Technology

➚ MOVE FAST: Mountain View. Google got a double pass from a U.S. Senate hearing on online child sexual exploitation. Its absence meant it didn’t have to answer for its dominance in smartphone operating systems (Apple, the biggest smartphone maker, also wasn’t there). And YouTube, which is popular among kids, was excluded while the bosses of Meta, Snap, X, TikTok, and Discord were on the hot seats.

➘ BREAK THINGS: Wilmington. A Delaware court shot down a (admittedly large) $56 billion pay package for Tesla CEO Elon Musk, even though shareholders approved it and he met the aggressive milestones needed to earn it, creating massive shareholder value in the process. The decision hurt investors, sending Tesla’s shares down, while Musk hinted he could move its incorporation to Texas.

Today, UK-based startup Synthesia launched a new AI tool that allows people to upload long text documents, and have it instantly distilled and turned into a short video of their digital avatar talking. This probably isn’t for consumers — yet. It takes a lot of effort to create one of these digital avatars. But applications for companies and online creators seem endless. The videos can be automatically translated into different languages.

Chris Dixon is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he founded and leads a16z crypto, which invests in web3 technologies and has more than $7 billion under management. His new book is Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet.

Q: A lot of your colleagues wouldn’t bother explaining a technology that’s not so hot right now. A lot of people have moved on to large language models. Why do you want to go this route?

A: I could go do AI. I just really believe in this. I really got into business because I fell in love with the ideals of the internet. These computers got connected in this open, decentralized way, which was a magical thing.

I started an internet company in 2004. And then I got into social media, and in some cases, invested in some of these companies. I just assumed that we would keep that ethos. Twitter was this open platform people were building on, people were building on Facebook.

Now we are at a point where there’s five companies that control the internet, and I think it’s going to get worse. I’m pro-AI, but I don’t see a version of this where it doesn’t further exacerbate this because it’s a centralizing technology.

It will further entrench these big companies, because it rewards companies with money, compute, and data. And the world hasn’t fully appreciated that we’re really losing this great thing. There may be regulatory approaches to helping with this, and I support those. So I’m not saying that technology is the only solution. But blocking [Adobe’s deal for] Figma is not going to decentralize the internet. The cow has left the barn in some of those regulatory matters. It was the acquisition of Instagram that was the issue, not Figma.

So the other important thing is can we create a new wave of internet services that embody the ideals of the early internet. That’s what my book is about. My argument is that blockchain-enabled networks can be the best of both worlds. They can have the advanced functionality and the funding that people expect from modern digital services, but also return us to the ideals of the early internet.

Q: We’re on the cusp of a new wave of a lot of value creation. The internet also created a huge amount of wealth, but it went to a small percentage of people. Do you think the “own” phase of the internet, as you call it, is an antidote to that problem?

A: That’s the idea. The value of Bitcoin, unlike the value of Square Cash and PayPal, has gone to the community. The same has been true of Ethereum.

We’re not building steel mills. We’re building networks. When you go to TikTok, they didn’t pay for the content. Instagram didn’t pay for it. The users created it. Why wouldn’t the users get rewarded? It just makes intuitive sense that the people who do the work should make the money.

It’s a really exciting design space. Maybe my favorite idea in all crypto is called collaborative storytelling. The idea is you have kind of Wikipedia-style communities of fans who get together and create narrative universes, like the new Harry Potter. And then they get rewarded with NFTs and tokens, according to how much they contributed. And then those things can become movies or TV shows, and those fans get rewarded financially. So instead of just debating should Obi-Wan have done that, they can actually decide and then GitHub-style fork it.

And what’s so beautiful about this idea is it’s like the extension of Wikipedia. It’s the next level of doing it for creative things. Two, it provides a new business model for creative people at a time when it’s critical, with generative AI dropping the cost of things like illustrations to zero. And three, it solves a problem for Hollywood. Why is Hollywood creating so many sequels? They’ll say because it costs $300 million to market a movie. What if instead, you have this army of fans who created something who go and evangelize it themselves.

