Technology

➚ MOVE FAST: Up round. Microsoft briefly surpassed Apple yesterday as the world’s most valuable company and remains close behind today. It shows how much AI has helped Satya Nadella’s firm while Tim Cook’s company has been lagging (slipping iPhone sales also hurt). Plus, Microsoft has the added bonus of eventually getting nearly half of OpenAI’s revenue through their partnership.

➘ BREAK THINGS: Down round. The AI hype failed to revive overall startup fundraising. U.S. venture capital funding fell about 30% last year compared to 2022, according to PitchBook data out this week. Startups in the AI space got about one-third of investor money, but 20% of young companies raised funds at lower valuations.

The headlines out of CES are all about AI, but as Reuters reporter Max Cherney points out, it’s not necessarily the AI we were looking for. While it’s generative AI like ChatGPT that’s captured the public’s imagination, a lot of the technology at CES is what some might call machine learning. Sure, this grill might be able to cook you the perfect steak, but can it talk to you about that steak while pretending to be celebrity chef Michael Mina?

CES has always been about physical gadgets and, at some point, they will be the conduits that bring generative AI into the physical world and, consequently, into our everyday lives. Meta’s Ray Ban glasses, capable of multimodal generative AI, are a great example of the future. A wave of those devices is coming, but it’s unclear when.

Ben Lamm is the CEO of Colossal Biosciences, the startup trying to resurrect the woolly mammoth, Tasmanian tiger, and dodo. It has also been spawning new ventures. Its first spun-out company, Form Bio, raised more than $30 million in an oversubscribed first round of funding and another just closed its financing pitch. Colossal has also brought on a Hollywood filmmaker to build content, which could draw interest from museums and zoos, but it’s in the early stages of figuring out how to bring in revenue.

Q: How is the effort going to build the mammoth?

A: It’s somewhat frustrating or a double-edged sword. What we’re doing is really cool, but very few people want to talk about the conservation work we’re doing. They’re like ‘let’s talk about de-extinction.’ But we were fortunate at the end of 2023, we had folks interested in learning about what we’re doing that also has an application to conservation.

But a quick update: We’re not currently raising capital, the business is doing well. We’re doing research on a bunch of species outside of the mammoth, thylacine [also known as the Tasmanian tiger] and dodo. And we’re learning a lot about other ancient species.

De-extinction and the pursuit of synthetic biology is really a systems model. You have to build teams and infrastructure to support everything, from an ancient DNA lab all the way through computational analysis, to protein engineering, and DNA synthesis, advanced embryology and cloning, to animal husbandry. And then we have a team working on artificial wombs.

Our long-term goal is not even to use surrogates. We want to do everything ex-utero. That will be a massive transformative technology, not just for extinction, but also for our species preservation, as well as potential impacts to human healthcare. We hope to have our first [mammoth] calves by 2028. We’re still on track for that.

We now have over 60 genomes that we’ve done analysis on. We built a reference genome that we published and gave to the world for free for the African elephant and the Asian elephant.

Q: Do you have a genome for the mammoth and that will be the final product? And are there parts missing that you’re finding?

A: This is a great question. What you’re describing is Jurassic Park. They were taking ancient DNA. In their case, dino DNA and in our case mammoth DNA. They were looking for the holes and filling it in with that of the frog in the movie. (In our case it would be an elephant.)

But that’s not actually the best way to do it. Even if we were able to have a complete mammoth genome, that’s 100% exactly right, and we had the ability to print it, that one genome could have some type of mutation. It could have a certain type of cancer or sickle cell or any anything that all of us humans have, and animals have. (Cancer is a bad example with elephants because elephants actually get cancer in significantly lower numbers than humans do.)

We do comparative genomics and say, ‘what were the genes that drove the phenotypes or physical attributes of a mammoth that made it effectively cold tolerant.’ And what most people don’t realize is that mammoths were 99.6% Asian elephants. They’re actually closer genetically to Asian elephants than Asian elephants are to African elephants.

