Innovation  

Peter Thiel talks with Tyler Cowen about stagnation, company names, chess, favorite TV shows, and especially innovation.

Peter Thiel and Tyler Cowen, both bestselling authors, are among today’s top global thought leaders and influential innovators. Watch as these two engage in a serious dialogue on the ideas and policies that will shape the future of innovation and progress in the coming years and decades.

In the conversation, Thiel discusses how he thinks we will leave the “great stagnation,” whether the AI hype is justified, how he would boil his thought down to the smallest number of dimensions, whether NYC is over- or underrated, why globalization is likely to decline and what that means for different regions, the parts of the Bible which have influenced him most, “the Straussian Jesus,” to what age he thinks he will live, why Japan is special, how his German background matters, his favorite opening chess move, how and why company names matter, and even his favorite TV show, Game of Thrones.

"There’s no straightforward formula for innovation."

"I think we’ve had a lot of innovation in computers, information technology, Internet, mobile Internet in the world of bits. Not so much in the world of atoms, supersonic travel, space travel, new forms of energy, new forms of medicine, new medical devices, etc. It’s sort of been this two-track area of innovation," Thiel states.

Related articles Facebook Researching AI In a Big Way  Peter Thiel on Development In The Future  Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel Discuss Innovation and Technology

When asked, where the breakthroughs that will get the economy out of stagnation are, Thiel replies:

AI feels slightly overhyped. Biotech, a lot could happen. It feels heavily regulated. But if you’ve got self-driving cars, that would be a significant innovation which would change a decent amount at the margins. There’s some regulatory challenges with it, but it’s sort of right at the intersection of the kinds of things that could happen.

I think the most natural hope is that information technology starts to broaden out and starts to impact this world of atoms. Then we’re going to have this question about whether the technology outpaces the politics or vice versa.

According to Thiel, "There’s no straightforward formula for innovation. It’s much easier to do horizontal progress, which I describe as globalization, copying things that work going from one to n, versus vertical progress, technology, doing new things, going from zero to one."

Peter Thiel is among the most impressive innovators of the past two decades. As co-founder of Paypal and seed-funder for Facebook, Thiel has been instrumental in the conception and growth of some of today’s most entrepreneurial and innovative companies. In his latest best-selling book, Zero to One, Thiel explains how to build a better future by capitalizing on innovation. A staunch optimist, he maintains that progress can be achieved anywhere the human mind is able to think creatively. Thiel describes how entrepreneurial thinking leads to innovation, which builds something new and moves the mark from zero to one.

Tyler Cowen is a world-renowned professor of economics, co-author of the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution, co-founder of the award-winning online educational platform Marginal Revolution University, and chairman of the Board at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Bloomberg Businessweek profiled Cowen as “America’s Hottest Economist,” Foreign Policy named Cowen as one of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers,” and an Economist survey counted Cowen as one of the most influential economists of the last decade.


SOURCE  Mercatus Center

By 33rd Square

Embed

 Books  

Silicon Valley hangs on to the words of Peter Thiel.  The billionaire entrepreneur and early financier of Facebook has now put those words to paper with the release his book Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.

The great secret of our time is that there are still uncharted frontiers to explore and new inventions to create. In Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things.

Thiel begins with the contrarian premise that we live in an age of technological stagnation, even if we’re too distracted by shiny mobile devices to notice.

His, Founders Fund, famously displays the tagline, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”  He only recently made his first Tweet:

from zero to one http://t.co/TtFsSpVkLP
— Peter Thiel (@peterthiel) September 8, 2014

The title of the book refers to the distinction Thiel draws between transformative, “vertical” change—going from zero to one—and incremental, “horizontal” change—going from one to n.

“If you take one typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress,” he explains in the book’s first chapter. “If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress.”

According to Thiel, and co-author Blake Masters, information technology has improved rapidly, but there is no reason why progress should be limited to computers or Silicon Valley. Progress can be achieved in any industry or area of business. It comes from the most important skill that every leader must master: learning to think for yourself.

Related articles Peter Thiel on Development In The Future  Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel Discuss Innovation and Technology  Salim Ismail Outlines Exponential Technology's Explosive Effects

Doing what someone else already knows how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But when you do something new, you go from 0 to 1. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. Tomorrow’s champions will not win by competing ruthlessly in today’s marketplace. They will escape competition altogether, because their businesses will be unique.

"There’s no reason why the future should happen only at Stanford, or in college, or in Silicon Valley," according to Thiel. "To start a wider conversation, we have refined and expanded on the best ideas from the class to make a richer, fresher, more readable text. Zero to One is about learning from Silicon Valley why and how the most valuable businesses in the world are the ones that solve problems in new ways rather than competing on well-trodden paths."

