🤔 The *Dumb* Idea Paradox (and how to beat it) - plus news across AI and big tech

1. Free library of optimized prompts for personal and business tasks, by Anthropic: [Link]
   
   Have personally checked out the culinary creator, mindfulness mentor, corporate clairvoyant, and spreadsheet sorcerer.
   Spreadsheet sorcerer comes out tops (currently saving me 3-4 hours weekly) - try it free

   

2. Digital Personal Assistant (free access)

   

   Used it for just an hour and it offers decent versatility and applicability. The AI layer automatically prioritises tasks, proposes timelines and tags, and enables seamless integration with day-to-day tasks. Would give it a 8/10 - it’s in free beta and being used by folks in tech and finance firms (such as Amazon, Barclays, Intercom)

Deep Dives 💬

1. Mark Cuban highlights the dismal state of US healthcare and cost impact on patients - X

   

Cuban is likely talking his book here (he is building a low-cost online pharma) but it’s fascinating to observe how a complicated value chain with many players lends itself to wastage and graft. Healthcare in most countries is fairly opaque and plagued with high cost and “winner take all/most” dynamics. More in his X post.

2. The Dumb Idea Paradox - why great ideas often start out sounding dumb, by Andrew Chen

   

   
   Andrew draws on his investing experience at a16z to highlight the conflating nature of traction, what are weak vs strong technologies, and how to separate the signal from the noise to detect really great ideas.

News & Trends 📢

1. [Breaking] Change Healthcare hacked, potentially impacting over 100m US residents

   

   Change Healthcare, a leading healthcare processor, with data of around half of all Americans was hacked earlier this year. The attack resulted in major outages across hospitals and pharmacies. The firm reportedly paid $22m in ransom to recover the data. Its parent company, UnitedHealth reported that they suffered around $1b in direct losses as a result of this.

   
   

2. Hailo lands $120m to keep battling Nvidia (amidst a backdrop of struggling AI chip startups) - Techcrunch

   

   
   

3. Meta wants to be the Microsoft of headsets

   Meta is licensing its Horizon OS across several players (Lenovo, Asus, Microsoft) as well as opening it up to third-party developers. This is the latest move in its bid to become more open-source than Apple, and eventually build an ecosystem of hardware and software layers for its headsets.

   
   

4. Tinder rolling out a “share my date” feature to its app

   

   
   

5. Microsoft launches its smallest AI model, Phi-3

   

   Microsoft is building a team focused solely on smaller AI models which can run natively on smartphones and non-PC devices. It has released the Phi-3, which is claimed to be as good as GPT-3.5 and was trained mostly on children’s bedtime stories created by larger LLMs. [Verge]

   
   

6. Google fires around 50 employees for protesting the firm’s cloud deal with the Israeli government

   
   

7. Tech.eu Summit London 2024 announces new speaker line-up of leading VCs and entrepreneurs - find out more here

   
   

8. Personal “invisibility shields” are now real - and selling like hotcakes for under $70: More