The next step in the evolution of digital interaction

There have been many technological evolutions throughout our lifetime. I am from a generation who remembered the very first computers. When I was a kid we got our first computer at home when I was about 8 years old or so. Typing in a command in order to launch my game “Return To Castle Wolfenstein”.

We all know what happened after this and how we ended up here. But let’s zoom in a bit on specifically the ways we interacted with technology and digital.

As I alluded to in the beginning, in order to launch this game I had to type into DOS. Many MS-DOS games came with a README or a printed manual that explained the exact steps and file names, so you would know what to type in. Such as: cd \games\wolf3d. No idea how, but all I knew that this is what the game would start. Additionally I would only play with a keyboard, no mouse yet.

Fast forward to when operating systems like Windows and MacOS become standardized. Apple’s approach specifically made the mouse a central part of the user experience. It allowed you to point, click, and drag rather than typing commands, which was groundbreaking for its simplicity.

Interacting with digital went from a stick and arrows, to a keyboard, to a mouse. Next up: laptops, phones and more specifically, touch screen.

I loved my Blackberry! Now thinking back, their way of interacting with the phone was very computer like. The phone had a physical keyboard and a little “ball” that you could use to move things like a mouse would move a cursor on a computer. The “Windows Phone” was even more a computer as you operated it in almost similar ways in terms of menus etc, but it did have touch screen already.

The real breakthrough came when the iPhone launched in 2007, the start of a whole new way of interaction with digital and the way everyone is familiar with at the moment. It wasn’t only the fact that it was touchscreen, but more that the user interface was redesigned from the ground up, focused purely on touchscreens. Not, like Blackberry/Windows Phone, trying to put a computer “on a phone”.

Why am I telling you all this? Because the next step is here and it is not only about possible new devices but more “how” we interact with digital. How we will interact with digital in the next five years or so?

• Human language: just type how you normally message your friends and get what you want. No more scrolling, no more clicking.

• Voice: With AI getting so much better in understanding and conversations, will we see a return of at home smart speakers?

• Smart Glasses: A digital layer over our physical world, extending reality.

• AR / VR / MR: A new way of not only interacting, but experience via either augmented/ mixed reality or full virtual reality. VR has some use cases but I believe AR/MR will get wider adoption eventually.

• Thinking: Yes this one is still farfetched but Neuralink proofs you can control computers with just your mind. Check out their first test patient (3 in total now) and how it changed his life here (click).

What will this all mean for companies and brands trying to reach consumers? Brands always had to adapt to new ways of communication, interaction and therefore marketing changed every time.

We already seeing how brands are slowly but surely adapting to marketing inside of games and virtual worlds, as that is where their audiences are. But let’s open our minds and go beyond that. The following will be hypothetical of course but it is interesting to think about.

What if our main way of engaging with digital and therefore with a brand is via human language, conversational. As you know I am a strong believer that AI Agents will do a lot of our engagements for us, people will have their own (team of) personal AI Agents but brands will also have theirs.

If that is the case, that begs the question: how do you want your brand AI Agent to sound, behave, and talk? How do ensure that your Gucci AI Agent, sounds and feels different than the agent from Louis Vutton or Prada? Will this be a new role at brands and agencies?

I can see a world where there will be people, artists, who carefully design the ways of speaking of these agents. Installing a custom style, uniquely owned by the brand, into these agents and their conversations. Can you patent a conversational style?

The goal of me discussing this is to show that this is not only a visual change. Yes, we will have virtual ambassadors for every brand and collaboration between brands and AI Agents for sure. But what matters as much as how these characters will look, is how they will sound and therefore feel.

Additionally this raises the question what the role of websites will be in the future, will they even be needed? Or will you get a virtual environment that responds to your real time conversation with the AI Agent of your brand? Will that happen via your glasses, or via something else?

I think it is a fascinating opportunity for new ways of creativity and art. I am excited to see what type of people will go into these types of roles. Psychologist? Character designers? Game designers? Script writers? It is also an interesting, possible example of how AI will also create new jobs and not only make roles obsolete.

Would love to hear your thoughts!

Let’s talk about DeepSeek and what all the f’ing fuzz is about

Ok, there is no getting around it. We have to talk about DeepSeek.

For the people that don’t know: DeepSeek is a Chinese AI company founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng. It is the same company we laughed about a few weeks ago as their model V3 kept on stating it was ChatGPT. (as mentioned in my edition 6 newsletter)

Fast forward to January 20th as DeepSeek released their reasoning model called R1. A reasoning model is slightly different from regular LLMs. OpenAI’s reasoning model is O1 and they announced O3 recently.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are designed to generate human-like text by predicting the next word in a sequence, based on patterns learned from vast amounts of data. While they can produce coherent and contextually relevant responses, their ability to perform complex reasoning is limited. In contrast, reasoning models are specifically engineered to handle tasks that require logical deduction, problem-solving, and step-by-step analysis. They aim to mimic human-like thinking, analyzing situations, deducing logic, and making informed decisions.

