Weekly Roundup: Shop like a what? 💰️

Happy Friday, DVC! If you watched the Super Bowl, you probably saw all $21+ million worth of ads from Temu - the online marketplace telling you to “shop like a billionaire”.

I had no idea what Temu was before Sunday, but I’ve been on the site all week and it’s nice knowing the world’s most rich and powerful people are also browsing for deals on the “$0.38 Winter Fashion Sale”.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m currently in a bidding war with Prince William for a $3.38 pair of “Sport Reading Glasses”.

Welcome to DVC!

Welcome to the 8 new members who’ve signed up for DVC since last week! We’re happy to have you 👋 

Startup News & Weekly Poll:

Considering that OpenAI’s Sam Altman is looking to raise $7 trillion in new funding (I.e. ~7% of global GDP), it feels weird calling them a “startup” and not a “quasi nation-state with quirky tweets”. But, given that we’re looking at Personal AI for this week’s Deal Review, we’d be remiss not to report on some major relevant announcements from OpenAI.

Development 1 - ChatGPT Gets “Memories”:

If you’ve used ChatGPT, you know it’s like that friend who never asks you questions or remembers what you told them 2 days ago. For every new conversation, you have to catch them up on the backstory just so they can give you a generic robotic response.

Well, now your emotionally distant friend ChatGPT is getting an upgrade after OpenAI announced it will be able to store specific “memories” to reference in future conversations.

While this increases the value of a $20/month ChatGPT Plus subscription and could drive more revenue for OpenAI, some suggest it’s part of a bigger push to unlock a marketing revenue stream.

For example, if ChatGPT remembers you asked for “a 10-day itinerary for a trip to Mexico”, OpenAI could sell your info to Expedia to target you with ads for flights & hotels.

Development 2 - OpenAI Releases Text-to-Video:

Just when Google thought it was catching up by launching it’s own AI subscription and rebranding from Bard → Gemini, yesterday OpenAI revealed “Sora” - a tool turning text prompts into realistic AI-generated videos.

Sam Altman spent the day giving real-time demos on Twitter, and I have to say some of the examples are pretty impressive. 

Some positives: It’s cool seeing new use cases get mentioned. For example, once the tech gets good enough, ChatGPT could help you create your own custom, full-length feature film for your Friday movie night 

Some negatives: If that example’s even remotely possible, it likely would threaten a lot of jobs in film, TV, advertising, and more…

Our Take:

Not much personal commentary here besides the fact that it feels both exhilarating and exhausting to keep up with what seems like the same tech cycle every month:

1) OpenAI releases some new thing → 2) Media reports on new thing → 3) People panic about said new thing → 4) Nobody really uses original thing → 5) Return to Start

Which all leads me to wonder about today’s poll… Choose an answer below and see how you stack up next week!

Last Week's Results:

Last week we asked which deal stage you prefer to invest in… and 100% of you answered “Early Stage”!

That makes two unanimous votes in a row! I can’t imagine we’ll get the same results on this week’s poll, but I’ve been wrong before…

Vote for New Deals:

Help select DVC's future deals! Please view the options, upvote your favorites, and suggest your own!

New companies suggested this week:

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Deal Review #75 Update:

In case you missed it, this week we’re looking at Personal AI - a startup helping anyone build unique, no-code AI models trained on their individual memories.