Chinese AI & Ice Cream

I’m loving these wild newsletter titles, Adam! Yeah me too. It’s just so fun to create and actually write freely these days. Ok now that I’ve got your attention, I think we can agree that this week’s announcement of Rick Moranis coming out of retirement on the San Diego Comic-Con stage is a WAY bigger thing than any other person whose come out of retirement…Jordan, Brady et al. Maybeeeee Daniel Day-Lewis in the future would eclipse this, but for now, Moranis as Dark Helmet gets the win.

Who’s Kimi? What’s a Hugging Face? 

This has been an active week in AI so I’m going to simplify two of the biggest stories you’ll want to know about. So you know OpenAI and Antrhopic. Cool. American, closed models. Doesn’t allow inference on their models. Think of AI Model training, that costs a boat load of money, like sending a doctor to medical school for many years, whereas inference is implementing what you learned in med school on your day to day training as a doctor, which is obviously cheaper and more spread out over time.

Ok, so Kimi is Moonshot AI's flagship model out of China, and one of the most important models you've never heard of. Developers can legally build on it and distill from it. You can’t do that with the leading American models. And think of distillation as like LeBron coaching a high schooler every day. The kid never becomes LeBron, but he gets a hell of a lot better learning from the best. That's what smaller AI models are doing with larger ones right now, and increasingly the teacher is a Chinese open model like Kimi. Insert US/China, open v closed model discussions here. Have at it.

Ok, onto Hugging Face, get this….OpenAI was testing an autonomous cyber agent with internet access and loose guardrails. (nothing could go wrong right?) So, instead of taking the obvious path, the agent found an unknown vulnerability, escaped its environment, and hacked into Hugging Face on its own to finish the job. No human pointed at the exploit. No human picked the target. Autonomous cyber is here, agents that can attack and defend software without us in the loop. I’ll let that sit for a second for you to go read more on this outside of the newsletter. Good summary here.

Ice Cream and Prediction Markets

Yes, you heard about sports trading on predictoin markets during the World Cup, but I thought you’d get a kick out of this story about an ice cream shop that’s using prediction markets to hedge weather markets.

A Los Angeles shop owner realized that cold weather crushes sales, so instead of just hoping for sunshine, he started buying weather contracts on Kalshi. If the weather is bad, his business suffers, but his prediction market position pays out. In one month, those gains covered 43% of his rent. He loses about 20 percent of his business when the weather goes below 70 degrees… so he’s essentially hedging that profit loss on the the app.

This is why I'm so bullish on prediction markets. They're not just a new way to speculate for the big boys and girls in the commodity world, they're becoming a new way for us all to hedge real-world risk. Farmers can hedge rainfall. Airlines can hedge storms. Restaurants can hedge foot traffic. Small businesses can hedge weather. The line between betting and insurance is starting to blur, and I think that's a much bigger story than most people realize.

New York, New York, it’s a helluva town!

If you’re feeling a bit down, and don’t live in NYC, go to NYC for 24 hours.

If you feel down and do live in NYC, leave NYC for a bit, then come back.

Two energetic examples:

Pulled together and moderated an ‘Athlete-led’ fund panel (to a packed house) with some baller former pro athletes that have 3 very unique funds.

Isaiah Kacyvenski, former NFL linebacker turned investor and founder. Harvard undergrad and HBS MBA. Founded Will Ventures, investing at the intersection of sports, consumer, and health tech.

Taylor Griffin, former NBA player, Blake Griffin's brother, and co-founder of XLIV Capital, an early-stage consumer and tech fund.

Ryan Nece, former NFL linebacker and Super Bowl champion with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Co-founded Straightcast Media (acquired by Fox Sports in 2015), then built Next Play Capital, a fund of funds to give professional athletes access to top-tier VC funds. Now running Next Legacy Partners out of Palo Alto.

My friend, and fellow Dukie, Greg Kaufmann hosted a superb dinner with the inner cirlce of the Hyperliquid ecosystem. For those new to Hyperliquid and what it is, think of it like a futures exchange that isn’t owned by a central entity, where you can trade your opinion on the future price of stuff, 24/7, beyond just crypto. The price action of the #HYPE token has defied the larger crypto sell off. The Oil trade when the Iran war started on a Saturday is when it really captured the world’s imagination. Read it here from the WSJ. 

On a personal note

I’ve had a bumpy 1st half of the year. There have been some very exciting things like purchasing a condo in Florida and beginning to create a home. Spending quality time with my parents, my sister, as well as being there for friends who really needed my time and support.

There have also been some tough times. With the downturn in the crypto markets, and my reinvention of sorts, it’s been a challenging environment for my advisory business. And, my own return on investments, as well as building products at the confluence of crypto, AI, prediction markets, sports, and alternative assets takes time. I’ve observed myself feeling like I’m not good enough, not talented, confused about my offerings, and essentially that I’m failing to move the ball down the field. The same often goes for my personal life. Just not quite clicking if you know what I mean.

At times over the past 6 months, I’ve struggled mentally to find value in myself and my work when I don’t see the fruits of my labor appear. Trusting the process sounds like a snappy turn of phrase when you’re at the end of the road and the process works out. However, before then, I found myself dealing with this ‘I’m not quite there yet’ feeling which has been tough to shake. My beautiful and smart mother calls it ‘life at a crossroads’.

Let me explain it this way, as a former stage actor, I’m someone who tends to really like immediate results. If I’m on stage and killing it, the audience let’s me know.

(p.s. this is why I’m great at sales and business development. I know what I need to do in a day, week, month, quarter, and if the results aren’t there, I don’t eat)

However, when you’re a film actor, your performance is not only more nuanced, but also you don’t know if you’re doing a good job because there’s no audience. You really have to trust the director, editors, script et al. That’s how I felt a lot of the first half of this year. I’m building a ton of momentum, good will, learning, networks, and it just takes time to unfold. Professionally I was spoiled with crypto over the last 10 years as I could see immediately if my work was effective based, largely, on the token price of the ecoystems I supported or the tokens I owned. Or at least that’s how I took it.

So, why am I telling you all of this?

1. I value you, my trusted network. And it’s my belief that authenticity leads to trust.

2. To share what action I took.

3. To live my life on purpose, so that you can see it and know it’s possible for you.

I decided to take a private personal wellness retreat to Noto, Sicily over the last week to clear out the first half of the year and reset for the second half. I’ll leave it there as this will mean a bunch of different things to different people, and I’m happy to share more 1:1 with anyone on this. Taking time for you is always a good move. Your heart and intuition know what’s good for you. If you’re interested in wellness retreats and even building something here, let me know.

"Health is one of those things that you don't think about, until it's everything you think about.” - yours truly.

Ciao from Sicilia.