You’ve Heard of QAnon, but Have you Heard of Q*?

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Happy Wednesday, folks.

Might be a controversial opinion among college football fans, but I absolutely love the end of season → National Championship window.

The coaching carousel is bonkers (A&M fans literally cyberbullied their Athletic Director into reneging on an agreement with the new coach he wanted lol), and it got me thinking: what if there was a startup founder carousel?

Can you imagine the drama if investors weren’t happy with the job that Character.ai founder Noam Shazeer was doing and bought out his contract to take a shot on disgraced party animal Adam Neumann?

I get that this sort of stuff does happen sometimes, but I wish it were a bit more structured. I want a dedicated window to refresh and see the fan reaction to their favorite company’s hires in real time. @Garry Tan, think you might be the person to talk to about this?

You’ve Heard of QAnon, but Have you Heard of Q*?

Promise it’s not conspiracy.

Well, okay it is, but it’s not political conspiracy.

Imagine a world where AI could out-think, out-learn, and potentially outmaneuver human intelligence. Sound a bit “start of the robot wars” scary?

Welcome to the Q* saga, OpenAI's latest AI breakthrough that's got the tech world buzzing like a hive on Red Bull.

Q* (pronounced “Q Star”) is the latest whisper in the AI grapevine from OpenAI relying on two theories, the first of which suggests it's like Q-learning (means the AI does its best 2nd grader impression and continually asks “why,” but rather than wait for an annoyed parent’s answer, it teaches itself in an iterative process) on Compound V. Think ChatGPT picking up War and Peace and deciding to learn Russian literature without you ever nudging it in Tolstoy's direction.

The second theory introduces Q* to the MRPPS — the Maryland Refutation Proof Procedure System. In essence, this would mean supplementing AI’s self-educational (side hustle king, i like it) with a dose of Sherlock Holmes' logic and reasoning.

Trying to get ChatGPT to solve problems right now is like banging your head on a stump. It can spit out information, but it can’t do any reasoning beyond 2+2=4. With MRPPS, the AI isn't merely absorbing information but navigating through logical processes, solving puzzles that would stump us mere mortals.

This breakthrough is pretty insane even in theory, but the reality is that we might soon meet Q* (and the consequences it brings) in action.

More and more, it seems like this breakthrough (and subsequent Oppenheimer moment) was what led to researchers at OpenAI sounding the alarm to the Board, catalyzing the drama that consumed our brainwaves for the entirety of last weekend.

How Q* is used will literally shape the economy for generations to come. At its most optimal deployment, it could literally allow you to go to ChatGPT and say “build time travel” and wait as the AI continues to hit the books to make you Doc Brown.

On the other hand, the same tech could mean we get the robots that realize they’re smarter and more powerful than us and we are taking up too many resources and stand a threat to their continued existence and decide we must be exterminated. No big deal.

I’ve made fun of the AI Ethics debates, but I think it’s because I’m struggling to come to terms with how serious and existential AI’s development really is.

AI, at the level of Q*, has the potential to redefine our social, economic, and ethical landscapes. Though I typically focus my analysis on the impact of the latest tech news on the startup ecosystem (if you think startups are lean and efficient today, imagine the one-person unicorns of tomorrow), doing so here would understate the monumental meaning that Q* has for mankind.

This article was a bit of a downer, and to be completely fair, we don’t know much at all about what Open'AI’s Q* really is.

But its implications are crystal clear.

This technology could make entrepreneurs and startups 100x more productive even than what is enabled with ChatGPT.

But it could also create something which has the potential to make our greatest fears about robots and technology come true.

And if the Board fired an executive like Sam Altman over fears over how his push to commercialize the technology, safety be damned, then his reinstatement and the replacing of the Board at the push of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s shareholder value-focused behest, I’m not exactly uber excited about the direction that AI development is headed.

Every once in a while, I miss the days of scouring the internet for any promising startup to hitch my wagon to and write about in hopes that they’d become my “told you so” to anyone who asked me about my VC chops.

Those moments are few and short-lived. But if you want someone who actually lives and breathes that grind and writes incredible, in-depth analysis of startups in the software space, Venture Scout is your source.

Cheers to another day,

Trey