News:
Monzo Plus: Wednesday saw the (re) launch of Monzo plus, their premium offering that capitulated in September following a run of technical issues. Priced at £5/mo, the service will offer 1% interest on balances up to £2,000, and allow customers to check their balances on accounts with rival mainstream banks and credit cards in-app. A timely move towards self-sustainability, the London-based fintech will be hoping to recover from the Covid-induced job losses faced earlier this year. Although I couldn’t help noticing the resemblance of the new card to a certain other challenger bank, with whom there is certainly no love lost.
Leap Forward for AI with GPT-3: This week a group of Artificial Intelligence researchers from Open AI released a website that allows people to access a new language model called GPT-3. A context-based generative AI, it essentially takes incomplete inputs and attempts to “fill in blanks.” So far, some of the results have been deeply impressive - to the point where the programme is generating cogent additional paragraphs to memos & letters, whilst adhering to prior formatting. Although it can’t test the validity of the material, it still represents a huge leap forward and presents at least reasonable future potential for passing Alan Turing’s eponymous test. You can read an informative and not-too-techy summary here, and a thread listing potential applications based on what we’ve seen, here.
Twitter security leak: Accounts belonging to Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Apple, Joe Biden, Barack Obama and more were compromised this week by hackers who got in through Twitter employees with access to internal tools. Posting tweets promoting a popular cryptocurrency scam, the hackers made c.$130k promising to double all payments made to a specific Bitcoin wallet. After briefly blocking verified users’ activity, Twitter and Jack Dorsey were quick to apologise for the lax security, but the damage was already done. Many questioned the potential security risks going forward, particularly with regard to Donald Trump and his unpredictable foreign policy; he was mysteriously omitted from the attack, which could speak to its nefarious purpose. I particularly enjoyed seeing one user quip that they knew it was a scam when they saw Jeff Bezos tweeting that it was time to give back to the community. Link
UK denounce Huawei: Amid security concerns, the UK government have announced a moratorium on Huawei infrastructure for 5G networks in Britain. The company responded with a thinly veiled threat to “cause blackouts” if we go ahead with the proposal before the next election. It is yet unclear how this will affect foreign relations with China, although the government have remained steadfast despite an unsteady US stance on foreign chip technology. Link
Short Read:
Hustle culture is literally killing us: and here’s the proof. Link
Long Listen:
Building a Newsletter: with Brit-abroad VC and tech thinker Benedict Evans. Because that’s what everyone’s doing now, right? Link
Interesting Things:
The whole WFH thing: Apple this week released a bizarrely left-field video highlighting the blunders and frustrations that arise working from home. Even featuring CEO Tim Cook, it drew immediate comparisons to this WFH look-ahead advert from 1987:
The antitrust case against Google is gathering steam: "These days, when people visit Google, the majority of them get the information they sought from Google itself, and never touch the open web at all.” Link
Robinhood install bulletproof glass at its HQ: The company was forced to take the measure after disgruntled traders continued to show up at the California headquarters. Link
Ride-hailing entrepreneur found dead in NYC: In a shocking follow up to 33yo tech entrepreneur Fahim Saleh’s foray into ride-hailing in Africa, the CEO of Gokadeng was found decapitated in his apartment this week. The gruesome murder, almost interrupted by his visiting sister, was thought to be linked to investment in his motorcycle sharing platform based in Nigeria. Link
Lockdown impact on UK Economy: The numbers are out. Hospitality down, retail & e-commerce hit record high. Compiled by Ben Evans
Google to invest $10bn in India: Link