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ΔιαχειριστήςAdmin- Αριθμός μηνυμάτων : 26087
Ημερομηνία εγγραφής : 29/10/2010 
Stripe co-founder John Collison talks AI, crypto and future cities | |||||||
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| Welcome to the 25th issue of the Tech Wrap-Up Europe newsletter. Every few weeks, we'll be sharing interesting stories and expert insights from LinkedIn members. In this issue, Sam Shead, LinkedIn's tech and innovation editor for the UK and Europe, sits down with Stripe's co-founder and president for an exclusive interview. We also look at the main hurdles that AI researchers need to overcome in order to reach the holy grail of artificial general intelligence, or AGI. John Collison is 33-years-old. He's also worth a cool $7.2bn (€6.7bn; £5.7bn), according to Forbes, which makes him one of the youngest billionaires in the world. Born in the small village of Dromineer in County Tipperay, the Irish entrepreneur dropped out of Harvard in 2010 to build payment processor Stripe with his older brother Patrick in San Francisco. "We were doing it part time when we were in college and then it just kept working and we kept pursuing it," Collison told LinkedIn News in London this week as the company hosted its Stripe Tour event. Fuelled by investors including the famous Y Combinator startup accelerator, as well as the likes of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, Stripe grew rapidly and gained traction early on with startups who wanted to easily take payments from customers online.
Despite competition from the likes of Adyen , Square and PayPal, there are thousands of businesses around the world that use Stripe today to accept payments and manage their revenue including a growing number of large global enterprises like Google, Amazon , Maersk and Hertz. Household UK businesses such as Octopus Energy, ITV, Hargreaves Lansdown and Nando's UK & IRE also use Stripe. The company, which is valued at $65bn (down from $95bn two years ago), says it processed over $1tn payments in 2023 for the first year ever. That's around 1% of global GDP. Despite the growing payment volumes, Stripe has trimmed its headcount recently. In 2022, it cut 14% of its workforce after "overhiring" and it made further cuts in July 2023. Is the private company now ready to IPO? "Probably eventually, but we're definitely in no rush," Collison says. "We're very focused on growing the business. It grew well last year, it's growing really well this year. I think people focus too much on valuation and not enough on fundamental business value of 'is this business getting better?'" Return to cryptoOne area that may provide further growth for Stripe is crypto. The company announced in April that it's going to start supporting crypto payments again after a six year hiatus. This will be the first time that Stripe has taken crypto payments since 2018, when it dropped support for bitcoin due to it being too unstable."Crypto has gotten much better from a payments point of view over the last five or 10 years," Collison says, noting that transactions are faster and cheaper than they used to be.
"People want … a sane unit … that isn't flying around all over the place," says Collison. "With stablecoins you can just say I have five dollars in my wallet and it's not that you check back a few minutes later and it's a totally different value." Doubling down on the UKThe UK is Stripe's second largest market after the US, while London is the number one city in the world when it comes to new businesses building on Stripe.Stripe touted a number of new tools and services that UK businesses can access from this week including a financing service called Stripe Capital and an open banking payment method called Pay by Bank.  Stripe's new London office at 201 Bishopsgate (Google Maps). To support Stripe's next phase of growth in the UK, the company is moving into a bigger office this week. Located at Bishopsgate 201, the building is situated between the tech heartlands of Shoreditch and the traditional finance district of the Square Mile. "People are wheeling [Herman Miller] Aeron chairs in as we speak," Collison says. Passion projectsCollison says Stripe still keeps him very busy but he's still finding time to spend and invest some of his wealth into projects in his home country and elsewhere around the world.The qualified pilot bought a majority stake in an airport in Ireland as part of a consortium in 2021. He reportedly hopes the facility, which is mostly used for pilot training today, will become a hub for short-hop electric planes over the next decade. Collison has also snapped up an 18th century Irish mansion called Abbeyleix House that he's in the process of restoring. "That's really fun," he says.  