TRW Issue#68

AI Robot in Our Homes / The Trump Bubble / AI Trillion-Dollar Scaling Bet / YC Requests for Startups / An AI Policy Guide for Founders

Nov 17, 2024

Hello there 👋

I'm Edo, and welcome to the 68th issue of Tech Readings of the Week!

Every Sunday, I curate a digest of tech insights for non-tech folks and aspiring founders. From data-driven trends to tech leaders' opinions, with a pinch of startup wisdom, I help you cut through the noise and stay ahead of the curve.

Ready to dive in? Let's go! 🚀

In Today's Issue 👇

When Will AI Robots Be in Our Homes?
The Trump Bubble
The AI Trillion-Dollar Scaling Bet
Y Combinator Requests for Startups 2025
Founder's Guide to AI Policy and Regulation

👓 Essays & articles

AI Robots: when will they be in our homes? - An amazing scrollable experience on robots evolution and future (IEEE Spectrum)
Ten charts to understand the Exponential Age - a step back to explore the building blocks of how we understand the Exponential Age (Exponential View)
The great American microchip mobilization - Under Donald Trump and Joe Biden alike, the US has been determined to “reshore” chipmaking. Now money and colossal infrastructure are flowing to a vast Intel site in Ohio, just as the company may be falling apart. (Wired)
The death and life of prediction markets at Google - over the past two decades, Google has hosted two different internal platforms for predictions. Why did the first one fail — and will the other endure? (Asterisk Mag)
Google DeepMind has a new way to look inside an AI’s “mind” - Autoencoders are letting us peer into the black box of artificial intelligence. They could help us create AI that is better understood, and more easily controlled. (MIT Technology Review)(€)
Space policy is about to get pretty wild, y’all - Saddle up, space cowboys. It may get bumpy for a while. (Ars Technica)
AI’s trillion-dollar scaling bet isn’t over - obstacles create invention (Exponential View)
The bitter religion: AI’s holy war over scaling laws - the AI community is locked in a doctrinal battle about its future and whether sufficient scale will create God. (The Generalist)
The Trump Bubble - fixing the machine that builds the machines that builds the machines (Not Boring)
There’s lots of gold in urban waste dumps - the pay dirt could be 15 times richer than natural deposits (The Economist)(€)
The search for critical minerals is going high-tech - in a bid to unearth its own nickel, lithium, and more, the U.S. is using AI to help zero in on mineral-rich deposits. (Undark)

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Requests for startups - We are entering the golden age of building. Let's use it to make the country better! (Y Combinator)
Defensibility: Revolutions - disruption occurs when “critical" technology makes a new stack “viable”. (Signal to Noise Ratio)
The unholy trinity of venture capital - allocators, agglomerators, and absorbers (Investing 101)
Industry cheers UK’s $100B+ pension mega-fund plan - a new rule to combine pension funds into eight mega-funds, with the hope of unlocking £80 billion in investment capital (Pitchbook)

📊 Reports & Data

Inaugural APEXE Nations Report - a pioneering data-driven framework designed to help countries measure their startup ecosystem potential and effectiveness (Startup Genome)
Quantum computing funding hits record high with apparent AI boost - Quantum computing has been getting more attention in recent years as its promise becomes more palpable. Venture funding in the sector has hit new levels this year (Crunchbase News)

📚 Founder's Toolkit

TRW's collection of free fundraising resources for founders!

Founder's guide to AI policy and regulation - a resource specifically aimed at helping startup founders and operators understand the AI policy and legal landscape in key target markets (Balderton Capital)
AI makes tech debt more expensive - Since it’s getting easier to write code, and easier to clean up code, wouldn’t it make sense that the typical company can handle a little more debt? (Gauge)
Lessons from my first exit - My takeaways from selling TinyPilot (Michael Lynch)
6 brutal truths about fundraising - The earlier stage you are, the more different folks will come to different conclusions based on very limited data (SaaStr)