"If you take one typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress."

Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor. He started PayPal in 1998, led it as CEO, and took it public in 2002, defining a new era of fast and secure online commerce. In 2004 he made the first outside investment in Facebook, where he serves as a director. The same year he launched Palantir Technologies, a software company that harnesses computers to empower human analysts in fields like national security and global finance. He has provided early funding for LinkedIn, Yelp, and dozens of successful technology startups, many run by former colleagues who have been dubbed the “PayPal Mafia.” He is a partner at Founders Fund, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has funded companies like SpaceX and Airbnb. He started the Thiel Fellowship, which ignited a national debate by encouraging young people to put learning before schooling, and he leads the Thiel Foundation, which works to advance technological progress and long-term thinking about the future.

Masters was a student at Stanford Law School in 2012 when his detailed notes on Peter Thiel’s class “Computer Science 183: Startup” became an internet sensation. Before writing Zero to One with Peter, Blake co-founded Judicata, a legal research technology startup, and worked at Box andFounders Fund. He went to Stanford and Stanford Law School, and lives in San Francisco with his wife and baby boy.

Zero to One presents at once an optimistic view of the future of progress in America and a new way of thinking about innovation: it starts by learning to ask the questions that lead you to find value in unexpected places.

Some of the reviews for Zero to One:

“This book delivers completely new and refreshing ideas on how to create value in the world.” 
-  Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook

“Peter Thiel has built multiple breakthrough companies, and Zero to One shows how.” 
-  Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla 

" Zero to One is the first book any working or aspiring entrepreneur must read—period."
- Marc Andreessen, co-creator of the world's first web browser, co-founder of Netscape, and venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz 

"Zero to One is an important handbook to relentless improvement for big companies and beginning entrepreneurs alike. Read it, accept Peter’s challenge, and build a business beyond expectations." 
- Jeff Immelt, Chairman and CEO, GE 

“When a risk taker writes a book, read it. In the case of Peter Thiel, read it twice. Or, to be safe, three times. This is a classic.”
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan 

"Peter Thiel, in addition to being an accomplished entrepreneur and investor, is also one of the leading public intellectuals of our time. Read this book to get your first glimpse of how and why that is true."
- Tyler Cowen, New York Times best-selling author of Average is Over and Professor of Economics at George Mason University 

"The first and last business book anyone needs to read; a one in a world of zeroes."
- Neal Stephenson, New York Times best-selling author of Snow Crash, the Baroque Cycle, and Cryptonomicon

By 33rd Square

Embed

 Holograms  

Ostendo Technologies Inc. has spent the past nine years quietly working on miniature projectors designed to emit crisp videos and glasses-free 3D images for smartphones and giant screens.

Imagine stepping into an empty room and then suddenly seeing life-size, 3D images of people and furniture. Or looking down at a smartwatch and seeing virtual objects float and bounce above the wrist, like the holographic Princess Leia beamed by R2-D2 in the movie Star Wars.

Ostendo Technologies Inc. has spent the past nine years quietly working on miniature projectors designed to emit crisp videos and glasses-free 3D images for smartphones and giant screens.

Other companies have shown they can project floating images that appear to be holograms, but many involve large machines employing a system of mirrors to direct light with limited viewing angles. For instance, the lifelike hologram of the late rapper Tupac Shakur, which graced the Coachella music festival stage in 2012, was a combination of computer graphics and video projection that relied on visual effects first designed in the 19th century.

Ostendo's hologram-producing chip
Image Source - Sam Hodgson /The Wall Street Journal

Ostendo's projectors, in contrast, are tiny, powered by a computer chip that can control the color, brightness and angle of each beam of light across one million pixels.

One chipset, small enough to fit into a smartphone, is capable of projecting video on a surface with a 48-inch diagonal. A patchwork of chips, laid together, can form far larger and more complex images. The first iteration of the chip, which is scheduled to begin shipping next year, will only project 2D videos, but the next version, expected to follow soon after will feature holographic capability, according to Ostendo's chief executive and founder, Hussein S. El-Ghoroury.

"Display is the last frontier," said Dr. El-Ghoroury, who in 1998 sold CommQuest Technologies, a mobile chipset company, to IBM for about $250 million in cash and stock. "Over the years, processing power has improved and networks have more bandwidth, but what is missing is comparable advancement in display."

"Imagine if everything coming back to you was in 3D—all of your shopping, all of your gaming, every way you retrieve data," he said.

