Aujourd'hui, on lance quelque chose d'inédit pour la communauté tech sénégalaise.
State of Dev Sénégal : 1ère Édition 🇸🇳
La première grande enquête annuelle dédiée aux développeurs du Sénégal.
Participe et partage autour de toi :
🔗 https://t.co/6yJ3wpA67k
#StateOfDevSN
I don’t think people truly understand what’s about to happen with 𝕏 Money.
This is Elon going back to his roots - back to https://t.co/xPHLRiKvNk - and building what he always wanted in the first place: one place that runs your entire financial life.
When he rebranded Twitter to 𝕏 in 2023, he said straight up that we’re adding the ability to conduct your entire financial world. He even said you may not even need a traditional bank account.
Most people brushed that off. And now it’s becoming real.
𝕏 Money has already been live in closed beta internally within the company. A limited external beta is expected soon, and they’ve already secured money transmitter licenses in over 40 states plus DC. 𝕏 Payments is registered with FinCEN. Visa is officially partnered. You’ll be able to fund your wallet instantly, send peer-to-peer payments, move money to your bank, and eventually use a debit card.
And I think this is just the beginning.
This will probably start as a simple wallet where you can send money as easily as sending a DM. With this technology, you can pay creators, pay subscriptions, pay whatever bills, shop inside the app, get paid inside the app, and much more.
Then, there will be high-yield savings, you can invest, you can get loans, have money market accounts, maybe even treasury access, cool smart cashtags that let you see live stock prices in your timeline and execute trades seamlessly, crypto integration, potentially full asset management… the list goes on and on… Elon literally said this is meant to be the central source of ALL monetary transactions.
Bro… think about that for a sec.
Your 𝕏 profile becomes your financial identity.
Everyone you follow is already there. Everyone you interact with is already there. That social graph becomes your distribution engine. Like, you won’t need a separate banking app, no need for a separate investing app, no need for a separate payment app… this all lives where you already spend your time. Right here on 𝕏.
Look at WeChat in China, which Elon always alluded to. Payments, messaging, shopping, investing - all integrated in one app. It handles $ trillions in volume and became deeply embedded in everyone’s daily life. Now 𝕏 is building the Western version of that, but with a more global reach, and xAI’s AI layered on top of all this.
Before you call me crazy, you have to understand how big this opportunity is.
Digital payments globally are measured in the tens of $ trillions of dollars annually. Even just capturing a small slice of that across hundreds of millions, and eventually a billion, users can change everything. 𝕏 already has the audience. That lowers customer acquisition costs significantly. Add fintech revenue on top of ads, plus float, plus lending, plus investing tools, and we’re talking about a completely different valuation profile.
Now, $44B for this company looks like the bargain of the decade… this was one of the main reasons I invested in 𝕏.
And if they execute the way they’ve executed at Tesla and SpaceX, this could truly fundamentally redefine how people handle $ .
Most people today still see 𝕏 as just a social media app. I see it as the foundation of a financial system layered on top of a global network. Ultimately becoming the “everything” app.
And this I believe is a once-in-a-generation opportunity.
Elon is calling this a game-changer.
I believe him.
Starlink Mobile’s next-gen satellites will deliver 5G speeds from space with 100x the data density of the current V1 generation satellites
V2 satellites will seamlessly enable streaming, internet browsing, high-speed apps and voice calls, just like being connected to a terrestrial network → https://t.co/CV6MjKASx7
“The most important thing that’s going to happen in the world in the next 3-4 year is data centers in space” - @GavinSBaker
We have the first Nvidia H100 operating in space at @starcloud_ 🚀
my weekend project to learn about bluetooth mesh networks, relays and store and forward models, message encryption models, and a few other things.
bitchat: bluetooth mesh chat...IRC vibes.
TestFlight: https://t.co/P5zRRX0TB3
GitHub: https://t.co/Yphb3Izm0P
wow Orb Mini just went super viral
i’ve gotten many questions about this new device and World in general since we launched in USA last week, so i wrote a bit about the project to catch you up:
(links in brackets in the next post)
1. the problem with the internet today
ai is awesome. but one of the challenges is that when everything can be faked, we don’t know who and what to trust on the internet. this started slowly, but we all feel it more and more every day.
on social media it's now impossible to know if something is a real opinion held by many or just someone manipulating with bot farms, games are no longer fun with ai cheaters, catfishing got even more dangerous in dating apps, concert tickets go to scalper bots instead of fans, and financial scams are getting out of control. i talked more about this in a recent podcast [1] and cnn interview [2]
we think the internet needs a new kind of blue checkmark; one that tells you wether an account belongs to a real and unique human, and nothing more.
we call this anonymous proof of human.
