• AI is advancing so fast it’s scary…

  • This autonomous cargo ship is ready for prime time…

  • A Doorway on Mars?

Dear Reader,

What a terrible day in the markets yesterday. Yesterday, the Nasdaq fell nearly 5% over the course of the day. The S&P fell over 3.5%.

These kinds of days are painful to experience. And they feel like they build on one another. The S&P 500 is nearing the 30% pullback levels that we saw back in March of 2020.

We’ve been seeing a large deleveraging unfold by banks, institutional funds, and hedge funds. This is the result of keeping interest rates at near-zero levels to “goose” the system. It stimulates a lot of margin buying, which builds up debt in the system that eventually needs to be unwound.

It can be hard to remain objective when we see this kind of market action. One way I like to put things in context is to view them through different timeframes.

Many institutional funds and hedge funds view their performance on a quarter-by-quarter basis. In a market downturn, they are likely to close out positions quickly, unwind any debt, deleverage, take the bad quarter, and then reload for the next quarter to pile back in. After all, if they don’t allocate capital, they have to give it back… and that means no bonuses.

As individual investors, we tend to think differently. Most of us are investing and holding for long-term capital gains, which means that our timeframe usually isn’t quarter to quarter, but well beyond a year. 

And this is precisely why I held my Crypto Placements Summit last night. Thank you to everyone who turned out to join me.

Private companies are one of the few safe ports when the market is pulling back. They aren’t subject to the shifting market conditions. They don’t really care about Federal Reserve-induced volatility, because they are investing and building for the long term. 

As long as they build products and services that the market wants, their valuations will rise. Yet many investors don’t know how to take advantage of this asset class. It’s only recently that non-accredited investors have been able to gain exposure to these kinds of investments.

That’s why my event last night was so critical for my readers.

I know how hard it is out there in the public markets, which is why I want to help guide my subscribers to investments that aren’t subject to the volatility and benefit from a radically different timeframe compared to the fast Wall Street money. We’ll navigate the private markets together.

Even better, private investments in the digital asset space are absolutely on fire right now. Simply put, these companies will form the backbone of Web 3.0 – the next generation of the internet.

Some of these companies will be the Amazons, Googles, and PayPals of tomorrow. It’s akin to investing in Web 2.0 companies back in the mid-90s.

And I have identified two private “crypto placements” that will open their doors to investors in the next few weeks. In fact, the first deal will go live Friday (tomorrow) evening.

These are the types of deals I invest in personally in my own private portfolio, and now I can finally show Brownstone Research readers how to do the same.

So for anyone interested in learning more about the world of private investing and how it can grow your wealth in these volatile times, I encourage you to check out the replay of the Crypto Placements Summit as soon as possible. You can find it right here.

And there is one nuance we need to be aware of: Private investments always have a “hard cap,” or a limit as to how much capital they will raise in every venture round. That means there’s only so much to go around, and these deals will fill up fast… the best of which fill up in a matter of hours.

So please don’t delay. Anyone who wants to secure an allocation to the best private investments on my radar right now should be ready to act right away.

DeepMind is speeding toward artificial general intelligence (AGI)…

Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) division DeepMind just came out with another incredible development. It seems like these breakthroughs are coming nearly every month now.

This month DeepMind released a “generalist agent” for the very first time. It’s called Gato. And Gato is one of the world’s first multi-modal, multi-tasking AIs.

Here’s what that means…

We have talked about all kinds of different AIs in The Bleeding Edge. The one thing they all had in common is that they are each optimized for a single task.

For example, DeepMind’s AlphaFold predicts the folding of proteins. Meanwhile, Miso Robotics’ Flippy turns burgers on the grill. And, of course, there are many other AIs trained to master a specific task.

What sets Gato apart is that it mastered many different tasks. In fact, DeepMind trained the AI to do 600 different things.

Here’s a look at just a few of them:

Gato in Action

Source: DeepMind

Here we can see a sample of what Gato can do. It can operate a robotic arm designed to pick, sort, and categorize objects. It can manipulate and organize building blocks. It can notate the objects it “sees” in an image or video. It can play different video games.

Gato is also skilled in natural language processing. It can understand human language and even engage in conversations.

So Gato has learned to do many, if not all, of the tasks that the AIs we have discussed before can do. That’s remarkable. If we think about it – even humans might struggle to be good at 600 separate things. 

And get this… On a relatively small training set, Gato was able to achieve an expert level score on 450 out of the 600 tasks that it learned.

