Crazy Until It's Not: Startups, Venture Capital & Big Ideas

🔗 Humans, Connected: The Age of the Exocortex

🌐 Imagine a world where you’re seamlessly connected to the internet, not through screens and keyboards, but directly through your brain.

Our minds are already a marvel of evolution, with three layers:

1. Reptilian Brain: The ancient core responsible for keeping us alive by regulating basic functions like breathing.
2. Mammalian (Limbic) Brain: The “monkey brain,” managing emotions like fear and excitement.
3. Neocortex: Our human layer, dedicated to logic, reason, and creativity.

✨ Enter the Exocortex—a revolutionary fourth layer. Soon, we’ll be able to read and write information directly to our brains, allowing seamless integration with the internet. 🧠

Imagine this: You’re able to remember scenes from a movie you've never seen before because your Exocortex looked it up and now it feels as real as any personal memory.

🎥 Your imagination becomes your reality.

📚 Forgot what you read in a book? Your Exocortex retrieves it in an instant.

🌍 Curious about global events? The Exocortex brings you firsthand insights as if you were there.

The boundaries between “you” and the world’s knowledge will blur. The Exocortex won’t just connect us to the internet; it will be the internet.

The future isn’t just at our fingertips—it’s in our minds.

🔌 Are you ready for the Exocortex era?

#Exocortex #FutureOfHumanity #NeuralInterface #Neurotech #Innovation #DigitalTransformation

DNA is an alien programming language - that can be learned

That's the mind blowing idea of Stef van Grieken, the founder of Cradle, which is unlocking the keys to human biology.

What does he mean here?

Well, DNA was not designed like most languages, but it evolved, and so it's hard to understand and harder to engineer. 

But what if, similarly to how we have learned natural language, we might be able to engineer organic chemistry?

That's exciting because most of the things around us are biology, including ourselves. 

So if we could tweak that or engineer that then that could open up a really exciting future.  Imagine the possibilities if we could engineer life itself to solve global challenges, from health to sustainability!

In the global AI race, product will matter more than tech. 

That's the prediction from Mehdi Ghissassi, the Head of Product & Deepmind 

Check out the latest episode of "Crazy Until It's Not" to discover more about why it's the builders who bring AI tech to life that will conqueror the world. 

In the future, buildings will be grown not built

That's the prediction from Tim Fu, the Generative AI architect and founder of Studio Tim Fu. 

We're already well on our way, with advances in synthetic biology. 

But there is so much further to go. Check out the latest episode of "Crazy Until It's Not" to discovery the future of biology. 

In the future we will be able to program biology. 

That's the prediction from Dr Mark Kotter, the founder of three synth bio companies bit.bio, clock.bio and Meatable.

We're already well on our way, with the ability to perform feats like turning bacteria into lightbulbs. 

But there is so much further to go. Check out the latest episode of "Crazy Until It's Not" to discovery the future of biology. 

Welcome to another episode where we plunge into the world of artificial intelligence and its rapidly growing influence on the media landscape. This podcast explores the revolutionary assertion that all media - yes, you heard that right, ALL media - will soon be AI-generated or AI-assisted.

Our journey begins with a comprehensive overview of current trends in AI technologies and how they are disrupting traditional media production. We unravel the inner workings of AI applications in news reporting, content creation, music, video production, and even the film industry.

We are joined by esteemed guests Nina Schick who shares her unique insights and predictions for this new media frontier. She paints a vivid picture of a not-so-distant future where AI doesn't just assist but actively shapes the stories we consume daily.

We also delve into the ethical considerations and potential implications of such an AI-dominated media world. From the risk of deepfakes and misinformation to the possible loss of human touch in our narratives, this podcast will leave you questioning what the role of humans in future media creation will be.

Get ready for a thought-provoking journey into the future of media. This is a must-listen for anyone interested in the confluence of artificial intelligence, media, and the future of human creativity.

Prepare to be amazed and perhaps, a little unsettled. Tune in now!

What’s next in Generative AI? Could it be LLM-powered implants in our skulls directing us everywhere? 

That’s something that Julien Simon from Hugging Face (a platform with over 120k open-source machine learning models) expects to see in his lifetime.

“A lot of tech innovation is just reading science fiction books and just inventing stuff that makes it happen…” he says.

One sci-fi innovation that has not happened yet is the Babel Fish from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy translating all languages in real-time.

“We might be getting close to that… the next step is a skull or each implant that gives you access to the all-seeing and all-knowing chatbot."

“I can just whisper ‘Is there a good pizza place 5 minutes from here?’ and I can hear it in my head: ‘oh yeah, take a left and then a right’”. 

Would you like this future?

Also on a show a discussion on the difference between "useful stuff” and  “fancy stuff” when it comes to Generative AI and how we should leave the big tech companies to it when competing to build the largest models.

Society needs to brace itself.

Tens of millions of people around the world work in call centres - but the latest advances in Generative AI and synthetic voice are set to make around 🤯🤯 🤯 80% of their jobs redundant 🤯 🤯 🤯 .

That's according to Nikola Mrkšić, the founder of PolyAI, a machine learning platform that buildings chatbots or voice-based agents for call centres.

In this episode of Crazy Until It's Not, we talk about the story behind PlolyAI and Nikola himself. And we also talk about what it means for society if so many jobs are getting automated. 

Welcome back to Crazy Until It's Not, a podcast about big ideas and the amazing people behind them. 

Every episode we bring on a new guest who has a prediction for the future, which on the face of it, sounds a little bit crazy. 

I'm your host, Michael Stothard, an early-stage tech investor at firstminute capital.

And today I'm joined by Jonas Andrulis, the Founder and CEO of Aleph Alpha, the generative A.I. Company from Heidelberg, which has built a generative A.I. model that is going up against the likes of Open AI.

Listen to this episode if you want to know about:
- How generative AI is changing the world.
- Can Europe compete? 
- The fractal nature of time
- How creativity will be done by machines.