Transmissions from the future frontier
Transmissions from the future frontier
Interesting briefs at the forefront of science, technology, music, and culture.
Every day, through my work as a Venture Capital investor, running a patent analytics firm, and teaching innovation and entrepreneurship to graduate students, I am inundated with interesting transmissions from my network.
Whether music, book, or restaurant recommendations; new technologies, scientific papers, patents, or startups there is a lot of content flowing in front of me. I can’t pay attention to all of it, and certain things resonate more than others. So, I will sporadically post the more interesting and intriguing content to Ignore the Confusion.
Here are several worthy transmissions that I have encountered during the last couple of weeks:
An MRI experiment that reconstructs images from brain waves using Stable Diffusion:
Here’s a link to the paper written by Yu Takagi and Shinji Nishimoto.
I tested several (mostly lame) music AI tools.
They are all quite similar, none really stood out or blew me away.
Each typically provides a handful of variables (instruments, tempo, mood or music style, etc.) which can be be toggled by users to “create” AI music.
Some offer publishing tools where the rights are owned in-part by the service and in-part by the user that “selected” the features.
Some offer the ability to add vocals. They all have a free tier.
I believe it will be difficult to differentiate, deal with potential copyright issues, and create a moat - however, I am confident over time one or two will rise above the rest and figure out a compelling model for B2B (jingles, advertising, music producers), and then B2C fun “toys” for the general public or as Loudly calls them “modern creators”.
Chat GPT is amazing because it can create complex long threads from a short prompt. Eventually, generative AI music will be able to do something similar. Imagine asking, “Give me a new album by (insert favorite band here),” and getting 13 inspired tracks. Or if the AI could “watch” a film and soundtrack it.
I am sure there are many many others but here are the 5 I reviewed.
Listened to an eye-opening interview on Cobalt mining in the Congo.
Siddartha Kara has been researching cobalt mining in Central-West Africa for the past several years. His new book Cobalt Red was the focus of Terry Gross’s interview “How 'modern-day slavery' in the Congo powers the rechargeable battery economy” on her NPR show “Fresh Air”.
I was moved by Kara’s account of the horrible situation that many Congolese (women and children) face, and the price they pay for the rest of us to have cell phones, electric vehicles, and many other devices powered by Lithium Ion batteries.
I have tremendous respect and admiration for what Kara is doing with his life. I believe everyone should be aware of this situation in the Congo, and am very interested in hearing from startups working to replace cobalt in batteries such as Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePo4 or LFP) or Lithium Sulfur (Li-S).
Job opportunities for Engineering Graduate students
In my role as a professor at the Coleman Fung Institute for Engineering Leadership, I work with dozens of engineering graduate students looking for jobs. My network from Future Frontier Capital shares lots of startups looking for talented engineering leaders.
Here is a short list of some recent job opportunities:
Bubble 2023 AI x No Code Residency
Rain Stick Shower - Junior Product Engineer
Proton Therapy - Junior Data Engineer
Proton Therapy - Data Engineer
Brimstone Energy - Several Jobs
Blue Ocean Barns - Several Jobs
Gecko Materials - Several Jobs
My first published academic paper related to Patent Holdout
This paper will soon be published in an academic journal. I co-wrote it with my colleague, Bowman Heiden who, among other roles is the Executive Director of the Tusher Center, Institute for Business Innovation, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley.
The TL;DR is that the patent system in the US is heavily weighted in favor of large, well-heeled tech companies. It is extremely expensive and time consuming for smaller technology firms to assert patents against larger firms. And most importantly, these cases rarely result in a meaningful financial remuneration for the smaller firms.
Feel free to reach out to me directly or comment below if you’d like to discuss any of these topics in more depth.
In the meantime, ignore the confusion.