Since the GenAI boom, there’s been a wave of interest in building AI-based products. Many of these are B2B products which intend to make an old-school industry, like law and accounting, more efficient. For example, they try to process paperwork, verify regulatory compliance, or handle customer service requests automatically. Over the last few months, many […]| Emmanuel Maggiori
By the early 2010s, the internet became massively adopted and much faster than before. This led to the surge of high-growth, Uber-like start-ups. As no other line of business promised such outstanding growth, investors became highly enthusiastic about the sector and tried to find the next “unicorn.” But enthusiasm alone isn’t enough; investors must have […]| Emmanuel Maggiori
As we discussed in another post, venture capital firms manage pots of money, called funds, which they invest in start-ups. They charge a high fee for this service (a total of $15 million to manage a $100-million fund over the years, for example). The fee is charged regardless of the success of their investments. This […]| Emmanuel Maggiori
In November 2022, OpenAI launched its famous AI chatbot, ChatGPT, which gained 100 million users in just two months. This made ChatGPT the fastest adopted piece of software in history. The reason for its success was very simple: It worked much better than any previous chatbots. Investors were so enthusiastic that they handed $10 billion […]| Emmanuel Maggiori
Imagine that a real estate agency charged you a management fee just for listing your property, independently of whether it managed to sell it. You might worry that the agency won’t work hard enough to sell your property, as it would collect a fee regardless. You might even worry that the agency would focus more […]| Emmanuel Maggiori
Venture capital firms promise great returns to their investors by betting on risky start-ups. As a rule of thumb, their promise is to multiply investors’ money by at least 2.5, or a “2.5x return,” after deducting management fees and the VC firm’s share of the profits. To put this in perspective, the stock market has […]| Emmanuel Maggiori
This is the first of a series of posts that will explain the inner workings of ChatGPT, step by step. Today’s topic is ChatGPT’s vocabulary. When ChatGPT generates text, it does so by selecting words from an internal vocabulary of 100,261 different words (or piece of words). ChatGPT’s vocabulary has some curious words in it. […]| Emmanuel Maggiori
Since the ChatGPT boom, there is a growing fear that it will replace human labor. Indeed, technology has displaced workers in the past—we certainly don’t see many people in charge of operating elevators nowadays. But the proliferation of dramatic news articles predicting job losses has made me think, and I don’t fully buy into their predictions. […]| Emmanuel Maggiori
A year ago, I walked into an Amazon Fresh store for the first time. We were about to have a picnic in a park, and one of my friends insisted on taking a detour to go to a nearby Amazon Fresh to buy our snacks; he was thrilled. He explained to me that the shopping […]| Emmanuel Maggiori
When Twitter fired half of its employees in 2022, and most tech giants followed suit, I wasn’t surprised. In fact, I think little will change for those companies. After being employed in the tech sector for years, I have come to the conclusion that most people in tech don’t work. I don’t mean we don’t […]| Emmanuel Maggiori
When Twitter fired half of its employees in 2022, and most tech giants followed suit, I wasn’t surprised. In fact, I think little will change for those companies. After being employed in the tech sector for years, I have come to the conclusion that most people in tech don’t work. I don’t mean we don’t work hard; I mean we almost don’t work at all. Nada. Zilch. And when we do get to do some work, it often brings low added value to the company and its customers. All of this while bein...| emaggiori.com
