🦄 Unicorns' Reality Check

🦄 The 90% Drop in New Startup Unicorns

Unicorns are startups that are worth more than $1 billion.

Right now there are over 2,700 unicorn companies globally, with over 1,300 still private and venture-backed, meaning they haven’t gone public or sold to another company yet.

Unicorns have been popping up like mushrooms in the past few years. Since 2018, over 250 new unicorns have been born each year, except for 2021, when this number exploded to 787. That’s more than two new unicorns per day!

But in 2022, the unicorn boom suddenly turned into a bust. The number of new unicorns dropped by 90% within five quarters, with only 21 unicorns minted in Q1 2023.

North America experienced the most significant decline in new unicorn creation in 2022 (-64%), but all regions have shown a decline.

📚 170,000 Pirated Books from Bestselling Authors Used for Training Meta’s AI Model

Turns out some AI models were trained using pirated books from leading authors.

At least 170,000 books, mostly published in the past 20 years, are in Meta's open-source Llama’s training data.

The copied books were contained in a dataset labeled Books3. The dataset includes titles by bestselling authors such as Stephen King and Margaret Atwood.

BloombergGPT and EleutherAI’s nonprofit GPT-J were also trained on the same dataset.

The developer who claimed responsibility for releasing the Books3 dataset said he did it to give others “OpenAI-grade training data.” That sounds very generous of him, but also very illegal.

While some developers may claim fair use, the law governing the use of copyrighted data in training AI remains unsettled.

⏳ Threads: Is the Honeymoon Over?

Meta’s new app, Threads, may not be the “Twitter killer” it was hyped up to be.

After a strong start with 30 million users on the first day, the app has lost its steam. The number of people who use it every day has gone down by 80% since then.

Even the famous influencers who were promoting the app have moved on. Pokimane and MrBeast, who have millions of followers on other platforms, have barely posted anything on Threads lately.

The average user now spends only about 2.4 minutes daily on the app.

But Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is still optimistic, saying that the app’s user base will “take time to stabilize.” “Early growth was off the charts, but more importantly 10s of millions of people now come back daily,” Zuckerberg wrote. “That’s way ahead of what we expected.”

⚡ 3 Cool Tools

🫵 Your Wish is My Command

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Until next time!

— Tay

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