And what’s so exciting is that the number of tasks is arbitrary. If Gato can learn 600 tasks, it’s just a matter of scaling the training for it to master 60,000 tasks.

What we are looking at is the natural evolution of AI. We are moving from single-task AIs to more general, multi-tasking AIs that can do all kinds of things. This is the next logical step toward artificial general intelligence (AGI).

As a reminder, AGI is when an AI is indistinguishable from a human and is empowered with “superhuman” capabilities. It can think, understand, learn, and apply its knowledge to solve any problem – just as we humans do – but in a fraction of the time and on any subject matter at all.

This latest development from DeepMind signals that we are rapidly moving towards that eventuality. It’s a little bit frightening to think about how fast AI is advancing.

The implications are profound. Everything changes when we have AGI. We can’t even predict what the world looks like with AIs that can think and act independently.

How Gato develops over the next 12 months will be very telling. This is something I’ll be tracking very closely.

And I’ll do my best to keep readers informed and ready for what’s to come.

Autonomous cargo shipping is coming…

We have talked about some big developments around self-driving cars this year. Today we’ve got a major breakthrough on the autonomous shipping front.

A company called Orca AI just announced that its autonomous cargo ship completed a 491-mile, 40-hour-long journey without human intervention.

That’s quite impressive, especially when we consider the sheer size of this ship… It’s a 750-gross-ton vessel.

Here’s a visual:

Orca AI’s Cargo Ship

Source: Orca AI

This ship dwarfs the ship behind it in size. Yet there’s no captain at the wheel.

And what’s most significant is that the ship set sail out of Tokyo Bay. This is one of the busiest ports in the world, largely because it serves Tokyo’s 35 million residents.

Orca AI reports that its autonomous navigation system encountered 107 object-avoidance scenarios on this voyage. These were instances where the ship had to maneuver itself to avoid colliding with something in the water.

And it managed to do this without human involvement. That’s quite the feat.

What’s exciting here is that navigating the ports is by far the most challenging part of an autonomous voyage. Once the ship is on the open ocean, there are relatively few problems that can come up… it’s mostly smooth sailing on an open sea.

So if Orca AI’s tech is capable of maneuvering about Tokyo Bay, we can be sure that autonomous shipping is ready for prime time. That’s exciting, especially in light of the ongoing labor shortages that have caused ports around the world to back up.

To me, it’s not much of a leap to imagine a world in which cranes autonomously load and unload cargo ships, and the ships sail themselves without any human involvement. That’s a world in which moving cargo from one port to another is as easy as a few clicks of a button.

Is there a secret door on Mars?…

We’ll wrap up today with a fun topic, a recent discovery in our solar system.

Longtime readers may remember when NASA launched its Perseverance rover on Mars. Perseverance is a high-tech rover loaded with all kinds of sensors and tools. Its job is to explore the Red Planet and look for water and potentially signs of past or present life.

In light of the Perseverance mission, many of us might have forgotten about the older rover that’s been roaming the surface of Mars for about a decade now. That’s the Curiosity rover. It’s not nearly as high-tech. And it moves much slower than Perseverance.

However, Curiosity is still hard at work. The rover just sent back an incredible picture that’s got the scientific community buzzing.

Check it out:

Image From Curiosity

Source: NASA

This is amazing. We can clearly see what looks like a doorway on the right-hand side of this image. This looks a lot like something we might see around the pyramids out in the desert of Egypt.

Of course, this begs the question – did an intelligent life form make this? Is it actually a door to something inside the rock? We could let our imaginations run for hours thinking about this.

But it turns out the “door” is no more than 11×17 inches in size. That’s no bigger than a small window. And that means there are geological explanations behind how this fracture could have formed.

Hopefully, Curiosity will be able to reposition for an even better perspective on this formation.

I’m curious to hear what readers think about this. Is it silly to read anything more into this photograph that Curiosity sent back? Or could it be that there’s something more to the story? Let me know your thoughts right here.

Of course, the bigger takeaway here is that we stand on the precipice of a new age for space exploration. Thanks to modern technology, we are going to learn more about our universe in the next 10 years than we could possibly imagine today.

And if Elon Musk has his way at SpaceX, we’ll see a Starship land on Mars within the next few years, loaded with supplies necessary to sustain an outpost on the planet. This is just the beginning.

Despite the chaos that we’ve seen in the first half of this year, we still have so much to look forward to.

Regards,

Jeff Brown
Editor, The Bleeding Edge

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