The race to disrupt the screen is intensifying as both upstarts and technology giants try to find new ways to bring content to life.

"Imagine if everything coming back to you was in 3D—all of your shopping, all of your gaming, every way you retrieve data."

Development in virtual reality is at a high now with Microsoft and AMD  are both working on their own VR rooms, building a complex system of projectors and computers. Hewlett-Packard  recently spun out a company called Leia, that like Ostendo, is trying to bring 3D imaging to smartphones. Meanwhile, Facebook recently acquired Oculus VR Inc., maker of the Oculus Rift headset that pulls users into 360-degree virtual environments.

Related articles 5 Futuristic Features Coming to Smartphones  Amazon Reportedly Developing Smartphone With Glasses Free 3D Imaging  Virtual Reality Continues To Develop

Ostendo is little-known but has raised $90 million from venture-capital firms and Peter Thiel, and has secured some $38 million in government research and development contracts. A large bulk of that has come from DARPA, the government's futurist agency that worked on the predecessor to the Internet and self-driving cars.

The long effort has yielded the Ostendo Quantum Photonic Imager, an appropriately sci-fi-sounding name, which fuses an image processor with a wafer containing micro light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, alongside software that helps the unit properly render images.

During a recent test reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, Ostendo showed a working prototype: a set of six chips laid together that beamed a 3-D image of green dice spinning in the air. The image and motion appeared consistent, irrespective of the position of the viewer.

Ostendo, which says it has several opportunities with major handset manufacturers, expects the first 2D projector unit to be in the hands of consumers before the summer of 2015. With a lens attached, it will be less than 0.5 cubic centimeters, roughly the size of the camera in the iPhone. It also expects to begin manufacturing the second version of the chip, with 3D capability, in the second half of 2015. The cost to the consumer should be about $30 a chip, Ostendo estimates.

Ultimately, the larger vision is to have Ostendo's chips everywhere electronic displays are needed, whether it is a glasses-free 3D television screen, a smartwatch, or tables that can project hologram-like images.


SOURCE  Wall Street Journal

By 33rd Square

Embed

 Artificial Intelligence  

Major investors including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Ashton Kutcher are joining Peter Thiel with a $40 million investment in Vicarious FPC, a stealthy artificial-intelligence company that has already turned heads with it's CAPTCHA-beating algorithms.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have just invested $40m in the company that recently announced their artificial intelligence could decipher CAPTCHAs.

Joining Peter Thiel, the PayPal billionaire, whose Founders Fund targets cutting edge technology and Ashton Kutcher, actor and tech investor, also investing, Zuckerberg and Musk are also joined by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.

A Facebook spokesman said Zuckerberg’s investment in Vicarious, which hasn’t been previously reported, is a personal one and does not reflect Facebook’s interest in using Vicarious software.

"Translate the neocortex into computer code and 'you have a computer that thinks like a person,'" says Vicarious co-founder Scott Phoenix. 'Except it doesn’t have to eat or sleep.'”

Related articles A Smarter Calendar With The AI Powered Tempo  What Does Watson Tell Us About the Philosophy of AI?  Our Final Invention

According to Vicarious’s website, the company is developing “machine learning software based on the computational principles of the human brain."

"Our first technology is a visual perception system that interprets the contents of photographs and videos in a manner similar to humans. Powering this technology is a new computational paradigm we call the Recursive Cortical Network.”

Company founder D. Scott Phoenix told the Wall Street Journal that if they are successful, Vicarious will have created "a computer that thinks like a person except it doesn't need to eat or sleep".  Essentially they are trying to build a human neocortex in silico.

Phoenix said his aim was to create a computer that can understand not just shapes and objects but the textures associated with them. He said he hopes Vicarious’s computers will learn to how to cure diseases and create cheap, renewable energy, as well as performing the jobs that employ most human beings. “We tell investors that right now, human beings are doing a lot of things that computers should be able to do,” he said.

Vicarious, whose other co-founder was neuroscientist Dileep George, is a long way from accomplishing its goals. Phoenix says the company won’t make a profit anytime soon and it has said very little about how its technology works. It hasn’t even disclosed its exact address, for fear it might be the target of corporate espionage or hacking.

The investment parallel's other major funding announcements for artificial intelligence ventures, including IBM's spin-off of the Watson Group, a 2,000-employee division dedicated to developing its self-learning super-computer, numerous Google robotics and AI acquisitions and Facebook's creation of it's own AI Lab.




SOURCE  Wall Street Journal

By 33rd Square

Embed