2. solving proof of human with the Orb
we (and many others) have tried for many years to solve proof of human in many ways; captchas, email/phone, gov ids, fancy math models, paying $8/mo, etc but none of them are actually ai safe. they are also not anonymous or inclusive.
so we built the orb. it’s basically a fancy camera that's able to tell wether you’re a real and unique human. to do this it looks at your face with a bunch of sensors, and verifies you locally with ai models running on it’s nvidia jetson. we just launched a new orb generation, check it out in [3]
the whole process takes like 30 seconds, and you only need to do it every few years - sort of like getting a drivers license. once the orb is done, it sends your data to your smartphone and deletes it from the orb. check out recent CNBC report on this in [4] and a full verification demo in [5]
3. growth and adoption
so far 26 million people have joined the network and 12.5 million have verified at an orb - including 1 in 3 adults in Lisbon and Buenos Aires!
we just launched USA and hope to grow a lot over the next 18 months with more than 7,500 orbs coming to the country
as the network has grown, companies have started integrating it. for example we recently announced Tinder [6], Visa [7], and Razer [8]. we also have a mini app platform which has been used almost 1 billion times
if the project succeeds we think most sites, apps, and even governments will use this open infrastructure
4. orb mini: going small to go big
we think the new orb will scale the network to hundreds of millions of people. but the goal is to be accessible to billions, so we're already thinking about what's next.
we've been working on shrinking the orb to something that can fit in your pocket and costs 10x less, without compromising security or privacy.
we call it orb mini, and it's coming next year. we shared more details [9] and a nice teaser video for it [10] last week.
the cool thing about it is we're building it as an open source module based on smartphone architecture - so other companies will be able to integrate it into their devices!
5. the importance of anonymity
while proof of human is essential, it would be a big mistake to sacrifice privacy in it’s name. eg if every website required you to give up and store you legal identity that would be incredibly problematic (and can be faked with ai anyway). still that's the route many are trying.
in many ways, freedom in the world today comes from anonymity online, so from day one we designed World to let you be anonymous. we do this in many ways, i'll highlight four:
first, your important data (like orb images) is stored locally on your personal smartphone. not on the orb and not on our server. you can back it up (encrypted) to services like icloud, and you can delete it any time. neither we or the apps that you use with like Tinder have ever access to it.
second, when you verify your world id at an orb, you are anonymized using anoymized multi-party computation. this is cutting edge cryptography, i recommend watching [11] and reading [12] to learn more about it.
third, when you use your world id on an app, you are anonymized using zero-knowledge proofs. you can learn more about them in [13].
and fourth, the entire system is open source so you can verify instead of trusting. this includes the orb hardware, firmware, ai models, cryptographic protocol, and developer sdk. you can check out the repo and external audits in [14]
in summary
World is a network of real humans. it's not just private, but likely one of the most private systems you've ever used. it's growing super fast, it just launched in USA, and we think every site and app will use it's anonymous proof of human soon.
if you want to learn more about World, i can't recommend last week's keynote enough [15]
JULIAN ASSANGE IS FREE
Julian Assange is free. He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1901 days there. He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stansted airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the UK.
This is the result of a global campaign that spanned grass-roots organisers, press freedom campaigners, legislators and leaders from across the political spectrum, all the way to the United Nations. This created the space for a long period of negotiations with the US Department of Justice, leading to a deal that has not yet been formally finalised. We will provide more information as soon as possible.
After more than five years in a 2x3 metre cell, isolated 23 hours a day, he will soon reunite with his wife Stella Assange, and their children, who have only known their father from behind bars.
WikiLeaks published groundbreaking stories of government corruption and human rights abuses, holding the powerful accountable for their actions. As editor-in-chief, Julian paid severely for these principles, and for the people's right to know.
As he returns to Australia, we thank all who stood by us, fought for us, and remained utterly committed in the fight for his freedom.
Julian's freedom is our freedom.
[More details to follow]
No one is talking about this major LLM from China.
2 days ago, SenseTime launched SenseNova 5.0, which according to the report (translated from Chinese):
- Beats GPT-4T on nearly all benchmarks
- Has a 200k context window
- Is trained on more than 10TB tokens
- Has major advancements in knowledge, mathematics, reasoning, and coding capabilities
Crazy how much is happening in the world of AI in China that's going completely under the radar.