Then sh*t hit the fan. Their R1 model was released and slowly but surely it caught fire, well better said: exploded onto the scene. As experts started to test and dig in they noticed that the quality and performance was matching OpenAI’s reasoning model O1 and GPT4. That alone is impressive but combined with the claim that DeepSeek spent under 6 million USD on compute power in order to train this model set the tech world on fire.

Why? Companies, such as OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and others, are spending billions on developing these models and now someone did it for under 6 million USD and is 45x times cheaper to run compared to the other major models. If that is not enough, the model is open source and beating Meta’s open source model in terms of performance as well.

The result? Panic on the stock market. Are all other AI companies over valued? Is the fear of investors, that they will never see positive economic returns, actually true? Won’t we need that much Nvidia chips after all? 1 Trillion, with a T, wiped out from the US stock market in a day. Nvidia recorded the largest market cap in stock market history as they lost about 580 billion in value.

In my humble opinion, this panic is not necessary at all…

DeepSeek’s discovery is big and exciting, but not a reason to now be bearish on American companies who spent so much on huge compute power. It is not that they will now try to give us the same sort of model performance with less resources.. On the contrary, the exciting part is that they will utilize these findings by DeepSeek to now get more from the compute they do have. This means we will hopefully see more massive breakthroughs coming from these labs soon, exciting f’ing times!

I kinda compared it to stopping with the development of computers as soon as there was a cheap computer that could have Word, Powerpoint and Outlook running… We would never.

Investors think that because of this breakthrough we won’t need so much compute power after all and started selling Nvidia stock. Let me quickly mention the “law of demand” as stated by Charles Davenant in 1699, something that still holds today: as the price of a good decreases, the quantity demanded increases. Meaning, the result of this will probably be MORE demand for compute, although it became cheaper to train actual AI models.

I do want to highlight that there might be other reasons why Nvidia is actually under pressure and there is a valid question to be asked if they can keep up this revenue multiplier for years to come. That has mostly to do with growing competition. Have a read why this investor beliefs you should short Nvidia, here (click).

As we are a few days into this sage already, other stories are also emerging about the DeepSeek R1 model:

• It highly censors stories that put China in a bad light. It for example won’t talk about the Tiananmen Square event.

• Just as with ChatGPT and other LLMs, if you don’t use a closed off environment, everything that you put into the model will be used for training data and is therefore accessible. (We all remember Samsung in 2023 right 🤣) The big difference with DeepSeek is that under Chinese law, all companies must cooperate with and assist with Chinese intelligence efforts, potentially exposing data held by Chinese companies to Chinese government surveillance. As reported by NBC.

• There are now claims by rival OpenAI who say that DeepSeek may have "inappropriately” taken data from its model to spin up its own AI chatbot. Kinda hypocritical as there are also still lots of claims that OpenAI also used other peoples/companies data inappropriately 😅.

Of course we have to take a step back and not forget that there is a huge war going on between China and the United States when it comes to AI development. AI, meaning especially AGI, is set to be the greatest technological revolution we have ever seen and therefore will be super powerful in the hands of the people that get to it first. Both countries are putting everything on the line in order to be the first ones.

So it all make sense that the White House yesterday said they are looking into DeepSeek for national security interest.

All together, it has been one crazy week in the world of technology. But don’t let all this chaos take away your excitement. Because that is in the end what this means, it means we will see a lot more cool sh*t sooner than we might thought as this impressive technology got cheaper a lot faster than expected. (if it is actually true what they claim 😉).

I’ll end this with a quote by our very own Wesley Ter Haar, who said it well:

Here are some of the latest announcements and other things that I found interesting this week (underscore means clickable!):

• My favorite recent podcast episode is this one between Marc Andreessen and Lex Fridman. Marc Andreessen is an entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer known for co-creating the first widely used web browser, Mosaic, founding Netscape, and co-founding the influential venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. The conversation discussed big topics and Andreessen connects many matters to historical events and philosophies, which I really enjoyed.

• I assume everyone has seen OpenAI’s launch of their AI Agents called Operator? Here is a video of it in action, booking a flight.

• In the land of AI Agent influencers, aixbt has been continuing insane growth. In less than three months, the agent got 453K followers and counting, has an incredibly high user retention rate with over 100K followers enabling tweet notifications, and now offers a tiered-access to its source data, positioning it as the Bloomberg Terminal of crypto.

• Ending with my fav quote of this week by :

  

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^{Who am I and why you should be here:}

^{Over the years, I’ve navigated industries like advertising, music, sports, and gaming, always chasing what’s next and figuring out how to make it work for brands, businesses, and myself. From strategizing for global companies to experimenting with the latest tech, I’ve been on a constant journey of learning and sharing.}

^{This newsletter is where I’ll bring all of that together—my raw thoughts, ideas, and emotions about AI, blockchain, gaming, Gen Z & Alpha, and life in general. No perfection, just me being as real as it gets.}

^{Every week (or whenever inspiration hits), I’ll share what’s on my mind: whether it’s deep dives into tech, rants about the state of the world, or random experiments that I got myself into. The goal? To keep it valuable, human, and worth your time.}