Unicorns 🦄 RIP 🪦

 Unicorns are dropping dead like flies.  Approximately 3,200 privately backed companies have disappeared in 2023.  The NYT takes a close look 👀 at the collapse of these once high flyers - no pun intended!

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/07/technology/tech-startups-collapse.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Happy 30th Anniversary Bruni PR

Bruni PR was founded in November 1993 in a penthouse office at 10 E. 23rd, just a block from the Flatiron Building. Those were heady days as Silicon Alley was just taking form.  We dedicated ourselves to this emerging industry and are still in the game - 3 decades later ! 

We’ve had big clients too -  Mellon Financial , Wayfair , Quadrant Biosciences, Bradford Space and others - but have always focused on the “next big thing” .  Today it’s AI & Fintech. 

Our core business has been Media Relations, a specialized area that has seen many changes.  Back in ‘93 we were still sending press releases via fac.  Email was just getting traction. 

Today we reach reporters via X (Twitter) , Facebook and especially LinkedIn.  Back then press lunches were common, but today it’s the Zoom call !

Avride : look 👀 out Waymo & Cruise

 The international division of the autonomous vehicle and delivery robot developer Yandex Self-Driving Group has rebranded as Avride, according to the company’s new website, unveiled on August 4.

The rebranding comes as part of the company’s corporate restructuring, and the new brand is one of the four international businesses to be spun-off from Yandex. 

Avride positions itself as a pioneer of autonomous transportation. The company’s driverless technology has already covered over 10mn miles (16mn km) on public roads and its delivery robots have made over 200,000 deliveries from shops and restaurants to date, according to the site.

As bne IntelliNews reported, Yandex’s Dutch parent company is in the process of divesting a number of its core assets, including all Russia-based assets, with the plan being to retain the international divisions of self-driving cars, cloud computing, data labelling and education technology, enabling these to develop "independently from Russia." 

Apple Vision Pro

 Back in the early’90s I met Jaron Lanier, who funded VPL the first Virtual Reality startup.  His dream of a VR world 🌎 is now reality .  Make no mistake, the new Apple headset is like the car, computer or even the wheel 🛞 in terms of innovation. 

PR & AI

Research from OpenAI and the University of Pennsylvania argued that 80 percent of the US workforce could have at least 10 percent of their tasks affected by the introduction of GPTs, the series of popular large language models made by OpenAI. They also found that around 19 percent of workers will see at least 50 percent of their tasks impacted. GPT exposure is greater for higher-income jobs, they wrote in the study, but spans across almost all industries.

PR was among the industries that will be most affected or “influenced”.

I’ve been experimenting with ChatGPT in writing media pitch letters.  It’s a game changer.  In a few seconds, it composes a pitch letter that normally takes hours to write ✍🏻, edit and redraft.

What surprised me was how ChatGPT focuses on the strengths of the company “story” .  The end results were pitch letters that mirrored my own pitches but actually improved upon them !  

ChatGPT & God

 I asked ChatGPT the following question:

“Is Artificial Intelligence a God?”

Here’s how it answered:

“No, AI (artificial intelligence) is not a god. AI refers to the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to perform tasks that would normally require human intelligence to complete. While AI has advanced significantly in recent years and can perform many tasks more efficiently than humans, it is still a tool created by humans and is not capable of possessing supernatural abilities or transcending the limits of its programming. Therefore, it does not have the qualities or characteristics that are typically attributed to a god.”