One of the arguments is that it’s also a more democratic, egalitarian distribution of the money, which is why I wanted to write the book, because the gap between the reality and the perception is so wide. People think it’s laser-eyed people getting rich and I understand why. People are on Twitter saying dumb stuff, like ‘have fun staying poor.’ But in fact, this technology can be used in a very democratizing way.

Q: Critics would say that’s a great idea, but why do you need blockchain for that?

A: The alternative architecture would be to have a company behind it. The problem of corporate networks is they start off saying ‘let’s help the community.’ And then over time, they just end up changing the rules, extracting. You’re just not building on solid ground. The idea I just described involves ownership. So the users are owning a piece of the property. And a core part of my argument is that this is the breakthrough of blockchains — they enable credible ownership. The rules are baked in. It can’t be evil.

Q: There are big technological hurdles right now that need to be overcome to have a distributed compute network capable of training and running AI models. Is that where you could participate in the AI boom?

A: Fifteen years ago, there was the social, mobile, cloud. Social was the killer app that drove the sale of mobile phones. None of that would have worked if you didn’t have cloud backends to scale these systems up. So they are interrelated and I expect the same thing with VR, self-driving cars, AI, and crypto. What I hope is that they will intersect and reinforce. Like with AI, blockchain is a very natural antidote to things like deep fakes. Imagine a system where a video has a cryptographic signature, and Semafor attests that this is a real video that we put up. And that’s held in a community-owned database that keeps an audit trail, i.e. a blockchain.

Our friends at CB Insights make it easy to track emerging technologies, fast-moving startups, and disruptive mega-trends. Their daily newsletter keeps half a million nerds 3 steps ahead of all things tech using data no one else has access to. Sign up for the CB Insights newsletter here.

In a big milestone for brain computer interfaces, Elon Musk’s Neuralink has implanted its first sensors onto a human. Insert jokes about the Matrix and mind control here. Seriously, it’s exciting news though it will be a very long time before healthy humans get these implants. In the meantime, they could be very helpful for people with diseases like ALS, allowing them to communicate where they couldn’t before.

I text messaged with an ALS patient using a BCI just over a year ago (it was the first time someone had sent an iMessage with their brain). It was a jaw-dropping experience. That patient was using an implant from Synchron, which uses a less invasive approach than Neuralink’s, inserting the implant into a vein instead of directly on the brain. There are tradeoffs to both approaches, and there are other companies trying different methods. What’s almost certain is that at least one of them will gain FDA approval and become mainstream. When that happens, our knowledge of how the human brain works will grow exponentially.

The reviews are in for Apple’s $3,500 VR headset, dubbed the Vision Pro. The Verge’s Nilay Patel did, in my opinion, the best job of breaking down the myriad flaws, as well as some long term stumbling blocks facing Apple and other VR headset makers. Apple fans were defensive, comparing the device’s shortcomings to the lack of LTE in the original iPhone or the lack of RAM in the original Mac computers.

Apple’s accomplishments are legendary. It took computers — something owned mainly by big companies — and made them accessible to the average person. It revolutionized music by creating iTunes and the iPod. It turned mobile phones into the next great computing platform. Those products were all better versions of things people already loved or needed. Most people don’t love or need VR. In fact, it makes a lot of people sick. That and other problems may not be solved for some time. (I happen to enjoy the occasional VR experience. It can be fun and even good exercise.)

Apple seems unaware that our relationship with technology is changing. We grudgingly spend $1,500 on iPhones every few years not out of joy, but because we use them constantly.

People are already tired of being stuck on their devices, and now Apple wants its customers to strap one on to their faces. The AI craze has made it even clearer that computers are going to fade into the background as clicking and typing give way to verbal instructions and autonomous agents. People want technology that makes life easier and simpler, so they can spend more time with their devices tucked away and out of sight.

Apple used to know what people wanted before they knew they wanted it. It seems like the company knows people less these days, as shown by the original Vision Pro, Black Mirror-esque ad that depicted a father wearing the goggles while interacting with his daughter. That might be because the company is made up of silos, inside silos, stuffed inside one giant silo in Cupertino. It should get out more.

• Why team Biden is unlikely to use E. Jean Carroll against Donald Trump.
• Israel eyes longshot plan of exile for some Hamas leaders.
• South Africa’s Gaza stance threatens trade ties with Israel.