Magical Tears 💧 and Turning T-Shirts into Digital Money 👕 + New Cool Corner

Welcome to edition #2 of NPB Weekly Download (you are early!)

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Now back to the newsletter. There seems to be a lot of AR/VR and X news this week!

Newsletter Update: I’ve added a new “Cool Stuff Section” to share any interesting demos or posts or content we come across throughout the week. Not sponsored - just sharing random stuff we find cool.

Reply back if you think we missed anything!

Artificial Intelligence

• Abhu Dhabi TII’s Falcon 180B LLM model released to HuggingFace. tl;dr big model. Open sourced. Somewhere between GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. I feel like we’re soon reaching LLM commoditisation for many non-specialised use-cases

• 66% of Australian workers are not disclosing use of Gen AI

• X updates policy for public data on platform to be used to train AI. Of course, scraping is blocked but available for themselves. Data moats are going to be the differentiator for AI

AR/VR and Metaverse

• AR heads-up-display for cars company Envisic closes $100m funding round

• Lenovo launches VR glasses designed for portable handheld. Choices on experience should smoothen the adoption curve

• Further developments of smart contact lenses powered by human tears. I may need to watch “Up” every morning to charge the lenses. More details below

Web3 and Crypto

• Visa introduces $USDC onto Solana blockchain network for payments

• Supreme T-Shirts collateralised for $1.1M loan on-chain. More details below

• China declares digital assets as legal property. More clarity is key if we are to de-wild the wild-west

• Metamask releases sell tokens direct to fiat offramp. US and UK only.

Other things of interest

• India launches Aditya-l1 on a solar mission. Whilst we grapple with the issues of today, we should look outwards every now and then

• X new feature in-progress to share your email when subscribing to others. It feels like X is rapidly jumping into the creator economy

• Elon threatens to sue ADL over defamation impacting ad revenue. Never a dull day way Elon

• Airbnb de facto ‘banned’ from NYC

HIGHLIGHT

Lowered hype levels but progress continues for smart contact lenses

Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore have devised a battery that can power smart contact lenses… chargeable with human tears

Summary Points

• Smart contact lenses have faced into one big problem. Battery and charging safely. NTU developed battery without any metal components, making it much safer.

• Sodium and chloride ions, also found in tears, enable electricity storage and discharge.

• Should hold enough charge to power smart contact lenses for most of a day. Might last longer if you’re crying whilst using it.

What does this mean? The NPB perspective. Jokes aside, all technological advancements in this domain are very welcome in driving the field of AR forward. Although the research is quite early, the path towards screens in-front of our eyeballs is becoming clearer. This might mean a lot of the ideas explored over the last few years in AR/VR are not lost… just maybe ahead of its time.

HIGHLIGHT

Physical ←→ Digital-backed assets as loan collateral

Physical Supreme Collection, turned NFT, collaterised for $1.1M USD loan.

Summary Points

• A full set of Supreme box logo T-shirts was collaterised for a $1.1M USD loan with a 60 day term

• Done via tokensation into a NFT and executed on the Arcade.xyz NFT lending platform

• As this is physical, the goods should be put into escrow for verification and holding (not clear who’s doing this)

• At 40% APR, the lender would receive $170k in interest over the 60 days provided it doesn’t default

What does this mean? The NPB perspective. Although this is nowhere near the first of its kind (possibly the largest), I believe this is a strong demonstration of some potential Web3 technology integrating into the normal world. Supreme (+ many other physical items) hold value but are not easily extracted without selling. Tokenisation immediately unlocks access to funds at a global scale and its use as a financial instrument.

But, as assets go, this is an incredibly risky one, possibly worse than when banks were making loans on risky mortgages. Also… a healthy degree of scepticism is needed as this could always just be an elaborate PR stunt.

Cool Stuff Corner

COOL STUFF Sharing things that made us go 😮😮

One prompt… entire fantasy novel!

What I found particularly interesting was not only it was a whole novel, but the approach taken

• Matt Shumer mentions it’s a “constrained” agent, with it being more behaviour controlled. Would love to learn what that means!

• It’s a chain of more than 10 separate GPT, Anthropic, Stable Diffusion models, not just one.

• Even generates the book cover art and publishes it as an ebook to download

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