Creators, Korea, insurance companies and a bit AI - Mar 8th, 2024
Insurance companies, please deploy AI for your business processes: Klarna AI assistant handles two-thirds of customer service chats in its first month and doing the equivalent work of 700 full-time agents. While I think this is amazing, Im always shocked how slow and annoying the claim process with travel insurances companies is. It took me two months back and forth with Allianz to get reimbursed and 1 1/2 months with Xcover to get reimbursed. You want to provide the best experience for your customers, but also improve your margins, please deploy AI to make your customer service teams more effective. Thank you (Happy to give a hand)
New project: I started a new project with my friend. Sign up if you have kids between 3-6. It will be fun I promise :)
Narratives in crypto are pointless: I have been in crypto for awhile and there are a lot of good things happening, but every narrative on why crypto is going up or down makes no sense. Why is it going up now? Everyone says, because there is more demand than supply, but the truth is that it’s simply a casino. You could argue the same for the stock market, but they kind of make more sense as these are driven by revenue growth, while for crypto it’s more about do more believe more people want it.
Shopify is sunsetting their reviews app for hundreds of thousands merchants : When I was at Shopify, I was looking into the Shopify Reviews app. It was one of the first apps every merchant was installing and had a huge install base. We were discussing, if we should sunset the app, improve the app, or turn reviews (trust) to an API and make Shopify the source of truth. We ended up doing nothing for various reasons, but it’s good they are sunsetting the app, because it was literally hurting merchants by not automatically requesting reviews and not showing verified reviews. It is already impacting existing review apps, but also a great opportunity for new app partners.
The next breakthrough in AI is not context length, but active reasoning: Ben Thompson talks in his Stratechery interview Series with Nat Friedmann and Daniel Gross about the current state of AI Active Reasoning: "Active reasoning is the big project, I think, a lot of folks are working on and yeah, we’ve seen some stuff that’s sort of fairly compelling. Everything’s very early, but if there’s a big breakthrough of the year, if I had to guess, it’s not really going to be the context window, it’s going to be the idea of very large context combined with active reasoning and thinking." Just for context, Daniel ran AI at Apple and Nat Friedman launched Github Copilot at Github, while he was the CEO of Github. If you want to cut through the noise in AI, these interviews are worth listening to. One surprising nugget was that Magic.dev (they invested $100M into the company) has apparently a bigger context window than Gemini.
Fun one: Google Meet dynamically increase the size of your video based on how much you talk during a meeting.
Sam Lessin on “Why investing in creators makes sense... current notebook": You see a lot of stars/celebrities making more money with their businesses than with their original career. In just four years, Kylie Jenner’s Kylie Cosmetics was making $1 Billion Dollar annual revenue with just 10 people. In just four years Kim Kardashians’s Skim is worth $4 Billon dollar. Mr Beast has plenty of other businesses that follow the same idea. It sounds weird, but it feels like its just scratching the surface and it will be interesting to watch. Trust in creators is probably at all time high vs. news media outlets and that gives them a lot of leverage.
Is Korea is deeply fucked? Some interesting views on that. I cannot confirm everything, I have also never lived in Korea, but there a few things that I can agree with and reasons I stopped “being Korean”. It’s a wonderful country, but as someone who grew up in Germany, I could simply not identify myself with their culture.