💰 AI grads will buy the next round

HustleGPT — no relation — seems to be a modern-day Icarus tale of a viral sensation, backlash, and internet drama.

On March 15, designer and self-described “AI soothsayer” Jackson Greathouse Fall announced an experiment. He’d told GPT-4, the follow-up to ChatGPT, that it was now HustleGPT, an “entrepreneurial AI.”

HustleGPT was asked to turn $100 into a profitable business — nothing illegal, no manual labor. Fall promised to update daily for 30 days.

On Day One…

… HustleGPT suggested an affiliate marketing site for sustainable products. Per Fall’s request, his AI business partner also:

• Provided prompts for a DALL-E-2-generated logo
• Designed a website
• Created a blog post featuring real products and a Midjourney image
• Instructed Fall to spend $40 on digital ads, in addition to the $8.16 spent on the site’s domain and $29 for hosting

Later…

… it suggested hiring a content writer who’d use ChatGPT to generate posts, and developing a SaaS product “targeting a niche market with a recurring subscription model.”

After four days, Fall claimed investors had plopped down ~$7.8k in investments, per Mashable — something that probably wouldn’t have happened without the Twitter hype.

By March 22, Fall said the site had made $130 in revenue.

The fall of Fall

Fall shot to viral fame, but real life got in the way. Updates slowed, and on April 12, he tweeted that HustleGPT would take a back seat to his other work and encouraged fans to join a Discord server for updates.

• Many followers got angry and accused him of grifting.
• The website remains unfinished, with just that first blog post and “lorem ipsum” placeholders.

The beef

Dave Craige, a consultant, claimed he’d approached Fall about a HustleGPT Discord — from which he soon banned Fall for allegedly trying to disrupt the community and trying to undermine Craige’s reputation.

Now, there are two Discords: Craige’s “official” HustleGPT with ~5.2k members, and Fall’s Makeshift with ~3.5k, all hoping to produce the next hit AI-led startup.

What we’ve learned here:

• People are excited about AI
• But AI ideas often require human execution
• Going viral seems terrible, actually
• Even the bots cannot save humans from their drama

(Liberal arts grad students, maybe avert your eyes? This one’s gonna hurt a little.)

Every business under the sun, from Istanbul to Sticker Mule, is trying to get in on AI.

That’s good news for one group: the small number of AI experts holding advanced degrees in the field.

And when we say “good,” we mean really good. Like, $500k+-salaries-level good.

The talent wars are on

Top companies are making their presence felt at top universities. Per Insider, the corporate world is “ransacking” academia.

Headhunters are recruiting students so early — even undergrads are in demand right now — that enrollment is dipping for postgrad programs.

• How many college kids you know would stay in school when their classmates are seeing part-time offers exceeding $350k?
• That temptation can only be held in check for so long; computer science programs in North America annually produce ~15k master’s grads but just 1.9k PhD grads, according to Stanford’s AI Index.

Just 10 years ago, that elite class of AI PhD grads were evenly split between continuing in academia or working in the private sector. Today, with corporate enticements so grand, surveys show universities holding onto only ~25% of them.

This is just the beginning

If they weren’t already, every C-suite on the planet is having conversations about AI. Many will increase investments in the space.

• Machine-learning talent collective Tribe AI told Insider demand for AI-related placements doubled from December to March.

More good news? While PhD programs are expensive, student debt only hurts so much when you can pay it off in two paychecks.

1) In this labyrinth where night is blind, the “Phantom of the Opera” ledger will blow your freakin’ mind. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Phantom” ended its record-setting 35-year run on Broadway, but not before grossing $1.3B+ in NYC alone (its touring productions worldwide were separate cash cows). An uneven covid recovery thinned the margins for some Broadway shows. For “Phantom,” increased operating costs of $950k/week were unsustainable.

2) It’s hard to complain about a $1.3m compensation package — unless you’re Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, one year removed from a $212.7m haul. As jarring as the drop may seem, this is all according to plan, per Insider. In 2021, Jassy received ~$212m in stock awards, which will vest over 10 years and drive a bulk of his comp over that time. With no further stock in 2022, Backup Bezos was left with his measly $317.5k base salary and $981k in 401(k) contributions and security costs.

3) What’s eating at in-office employees? Not just their commute, but also a lack of, you know, actual eating. Decision intelligence company Morning Consult found 63% of remote workers eat breakfast daily, compared to a 53% morning nosh rate for in-person workers, many of whom eat “on the go.” A further flex from the at-home crowd: lunch. They visit restaurants midday slightly more than their commuting comrades (14% to 11%, respectively).

4) You might feel like you’ve been living in a cave, but Spanish athlete Beatriz Flamini just came out of hers on Friday after 500 days. Flamini was part of an experiment studying how humans fare underground. Flamini — who was ~230 feet below — mostly read, exercised, and knit. “In fact, I didn’t want to come out,” she said.

5) Tomorrow is Tax Day in the US. You may want to grumble, but at least you can take solace in not being a Swedish bitcoin miner? The Nordic nation will abolish tax incentives for data centers this summer, amounting to a “prohibitively expensive” 6,000% tax increase per kilowatt hour of energy. The bitcoin-mining sector, drawn in by massive 2017 tax cuts, hasn’t fueled the job growth Sweden was seeking, and now it may be curtains.