universal basic income or even bring an end to the wild west of the internet it could create a near perfect cyber defense because it could simply know everything and make everything bug free. In short it can a near God like AI to answer and do any digital task. This can make nearly all jobs eventually automated:3.
It’ll be a while before ChatGPT takes your job entirely, and in the meantime you can use it to make work life easier.
We are living in an age of rapid technological advancement, and with this growth comes a digital divide. Professor Luciano Floridi of the Oxford Internet Institute / Oxford University believes that this divide not only affects our understanding of the implications of this new age, but also the organization of a fair society.
The Information Revolution has been transforming the global economy, with the majority of global GDP now relying on intangible goods, such as information-related services. This in turn has led to the generation of immense amounts of data, more than humanity has ever seen in its history. With 95% of this data being generated by the current generation, Professor Floridi believes that we are becoming overwhelmed by this data, and that our agency as humans is being eroded as a result.
According to Professor Floridi, the digital divide has caused a lack of balance between technological growth and our understanding of this growth. He believes that the infosphere is becoming polluted and the manifold of the infosphere is increasingly determined by technology and AI. Identifying, anticipating and resolving these problems has become essential, and Professor Floridi has dedicated his research to the Philosophy of Information, Philosophy of Technology and Digital Ethics.
Phone and electric car batteries are made with cobalt mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Cobalt Red author Siddharth Kara describes the conditions for workers as a “horror show.”
It was cheaper to fuel a gas-powered car for 100 miles than it was to charge a comparable electric vehicle in late 2022, according to Anderson Economic Group.
A study published by The Planetary Science Journal in 2020 suggests that Psyche is made almost entirely of iron and nickel. This metallic composition sets it apart from other asteroids that are usually comprised of rock or ice, and could suggest it was originally part of a planetary core. That would not only represent a momentous discovery, it’s key to Psyche’s potential astronomical value: NASA scientist Lindy Elkins-Tanton calculated that the iron in the asteroid alone could be worth as much as $10 quintillion, which is $10,000,000,000,000,000,000 (yes, a 20-figure sum). For context, the entire global economy is worth roughly $110 trillion as of writing. However, more recent research out of the University of Arizona suggests that the asteroid might not be as metallic or dense as once thought. Psyche could actually be closer to a rubble pile, rather than an exposed planetary core, the research claims. If true, this would devalue the asteroid. NASA’s upcoming mission should settle the debate about Pysche’s composition for once and all.
Of course, Psyche isn’t the only valuable rock in space. NASA has previously said the belt of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter holds mineral wealth equivalent to about $100 billion for every individual on Earth. Mining the precious metals within each asteroid and successfully getting them back down to earth is the hard part. Then you have the whole supply and demand conundrum that could drive the price of specific metals up or down. We’ll leave the complexities of space mining for another day.
If Psyche is, in fact, the leftover core of a planet that never properly formed, it could reveal secrets about Earth’s own core. The interior of terrestrial planets is normally hidden beneath the mantle and crust, but Psyche has no such outer layers. The asteroid’s mantle and crust were likely stripped away by multiple violent collisions during our solar system’s early formation. By examining Psyche, we can further understand how Earth’s core came to be. The mission could also provide insights into the formation of our solar system and the planetary systems around other stars.