So we’ve taken Asian elephant cells and immortalized them. We’ve done all the computational analysis. So we know what genes made a mammoth a mammoth. And then we’re editing those in Asian elephant cells, because we know already they have 99.6% of them done correctly. So you don’t have to go fill in the gaps. You just have to make those edits. And then there are some edits, like in genetic diversity, that we don’t necessarily need in our gen 1 population. In our gen 2 population, we need to start introducing genetic diversity so that you allow the ability to interbreed.

Q: I want to ask you about the business. You have these high profile investors like Jim Breyer. How does this tech turn into revenue?

A: Thomas Tull is our largest investor. We’ve got USIT, In-Q-Tel, Bob Nelson, arguably the number one biotech investor of all time, Jim Breyer, who’s amazing. Tim Draper.

They kind of like the idea of what if you could go back in time and invest in NASA. You’re doing this thing that’s really cool for the world, that will spin off technologies that are good for the world, that will make history, and spin off technologies that are lucrative.

We do think there’s a consumer side of it at some point that’s around education. But right now, our focus is really just on delivering on the science, delivering on the conservation, and delivering on the technologies.

Q: What’s in your investor deck? How are billions made off this in the future?

A: Our investor deck isn’t for everyone. It really focuses more on the team and the science. It talks a lot about the technology spinouts, it talks a little bit about education and consumer aspects. There’s a huge opportunity long term with biodiversity, credits, carbon credits, government subsidies, and eco tourism.

If we are successful in our thylacine work, we’re confident that there’s a myriad of different things we can do with the Australian government around that. We’re talking to the Mauritian government [where the dodos once lived]. They’re like ‘you’re going to double tourism,’ which is about a quarter of their GDP.

We don’t have every answer right now. Our focus is starting those conversations, making sure we have public support, making sure that we have nonprofit support, indigenous people support, and government support. Make sure this is what people want.

Sony’s new VR headset is being billed as a competitor — perhaps an even more advanced one — to Apple’s upcoming Vision Pro headset. But all of this kind of misses the point. Apple’s product doesn’t need to be the first or best. It just needs to sufficiently take advantage of Apple’s walled garden.

Apple users who want to spend all day in a face computer will probably need to use the Vision Pro. Apple won’t play nice with Sony or other manufacturers, making it incredibly difficult for those products to work seamlessly with Apple devices.

Of course, there’s a real possibility that both of these products end up being kind of niche. They’re expensive and it’s not clear how people will use them. VR still makes a lot of people feel ill and even computer gamers, its target customer, are not all that excited about the technology. Apple’s headset costs $3,499. That’s about the same as the two most ambitious headsets products ever released: The Microsoft HoloLens and the Magic Leap 2. And both of those devices were relegated to non-mass market, enterprise products.

Substack, the newsletter platform that hosts independent writers and journalists, is facing a major backlash for its seeming indifference to hosting Nazi content. The latest big name to leave was Casey Newton, whose Platformer newsletter has around 170,000 subscribers, according to The Washington Post.

It’s unclear whether the controversy will affect Substack’s bottom line or just hurt its image, but the situation is really an unforced error by co-founder and “chief writing officer” Hamish McKenzie. When confronted with Nazi content, he initially balked at removing it, arguing he was “committed to upholding and protecting freedom of expression, even when it hurts.” It kind of reminds me of the scene in Ghostbusters when Bill Murray’s character yells “Ray, when someone asks you if you’re a god, you say YES!” The social media equivalent of that statement is when someone asks you to take down Nazi content, you say “YES!”

Too often, tech platforms get caught up in viewing themselves as the Supreme Court of the internet, making tough decisions on free speech. It’s now a cliche to refer to these platforms as the “digital town square” or something along those lines.

At the same time, all the people leaving Substack will have difficulty finding a “pure” newsletter service. If you’re on a tech platform, you’ll be sharing it with people whose views you think are abhorrent. The drive against that leads to a fragmented internet, where smaller platforms cater to specific political tribes. We’re already seeing this happen with X, where left-leaning users have scattered to a variety of replacements, such as Mastodon and Threads.

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