👋 Good morning. Better check your pantry — there’s been a chocolate heist. More than 413k KitKats — ~12 tons of candy — were stolen during transit from Italy to Poland, according to Nestle. The candy, and the truck carrying it, have yet to be found, though stolen bars will be trackable through batch codes on the wrappers. Someone confused “gimme a break” with “make a break for it,” apparently.
NEWS FLASH
🚗 Need a charge? Silicon Valley startup EneRenew’s robot, x-caddy, can wheel itself to an EV and charge it with a robotic arm. Drivers can use an app to summon the bot to wherever their car is, as opposed to seeking out charging stations and remaining with their vehicle while it juices up. Venues could offer EV charging without building charging infrastructure. The bot’s currently being tested in San Francisco's Treasure Island neighborhood.
🍄 A cheaper trip: EYWA is an Argentinian startup looking to manufacture lab-grown psilocybin — the psychoactive compound in hallucinogenic mushrooms — at scale for patients with depression, ideally reducing treatment costs by 60%. The company, which has raised $4.5m thus far, hopes to target clinics in Australia, where psilocybin is legal.
🧠Nothing to see here… just a guy thawing out his buddy’s brain. Biogerontologist L. Stephen Coles died in 2014, and his brain has sat in a vat in Arizona at -295 degrees Fahrenheit ever since — becoming one of the first patients in the world to undergo brain-only cryopreservation. Now, his friend and cryobiologist Greg Fahy is thawing chunks of Coles’ brain to biopsy, and said it’s in pretty good shape. We’ll stick to friendship bracelets, thanks.
MORE NEWS TO KNOW
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Bot pharma: US pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly made a $2.75B deal with Hong Kong-based Insilico Medicine to bring drugs developed by generative AI to market.
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More cute animal threads, please: Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee and chief innovation officer Jay Graber announced Attie, a new AI app that helps users curate custom feeds by chatting with a bot.
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Can’t spell aisle without AI: More than a third of engaged couples report using AI in their wedding planning process — a 225% increase from 2023 — according to data from The Knot.
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Brown-nosing bots: A new study from Stanford computer scientists found chatbots validate user behavior 49% more often than humans, including 47% of the time in cases involving harmful or illegal actions.
5 SCALING SECRETS
Viral product principles from Ring
In 2018, just five years after Ring doorbell was rejected on "Shark Tank," Amazon bought out the flourishing business for over $1B.
To tap into that abnormal growth, heed these five secrets to scaling from My First Million.
Principles by Ring founder Jamie Siminoff:
- The case for small but mighty ideas
- Build on existing awareness (e.g., Liquid Death, Dollar Shave Club)
- Think of yourself as a snowball
- Hire unrivaled sleepers (not first-round picks)
- Keep grinding… even when it sucks
Plus, the $1B+ idea workbook for getting started sensibly.
THE BIG IDEA
Why do your chores for free when you could be paid for it?
Think of all the things that don’t make it onto your calendar, like making your bed in the morning, cooking yourself dinner, and cleaning up after.
They’re mundane tasks, but ones that must be done nonetheless.
At least now you could be paid to do them — and already, many people are.
Why?
They're part of a growing workforce of gig workers who, in exchange for cash, are helping to train AI by recording themselves performing everyday tasks, so that eventually physical bots can do it in their place.
- In LA, Instawork has people strap on a phone-mountable headset and wristbands that collect data on their movements as they work, per the Los Angeles Times. Each task, anything from plant watering to dishwashing, must be 2-15 minutes long. Two hours of footage could net a cool ~$80.
- DoorDash is tapping into its network of couriers with Tasks, a standalone app it announced this month, where Dashers can accept assignments — e.g., recording themselves folding clothes or speaking a foreign language — with upfront rates based on complexity and effort, per Bloomberg.
“It’s one of the biggest gig economies that is going to exist in the whole world,” the founder of one such startup told LA Times of the global human data capture market, which is projected to hit ~$17B by 2030.
Everyone’s a gig worker now
Even laid-off white-collar professionals are now training AI to do their jobs, The Wall Street Journal reports, thanks to companies like Scale AI, Mercor, and Surge AI, whose ranks comprise tens or even hundreds of thousands of experts, including VCs, lawyers, astronomers, and writers.
- Some people assume the job postings are scams because the roles pay pretty well — as much as $250 an hour for certain specialists and up to $150 for poets — but that’s because it kinda requires you to sell your soul, or at least, in some cases, the rights to your IP.
- Many feel uneasy about the work, but for job seekers facing months of unemployment, it’s hard to blame them for taking the gigs, even if they might be digging their own career graves.
“I didn’t invent AI and I’m not going to uninvent it,” one laid-off journalist, who now spends 20-30 hours editing AI articles, told WSJ. “If I were to stop doing this, would that stop it? The answer is no.”
Bleak, but fair enough.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Can you drive massive traffic with a simple site? This entrepreneur breaks down how he generates $15k per month with a gaming website.
NEWSWORTHY NUMBER
Average airport security wait times (in hours) last week — the longest in TSA history — prompted by the longest government shutdown in US history, which left TSA officers without pay for weeks and airports understaffed, per Business Insider.
Now, wait times are beginning to return to normal at airports across the country, since paychecks are returning as of this week. That’s good news for TSA staff, who can feed their families again, and spring breakers, who can finally make it to the beach.
AROUND THE WEB
đź“… On this day: In 1985, the first WrestleMania was held at Madison Square Garden, with featured guests including Muhammad Ali, Cyndi Lauper, Mr. T, and Liberace.
🍕 That's cool: A tool for you and your friends to select pizza toppings.
đź“š Useful: The books most often recommended by public figures.
🎶 Chill out: with this browser synth you can play with your keyboard.
🌿 Aww: Munch, munch, munch.
SHOWER THOUGHT
The best place for a "Little Free Library" book exchange box might be an airport. SOURCE
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