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On the creativity of the entrepreneur's pitch; and more AI+Creativity
Painters ship paintings.
Sculptures ship sculpture.
Entrepreneurs pitch ideas.
The entrepreneur’s portfolio is their pitch. It’s not just the idea, it’s the story of an unmet need, a distillation of opportunity and competition, and the ability to frame how the right team and a process forward are worth further attention. And told without fear in the fewest words possible. Go!
Last night ten MCAD students braved the stage to pitch their ideas in the penultimate session of our Leading Creative Projects class. We heard pitches for a mobile game to teach tech literacy to older immigrants, a platform to help educators and parents address disability, a local plastics circular economy program, an art review app, “AirBnB but for 3D printers,” a faith-based podcast for young entrepreneurs, a market for certified artisans, organic hair and skin care products, an email-serialized comic book, and a wellness app for those struggling with Lyme’s Disease. And none of these pitches existed 14 weeks ago.
Huge kudos to Adrian, Carrington, Annalise, Anas, Nicola, Xander, Armel, Hewan, Samantha and Madi for putting in the hours and harnessing the courage to show up and ship. Now it’s time to go make a career of that, if that’s their calling.
And I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the wealth of guests who made time to share expertise, perspective and insights throughout the course. We’re very fortunate to have such generous talent who see the value in spending time in the classroom.
AI+Creativity Update
🎶 I wonder if there’s a future in music for my music-making teenagers, given Google’s Lyria which “excels at generating high-quality music with instrumentals and vocals, performing transformation and continuation tasks, and giving users more nuanced control of the output’s style and performance.” Here’s Lyor Cohen, of all people, ushering in this new realm of creativity.
💪🏾 Amazon wants 2 million people to become “AI Ready.” The partnership with Code.org and Udacity paints a compelling picture for high school and non-technical students. AI Ready offers free online coursework as well as $12 million in scholarships to help upskill talent. As we’ve heard, AI won’t replace you, but someone trained in AI certainly might.
🙋🏽♀️ MIT Sloan’s Teaching and Research team offer a robust collection of Generative AI resources. This is becoming commonplace for colleges and universities and I’ll share more as I gather them. These collections are useful for terminology, policy implementation, and general education should your team need such things.
👍🏽 Andrej Karpathy, who led AI at Tesla and is now at OpenAI, offers a “directors cut” explainer on LLMs. Solid primer here for those seeking same.
😻 Meta’s released a demo for Emu Video, its latest work in text-to-video generation, as well as Emu Edit, a “multi-task” image generation tool. As their blog announcement conveys, Emu represents an approach in fine-tuning the generative training data with a focus on aesthetic quality. In short: here’s a path towards “better looking” generative outcomes, or more control over the elements in those outcomes.
🧠 Eric Newcomer distilled Sri Viswanath’s presentation (source) at the 11/15 Cerebral Valley AI Summit. A couple slides stood out… first, GitHub commit activity suggests AI adoption is only growing stronger.
And the AI S-curve is, as we’ve noticed, rather insane.
But it’s worth noting previous tech S-curves demonstrate remarkable innovation occurs on both ends of a curve; there’s a decade between Uber to TikTok. Which suggests whatever we’re seeing with AI now is no definitive map for what’s to come—nor should it preclude anyone from innovating later in the cycle.
I’ll be back next week with a wrap up of the Leading Creative Projects course, along with reactions to a recent long read from Cannes Creativity; and early thoughts on my upcoming AI for Artists and Entrepreneurs course. .