Who's Your Friend, Orwell Days & The Lost Battle 🤺

This is the "Orwellian future," where citizens are constantly tracked and categorized for public and private use without their knowledge.

Vintra, a California-based startup, is the one that's brought this future to the West. The company has created a surveillance software that uses AI to scan security cameras and recognise people's faces, track their activities, their interactions and mark their friends and associates. 🧐

This is called co-appearance technology and it is commonly used in China to identify protesters and dissidents. And now it's going to be used in the US as well. In fact, the LA Times reported that Vintra's software has already been used by the Internal Revenue Service and various police departments in the US. 

Of course there are concerns about violations of privacy and constitutional rights, but the absence of national laws around the topic leave it up to authorities to weigh the balance of security and privacy on their own.

But not all hope is lost. Some companies have found ways to fight back. For example, Italian startup Cap_able has a collection of knitted garments that shields the wearer from the facial recognition software without the need to cover their face. 

Here's how it works: Each garment sports a pattern which was developed by AI algorithms to confuse facial recognition software in real-time and protect the wearer’s privacy (see image below). The camera will either fail to identify the wearer or it will think they are one of the animals embedded into the pattern which includes a zebra, a giraffe, or a dog, among other animals.

Valuation is just another number based on predictive calculations. In reality, most of these AI startups find it very hard to hold credibility in the eyes of users and investors alike. And it’s even harder to maintain USP in a world where tech giants can out-create your innovation overnight.

For instance, this week, both Google and Microsoft announced Google AI and Microsoft copilot to their docket of work tools - from mails and documents to presentations - effectively outdoing all other AI-based productivity tools.

Sam Lessin, a venture capitalist at Slow Ventures, told The New York Times, “The absolute vast majority of the [AI] spoils will go to the incumbents” and the best way to invest in AI is through Big Tech stocks.

Y Combinator, the well-known startup accelerator, just announced that they're shifting their focus away from investing in mature private companies and getting back to helping early-stage founders create products that people actually want.

YC's core investment strategy has been consistent throughout the years: investing in risky startups, some of which may only be an idea or a basic demo of a product, with the hope that a few will turn out to be home runs. 

This approach has led to an impressive list of alumni, including companies like Airbnb, DoorDash, and Stripe. In fact, with over 4,000 startups funded and a combined valuation exceeding $600 billion, it's highly likely that almost everyone in America has used at least one product from their portfolio of companies.

And according to YC data, they have made over 2,400 investments in just the last 5 years (see chart below).