The new fridge in town
Some thoughts on tech and consumer in the past few weeks, including OpenAI's Dev Day being the hottest ticket in town and the rise of the non-alcoholic beverage industry
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Today is a stream of thoughts based on the past few weeks. We’re covering a true variety show today — OpenAI demo day, a very cool kitchen appliance, and must-listen music releases. Hope you enjoy reading some thoughts, and stay tuned for next week as we circle back to our roots and dive into some fun data science. As always - if you have thoughts, ideas, or requests on topics to cover, let me know!
What does OpenAI do? Apparently everything.
OpenAI’s first ever Dev Day was one of the most sought after events in Silicon Valley in a bit. Everyone was foaming at the mouth to see what Sam Altman was going to talk about, so I had to tune in to watch the livestream.
Ben Thompson at Stratechery wrote a great piece on the keynote, where he speaks a bit to the evolution of the launch day in tech. Major releases, like that of the iMac or iPhone, were etched in my child mind as cultural moments that shifted the face of how we interact with technology. The hype of launch days has died a bit over the past years, but OpenAI’s Dev Day this year was a moment to bring that anticipation back. Developers, enterprise, journalists, and founders were all waiting to see what their fate meant after this demo day. And the OpenAI team brought a lot to the table in a short time.
There was a bit of an ominous cloud over the event, as with each new announcement, thousands of startup teams held their breath awaiting their destiny if OpenAI was about to launch a product they’d been working on for months or years. In a quote from this week’s Hard Fork podcast, attendees didn’t know if the event was “a wedding or a funeral” for this very reason. Incumbents hold their position at the helm of the generative AI ship, but there is whitespace that will continue to reveal itself.
Some key highlights:
GPT-4 Turbo is the new state of the art model from OpenAI. The new model has later knowledge cutoffs (up to April 2023), longer prompts, and automatic model selection based on prompt.
GPTs are customized GPT models for any purpose. GPTs can be created by anyone, then published on OpenAI’s new marketplace.
Copyright Shield will now pay your legal fees if you face legal claims for copyright infringement after using their tools.
A lot of what was presented was released the same day as the demo. Typical of an Apple demo day was “releasing later this month”, which never makes for as great of an immediate consumer reaction.
Using OpenAI’s APIs is now cheaper on a per token basis, on both input and output.
The new fridge in town
I personally haven’t been on the edge of my seat waiting for innovation in the fridge space. There was a time when I feel like fridges were going through an absurd push towards modernism, like Samsung’s 4.5K “Family Hub” Fridge, that lets you listen to music and show digital calendars, but nothing that would really move the needle for a first time fridge buyer.
Last week, I came across Rocco, and now, I believe fridges are cool and I want one.
Rocco is a smart fridge and bar cart in one. First off, the fridge just looks good. The Rocco fridge connects with an app that shows what’s stored inside, lets you control the fridge temperature, and soon, will let you order right from the app to restock when your purchases are out. There’s room for storage on top, for glassware and room-temp drinks, to be the all-in-one drink destination in your home. It’s small and perfect for tiny apartments. I say this all with a big disclaimer that I don’t have one, and it is pretty expensive ($1,500), but I’m a fan of what the team is getting at here.
I think the Rocco Smart Fridge is a tangible response to the growing beverage industry particularly in the non-alcoholic beverage market. The non-alcoholic business market surpassed $11B in 2022, with signs of continued growth in the years ahead. Non-alcoholic beer alone is growing 30% YOY (major plug for Athletic Brewing for getting me through staying alcohol-free through marathon training while still satisfying the cold beer taste!). 6% of Gen X is drinking a non-alcoholic beer, wine, or spirit often, while for millennials, thats’s 24%.
More millennials are opting out of alcohol than ever before, and that shift in consumption is trickling down into other markets. More people are drinking Celsius, Athletic Brewing, and non-alcoholic spirits on their night outs. I had a moment sometime last year where I thought I wanted to start a glassware business. Post-COVID, I was seeing friends still enjoy the niceties of preparing drinks and meals in the comfort of your own home, but making the process a bit more luxurious through the use of beautiful, curated, or vintage glassware. And as non alcoholic beverages were on the rise, your drink may not have been as glamorous, but you could put it in an cool glass and feel just as excited about it. Estelle Colored Glass is a company I loved to watch blossom, and think the tailwinds of growth in the non-alcoholic beverage industry is helping them.
The Rocco fridge excites me about the continued emphasis on building products around the home, and intentional moments we share in it, with a drink or not.
And as for the non-alcoholic beverage market, the public markets have responded well to some players, particularly energy drinks. Breakout star Celsius - maker of the questionably powerful 200MG of caffeine, metabolism boosting energy drink — has been a major winner. Celsius is up 77% YTD. The company has survived some major backlash, from claims of health risks, class action lawsuits, and its extreme amount of caffeine, and seen incredible growth in the last year. Fellow energy winner was Monster Energy which is up 10% YTD, whereas both Pepsi and Coca Cola are down 6% and 9% respectively. Lots of newer non-alcoholic players, like Athletic Brewing, aren’t publicly traded, so their growth isn’t reflected in the visual here. The incumbents in the beverage space are continuing to be squeezed by the surge in brands chipping away at their market share.
Early labor market response to AI
We’ve all been expecting AI to have some impact on the labor market. There’s been lots of back and forth, of whether the jobs AI is creating (like prompt engineers and AI researchers) will outnumber those of the jobs it will be displacing.
A study on the short term effects of generative AI on the labor market was released in August, and an analysis was shared by John Burn on some of the data. With a focus on digital freelancers, the researchers studied how jobs and earnings changed in the months after the release of ChatGPT. The findings were dramatically less jobs and earnings for freelancers after the launch. While this is merely a short term finding, some industries will see more pervasive changes from generative AI than others, and this study starts to illustrate some of what’s to come.
Some quick bites
The Cut did a deep dive into Erewhon and their history. Worth the read.
Whitney Wolfe Herd, the youngest woman to take a company public, is passing the Bumble CEO torch to Slack CEO Lidiane Jones.
Omegle is shutting down, after 14 years of being one of the most bizarre sites on the web, due to being riddled child safety concerns.
A24 won an intense bidding war for the rights to Elon Musk’s biopic, to be directed by Darren Aronofsky
UV-A emitting lights mistakenly placed at the event led to eye pain, skin issues, and other pain for attendees of the Bored Ape Yacht Club’s Ape Fest
This is the best banana bread EVER. Is banana bread a Thanksgiving food?
Noah Kahan’s much anticipated collaboration of Northern Attitude with Hozier was released this Friday. This is a good one.
Thanks for tuning in. See you next week!
Lots of good news. I salivate at the prospect of another issue. Do you need a new refrigerator?