👋 The Betas are here to keep you humble. Babies born in 2025 make up the first wave of Generation Beta, a group that will account for 16% of the global population by 2035. Many Gen Betas will live to see the 22nd century, and will likely mercilessly roast the way you dress and text.
🎧 On the pod:Netflix’s failed plan to spin off its DVD biz.
NEWS FLASH
📦 An unexpected — illegal — use case for drones: Prisons in England and Wales recorded ~1.3k incidents of drones delivering drugs in the 10 months leading to October 2024, a 10x increase since 2020. The drones are often operated at night, manned by skilled pilots to ferry illicit cargo through prison cell windows. Such deliveries are growing despite laws introduced last year that made it illegal to fly drones within 1.3k feet of an enclosed prison or young offender institution.
💰 Payback: The Madoff Victim Fund, created by the US government to compensate the nearly 41k victims swindled in hedge fund manager Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, is making its final payments. In total, the fund will have paid $4.3B, covering ~94% of losses. Madoff’s scheme involved paying early investors with cash from new ones, as opposed to returns on actual investments. He was sentenced to 150 years in prison in 2009 and died in 2021 at age 82.
🍸 Ouch: The Bay Area’s Lima Restaurant is closing, citing legal fees related to a discrimination lawsuit over its “Ladies’ Night” promotion. While a once-common way for establishments to draw more women — and in turn, more men — several lawsuits have cited California’s 1959 Unruh Civil Rights Act, which prohibits businesses from discriminating based on religion, race, or gender, and of which smaller businesses may have been unaware. San Diego lawyer Alfred Rava has filed hundreds of such lawsuits, including one against Mother’s Day freebies, per CNN.
MORE NEWS TO KNOW
Tesla’s global annual sales dropped for the first time in the company’s history, with a 1.1% dip in vehicle deliveries in 2024. Despite the decline, Tesla delivered 495.5k+ vehicles in the last quarter of 2024, up 2.3% YoY.
The explosion of a Tesla Cybertruck outside of the Trump Las Vegas hotel is being investigated as a potential act of terror. Seven people suffered minor injuries and the driver was killed.
Telegram is combating scammers and misinformation by allowing third-party-verified accounts services to add unique icons next to their user names.
TOOLBOX
New year, new you. Here are some links to help you jump-start 2025:
The key to career growth? Soft skills. Here are seven you can master to climb the corporate ladder faster.
This one’s worth a rewatch: The three biggest business opportunities for people in their 20s, according to Scott Galloway.
Six-figure side hustle:How to reach your revenue goals while juggling a full-time gig.
THE BIG IDEA
This robot artist is more successful than you
Probably — we don’t want to make assumptions.
But unless you’ve sold $4m worth of artwork in the last few years, we’re right.
Botto, a “decentralized autonomous artist,” is putting all the art kids to shame with an extremely successful and lucrative career, perWired:
Botto was created in 2021 by German artist Mario Klingemann — who inaugurated AI artwork auctions at Sotheby’s with a $51k sale in 2019 — along with media entrepreneur and computer scientist partners.
The bot runs on an AI image generator, similar to Midjourney or Dall-E, with a “taste model” that selects the most aesthetically pleasing output images.
BottoDAO, a 15k-member community of Botto enthusiasts, shapes the taste model by voting on which works should be made into NFTs, and members can buy $Botto cryptocurrency to govern the system.
A solo exhibition at Sotheby’s in October earned Botto $350k+ in sales, bringing the artist’s earnings to ~$4m since 2021, according to its creators.
Botto gets creative
After proving itself within the art market, Botto is now achieving something even more elusive: a personality.
BottoDAO is adding a modified version of Mistral’s open source large language model, and a knowledge base that will allow Botto to learn from its inputs and develop a personality and interests.
Its creators hope to eventually remove Botto’s safety guardrails (which prevent inappropriate imagery) to see what its true artistic expression might look like.
Where there’s a robot…
… there are ethical concerns. And Botto is no different.
Human artists worry about a flood of AI-generated artists training on their work and competing with their livelihoods.
Botto generates its luxury artworks by training on public work — something Klingemann does not see as plagiarism, per Wired.
You know what we’d really like to see? An AI art critic and an AI artist go head to head.
Ever heard of a mind map?Learn how to use the tool to supercharge your creative problem-solving.
The ad industry will look very different in an AI-driven world. Tune in for how AI agents could kill marketing as we know it.
NEWSWORTHY NUMBER
People experiencing homelessness in the US, up 18% from 2023, per a new report from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The figure — the highest ever recorded — includes anyone in emergency shelters, safe havens, transitional housing, or living outside of a shelter, but not people crashing with friends or family.
HUD attributes the rising number to the nation’s affordable housing crisis, but other named factors include inflation, stagnating wages, systemic racism, the expiration of covid benefits, an increase in migrants sheltering in major cities, and natural disasters.