💼 AI Jobs | 📄 Prompt Guides | 🧰AI Tool Kits | 🚀 AI Startups

Welcome Big Brainers!

We’re back with another deep dive edition of Big Brain. As a reminder, in these editions we go wayyyy deeper than we do on the other editions.

Our goal is to create the content you need to truly 10x your career with the power of AI.

In previous editions, we’ve talked a lot about how to use AI to accelerate in your current job.

Today, we’re flipping the script, and diving deep into how you can spot and join an emerging AI startup.

Here’s what we have on the agenda for today:

• 🔥 Hot AI Startup: Midjourney

• 📄 AI Career Deep Dive: How to Find the Next AI Rocket Ship

•  💼 5 Exclusive AI jobs

• 💰 Weekly AI fundraising wrap up

🎁 AI Giveaway

We’re giving away the ‘Ultimate AI package’…

1 year of ChatGPT + 1 year of Midjourney + $100

To enter, share Big Brain with the link below.

1 referral = 1 entry:
https://www.bigbraindaily.com/subscribe?ref=PLACEHOLDER

🔥 HOT AI STARTUP: Midjourney

Overview

Rising from the tech-rich streets of SF and launching into the spotlight in 2022, Midjourney isn't just another name on the AI block.

Born from the imaginative minds at Midjourney, Inc., their art tool takes a deep dive into the world of generative AI.

Drawing comparisons to heavyweights like OpenAI's DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, this platform, championed by David Holz (yes, the Leap Motion co-founder), has made quite the entrance.

What They Do

Think of Midjourney as your AI artist pal that turns your words into visual masterpieces. Through its advanced algorithms, this tool seamlessly translates natural language prompts into captivating visuals.

And here's the twist: users tap into its genius via Discord bot commands. Blend styles, create vibrant environments—your words, their canvas.

That’s right, they don’t even have a standalone app right now!

Problem They Are Solving

Traditional art methods? Time-consuming and skill-bound. Midjourney? A game changer. Their goal is to amplify human creativity, giving users the reins to craft dazzling AI art with just a few keystrokes.

The power to generate unique, high-definition visuals is now as simple as typing a sentence.

Take me for instance. I’ve always been a strong writer, but I am limited in my design abilities. With Midjourney, I am now able to craft beautiful images using written words. (We use them to create many of the visuals for Big Brain)

In other words, it took one of my strengths (writing) and allowed me to create a new strength (visual design).

Why the Company is Exciting

Democratizing Art: With just a Discord account, anyone's an artist. It's AI art, no fine arts degree required.

Their lowest paid tier starts at just $10/month. For context, having a graphic designer create a a few images for you can easily cost $100+.

Mastery of Detail: While others blend, Midjourney crafts. The richness in every visual? Unparalleled.

They’ve also rolled out a ton of new features over the past few months like: Upscale, Remix, Zoom in/out, and more.

Self-funded Phenom: They have no big backers, yet they're rolling with industry giants like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion.

DALL-E, was launched by OpenAI which has already raised $10 billion+.

Stable Diffusion, was launched by Stability AI, which has already raised $100 million+.

Talk about punching above their weight!

Open Roles

Given Midjourney’s scrappy roots, it should come as no surprise that they don’t even have an official careers page!

However, on their website they do list an email that candidates can reach out to: [email protected]

They specifically are looking for: AI researchers, AI engineers (JAX focus), Data engineers, Fullstack developers, Frontend developers, and Cloud infra engineers.

So if you fit any of these descriptions, be sure to reach out and join the hottest AI image startup in the game.

📄 AI CAREER DEEP DIVE: How to Find the Next AI Rocket Ship

There’s a famous saying by legendary Silicon Valley exec Sheryl Sandberg:

“If you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat. Just get on.”

This was in reference to why she joined Google as an early employee. At the time, Google met none of her job criteria.

However, then CEO Eric Schmidt, looked her in the face and said “don’t be an idiot, get on a rocket ship.”

Now obviously, this advice makes a lot of sense. And in hindsight it’s easy to say that joining Google was an obvious decision.