John Collison on stage at Stripe Tour in London's Tobacco Dock. In terms of science and education, he's set up a biomedical research facility with his brother called the Arc Institute, and he's also backing an "immersive software engineering" course at the University of Limerick that sees students split their time between university and businesses. On the other side of the Atlantic, there's an entirely new city in Northern California. "In all the major economic hubs, there is a huge housing shortage," he says. "People are always saying why are the tech bros just working on silly apps rather than actually solving the real problems like housing? So here, there's a guy called Jan Sramek, who decided to go raise a bunch of money, buy 60,000 acres, and develop a new city. So it's a bold plan but I admire the creative thinking. He's very focused on housing availability and housing affordability." If I interview Collison in 10 years time, perhaps it will take place there.  Demis Hassabis , the CEO of Google DeepMind, is unsurprisingly bullish on where AI is headed but admits there are multiple hurdles still to overcome before we get to human-level AI. There are several key ingredients missing from today's most advanced models, Hassabis said during a fireside chat with Entrepreneur First co-founder Matt Clifford at the Stripe Tour event. "Planning" and "reasoning" still need to be improved he said, noting that AI systems can plan how to win in a game like Go but they don't yet have general planning abilities that would allow them to take actions in the real world. With games, the user gives the AI an objective – to win or get the most points possible. But in the real world, objectives are often more complex. "If the objective is pretty complicated or abstract, it has to have the ability to break that down into a set of steps that are achievable – a set of interim goals, interim plans," Hassabis said. "And that can build up overall into this bigger plan." Building these bigger plans, however, will require involve utilising other technologies, such as "[url=https://brilliant.org/wiki/tree-search/#:~:text=A tree search starts at,traverse%2Fpass through a node.]tree search[/url]", Hassabis said. "I think what we need, and I think the next big advance, will be combining the sorts of things we did in planning for programs like AlphaGo, but instead of it just being limited to a game environment, obviously instead you connect that to all of language and perhaps all of the multimodal context around you and that model, and then you plan over that." Some people in AI have long argued that "scale is all you need" in order to get to artificial general intelligence, or human-level AI. In other words, as we give bigger and bigger AI systems more and more data, they get better and better. "Scaling is definitely required and these large models are going to be part of an overall solution to say AGI," Hassabis says. "There's not much doubt there. The question is: 'Is scaling enough?' "It could be that some of these properties that we're talking about might just emerge. But . . . some of these other things we're discussing like planning feel slightly different in kind computations. My guess is there's still maybe a small handful of breakthroughs required to get us all the way through to human-level AI."   EU approves law regulating AI. The EU AI Act applies a “risk-based” approach to AI systems, where higher risk models will be subject to strict transparency obligations, while those classed as limited-risk or general purposes will have lighter requirements. Read more here.  AI safety pledges made in Seoul. Sixteen of the world's leading AI companies have signed up to a new round of voluntary commitments on AI safety including Google DeepMind , Anthropic , Meta and Chinese developer Zhipu AI. Here's what experts think of the commitments.  Internet turning to 'slop'. Content generated by AI is becoming so prevalent online that it's clogging up the internet. This "slop" as The Guardian calls it, is rarely intended to actually answer people's questions or help them to solve problems. Instead, it's designed largely to look like human-made content and pull in advertising revenue. Read what people make of internet slop here.  VC raises new startup fund. Accel, one of the biggest venture capital funds in the world, has raised a new $650m (€602m) fund to invest in early-stage startups. Learn more. Andrei Brasoveanu – Brasoveanu is a partner at Accel. Pushmeet Kohli – Kohli is VP of research at Google DeepMind. Charlotte Jee – Jee is a news editor at MIT Technology Review.  Get Hired UK – A fortnightly update dedicated to advice and insights on landing your next role and progressing in your career. Get Hired Europe – A newsletter focused on helping you land your next job. LinkedIn Insider UK – a biweekly newsletter keeping you inspired, informed and connected to the LinkedIn community. Finance Wrap-Up UK – The latest financial news and insights from LinkedIn News UK finance editor Manas Pratap Singh. Retail Wrap-Up UK – The latest retail news and insights from LinkedIn News UK retail editor Aaron Toumazou. |
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