The Signal: Elon Musk’s Neuralink, the data is everything, and building momentum

Hey friends 👋 Happy Sunday.

Here’s your weekly dose of AI and introspection.

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AI Highlights

1. Elon Musk says Neuralink to be implanted in a second human within a week.

The first Neuralink trial took place at the end of January this year. The brain-computer interface enables the translation of thought into action. The second patient is planned ‘within a week or so’ and hopes for 1,000 humans by 2026.

Alex’s take: Neuralink has the potential to fully cure paralysis and treat epilepsy. I can only feel this is humanity and AI at its finest.

2. OpenAI introduces 5 levels to track its progress towards AGI.

OpenAI has developed a framework to track its path to AGI and believes it’s currently near level 2 “Reasoners.” AGI is OpenAI’s mission—a system capable of producing the same output as a human knowledge worker.

Alex’s take: I’m interested to see how soon we scale these levels. As Leopold Aschenbrenner predicted only a few weeks ago, we’ll have some form of government AGI project by 2027/2028.

3. Runway's Gen-3 Alpha can create transitions between objects, animals and characters.

Runway, an applied AI research company building tools for human creativity, recently announced their latest text-to-video generation model, Gen-3 Alpha, can create surreal morphing capabilities.

Alex’s take: We're at 10-second clip generation today. I wonder how long it will be before we can generate a feature film with a single prompt.

1 Article I Enjoyed

The “it” in AI models is the dataset.

James Betker is a Research Engineer at OpenAI.

I thought he published a really interesting observation in this blog post.

Even though it’s now over a year old, the foundational truth behind it rings loud.

The behaviour and performance of AI models are primarily determined by the dataset they are trained on, rather than the model architecture.

After all, compute may be king. But data will always be queen.

The takeaway: the data is everything.

1 Idea I Learned

Everything in business is about building momentum and leverage.

This is an idea that I’ve been thinking a lot about recently.

Three examples of high-leverage activities:

1. Building an audience on social media where you assemble a community of individuals who know, like and trust you.

2. Learning to write code to translate your idea into an MVP that you can get feedback from.

3. Amassing a network of people you can work with or hire.

Momentum comes from doing one of these over the course of a decade.

But as Naval famously said, “Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.”

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1 Quote to Share

American filmmaker David Lynch on catching the big fish:

“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.”

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1 Question to Ponder

What is your 10-year plan, and why can't you do it in 6 months?

This question from Peter Thiel is brilliant.

Forced constraints breed creative thinking.

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💡 If you enjoyed this issue, share it with a friend.

See you next week,

Alex Banks

P.S. Vintage AI: The Perceptron