Marketplace Pulse Year In Review

  • Want a guide to what happened in the world of ecommerce in 2024? Read here.
  • The most fascinating development continues to be a move from made in China, to sold by China to now, with the rise of Temu and Shein, promoted by China.
  • Retail media has taken over from traditional TV in terms of advertising dollars.

Is AI Progress Accelerating?

  • OpenAI’s new o3 system – trained on the ARC-AGI-1 Public Training set – has scored a breakthrough 75.7% on the Semi-Private Evaluation set at our stated public leaderboard $10k compute limit. A high-compute (172x) o3 configuration scored 87.5%.
  • This is a surprising and important step-function increase in AI capabilities, showing novel task adaptation ability never seen before in the GPT-family models. For context, ARC-AGI-1 took 4 years to go from 0% with GPT-3 in 2020 to 5% in 2024 with GPT-4o. All intuition about AI capabilities will need to get updated for o3.
  • Source.

The Concrete Impact of AI

  • In the US there are 5,000 data centers today, with 450 being added every year to 2030.
  • Data centers need a lot of concrete, more so due to AI’s need for bigger servers.
  • This concrete causes a lot of emissions, throwing a spanner in big tech emission targets, and leading to high demand for so-called green concrete.

You don’t Own Anything

  • The transformation of technology to the -as-a-service model has led to many positives, yet it has led to a situation where users don’t own anything.
  • This creates vulnerabilities – “years ago websites were made of files; now they are made of dependencies.”
  • If the current trend of technology is sweeping us in a direction of “everything is amazing, but nothing is ours”, Technology that’s Actually Yours could be the next great counter-trend.

Is AI hype or Does it Work?

  • A few links/stats on the topic.
  • Github co-pilot in this study led to substantial savings (30-50% time saved or reduced in some tasks).
  • Bloomberg Odd Lots podcast episode with the CIO of Goldman Sachs on the use of AI.
  • Good overview of current revenue run rate for gen AI products (chart).
  • A rather bullish tour of AI and semiconductors by Gavin Baker.

Start-up Failures

  • Are rising sharply according to Carta (just one data source).
  • This is hurting VC funds of certain vintages “Only 9 per cent of venture funds raised in 2021 have returned any capital to their ultimate investors, according to Carta. By comparison, a quarter of 2017 funds had returned capital by the same stage.

Pricing Data

  • Fascinating read on how to price a data asset.
  • Relevant especially with the rise of AI. At first quantity matters here but “as training sets grow ever larger, it’s often more efficient to do this than to acquire the next token; beyond a certain point, data quality scales better than data quantity“.
  • So there you have it: 5000+ words on data pricing. We’ve covered use cases and users; quality and quantity; internal and external value factors; pricing axes and maturity curves; table stakes and usage rights; and much more.
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