Visibility is getting pretty low – or is it?

In the mood for some catfish?

Are you ready to be (possibly*) impressed? Me too – so let’s check out this picture below.

“So what? It’s just a photo of two of the most monotonal nerds on the planet.”

Actually – despite how it may appear – this is not a photograph of Lex Fridman and Mark Zuckerberg taken by your town’s most affordable Senior Portrait studio.

Also, this is not simply a video of the two chatting it up about ju-jitsu and Pokemon in a dimly lit room.

Nope. This is, in fact, a real-time virtual rendering of each of them, speaking in the Metaverse…and it is scary impressive.

In the podcast, Lex revealed that he flew to the Meta offices here in Pittsburgh, PA to get a full-body scan, enabling him to partake in such a realistic avatar experience.

The technology creates a codec, which builds a simulated version of the “real” person to be overlayed on top of a model that’s then generated using hardware sensors on the Quest.

I use real in quotes because…well…Zuckerberg is the kind of guy who blinks sideways.

Assuming nothing was faked in the making of this podcast, this was probably the most impressive digitization that I’ve ever seen.

This podcast was positioned to add some hype to the new Quest 3, which was announced as the “first mainstream mixed reality device” at Meta Connect this week. To be totally honest, I’m actually more excited about this than I expected to be after seeing this episode.

An aside: I’ve been thinking about the philosophical implications of this sort of thing a lot lately.

Let’s say you see a picture of someone who is very physically attractive to you. In essence, it’s just a pixel representation of the actual person. The gap between a real person rendered to perfection by a digital camera and a fake person rendered in a way that is indiscernible is rapidly nearing zero.

In other words – the future is going to be really, really confusing for a lot of young people. My concern for AI’s impact on the next generation is growing and I’m starting to worry that we’re unprepared for the non-technical challenges it will ultimately pose.

That Drip

That Drip is a new feature in The Downpour that drops a few random facts, some things to look out for, or other randomness that isn’t section-worthy.

• Netflix is only now retiring its DVD service. Hard to believe, but they still have a million customers on that platform.

• SBF’s trial starts on October 4 and is set to last 21 days!

• Did you know that only 10% of the people who bought RayBan’s smart glasses still use the features?

• OpenAI announced a ton of new stuff – including their own Siri/Alexa-type chat AI.

• Don’t forget October 1 is the horrifying cartoon football game

Generation Z…elle some money to Pakistan

This may come as a bit of a surprise, but a recent survey by Deloitte found that Gen Z gets hit by online scams almost 3x as much as their grandparents do.

The $210 million question remains - why? This is the first generation almost entirely born after the Internet was an actual thing (~1997 and 2012), so one might assume they would be better off than those who merely adopted the dark.

Some assume that the sheer volume of Internet activity (and extra devices) makes them a larger target, but even at that, we should expect that they’d still be much better off with youthful wit and a lifetime of exposure on their side.

But maybe it’s just a case of hubris – I know I can’t tell my Gen Z kid nothin’ bout nothin’. Or maybe society has been focused a bit too much on things that don’t necessarily build strength and with that comes inherent vulnerability?

Nah, let’s just stick with the Internet activity thing.

The next obvious question is how do we really get this to stop? The answer is well beyond the scope of this newsletter, but it’s bound to be very difficult.

A more transparent (less anonymous) Internet might be the only course of action, but many people think that this is a dark road that makes people vulnerable to expressing opinions that go against the grain.

OpenAI aiming at a $90B valuation

According to TechCrunch, OpenAI is looking to sell existing shares at a price that would put them between $80B-90B.

This means Microsoft’s investment of roughly $10BN would now be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of 4x.

Keeping in mind its revenue targets are in the neighborhood of $1B, this would be somewhere north of an 80x multiple.

This comes on the heels of several releases, including GPT-4V, which adds computer vision to the tool. The image recognition is quite impressive, but exactly like other GPT-4 features, we are left with a lot of hallucinations, corrections, and pure misses.

Yet people are constantly placing their entire startup strategies within OpenAI’s ecosystem, despite unpredictable results and new features making them obsolete.

I’m actually a bit stoked for DALL-E 3, which will be included with the Plus subscription. If it works as well as the samples, it will be a lot of fun.

But if history is any indication, it won’t be quite as good as promised.

Links and whatnot

• Introducing the New Ray-Ban | Meta Collab – Smart Glasses

• Getting Images Subscribers get AI Image Generator 

• Meta’s AI chatbot plan includes a ‘sassy robot’ for younger users

• Bitcoin’s 87% Drop in 2021 Was Caused by Sam Bankman-Fried's Alameda, Ex-Employee Claims

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