But the reality is that the decision wasn’t obvious at the time. If it was, then everybody would have joined Google (or companies like Facebook) in the early days.

The purpose of today’s Career deep dive, is to give tactical advice into how to find the next rocket ship in the AI space.

When we say rocket ships, we are referring to AI companies that are poised to sustain and become one of THE key players in the space for decades to come.

Step 1) Think from first principles

It’s easy to get caught up in the headlines and hype, especially in a moment like this one where AI is hot.

However, it’s important to think from a long term perspective.

In my opinion, there are two key things you should consider before joining an AI startup:

i) Understand the problem the company is solving for.

Is it something that people actually need in their lives or is it something that is just nice to have?

This is the best indicator for a business’ long term prospects. Flashy ideas can buy you some time, but eventually you need to become profitable.

This means having loyal customers who are willing to spend lots of $ for your offering.

When it’s easy to raise capital, a lot of startups tend to focus on flashy ideas, but then die once the funding dries up.

ii) Understand how many people have this problem (TAM).

Just having a product that solves a pain point isn’t enough. There also has to be A LOT of people that share this problem.

There’s tons of great AI plugins that have launched in the past year, however, their total market is quite small.

You need to find a company that offers something that can eventually be leveraged by billions of people.

Let’s take an example of a company that solves for both: Nvidia.

Nvidia solves a very compelling problem: Providing chips for companies that need them to run their AI applications.

This is a very strong offering because without it, these companies literally cannot operate.

They are also going after a huge TAM. In the future, every software company will need chips to handle the computation for their apps.

This means that their TAM is in the trillions of $.

Step 2) Study AI research and Emerging trends

Now that you know how to think from first principles, you now need to start to look into the future.

The problem with focusing on the present, is that it is where the majority of people concentrate their time and energy.

In other words, companies/investors have already found the current key problems and captured the majority of the value from the space.

Instead, you need to understand where the puck is going, and skate towards there.

This part is extremely challenging, because it requires you to see the need before it has fully materialized.

Take OpenAI for example. The company was founded in 2015, but didn’t truly breakout until it released ChatGPT in November of 2022.

That’s 7 years of patience before striking gold.

Sam Altman was able to find that success because he understood that advanced LLMs would eventually be needed to truly take AI mainstream.

They then spent those years developing their AI models, before they had one that was high quality enough for the masses (GPT-4).

Ask yourself, which emerging trends aren’t as relevant today that could be massive in 4-5 years.

Step 3) Find emerging startups

Once you have a good read on where the space is going and how to evaluate a company’s offering, the next step is to find the leading AI startup candidates.

It’s not always easy to find them, but there are a few high signal places you can go:

• Y-Combinator batches: YC is the top startup accelerator in the world. Many of the biggest tech unicorns were started here.
  
  A good idea is to check out the YC startup directory. This directory lists all of the companies that have gone through the accelerator. You can even filter with the AI tag on.

  

• Look at recent AI fundraising rounds: While funding rounds aren’t always the strongest signal (in fact, sometimes they can be an anti-signal), it’s still a place to start.
  
  If an AI startup has raised a lot of funding that means venture capitalists probably see the potential for it to break out in the future.
  
  You can check out the latest AI funding rounds on places like Crunchbase.

• Look at app usage data: If you’re interested in joining a consumer-facing AI startup, there are a lot of signals you can garner from publicly available data.
  
  Tools like data.ai show data on app store downloads and usage. For instance, here’s one on ChatGPT.
  
  For web, you can use a tool like SimilarWeb, to see how much traffic web-based AI tools and plugins are getting.
  
  If you see an app starting to gain traction, it may be worth looking into them further.

Step 4) Understand your skill set

It’s not enough to just find the hottest AI startups, you also need to make sure that your skills and experience are the right fit.

Part of the key to making out well with startups, is ensuring that you can last through the inevitable turbulence that will arise.

If you are a salesperson, then you should make sure you are joining an Enterprise-facing AI startup.

If you are a designer, then you should join an AI startup with a consumer-facing app. Or where UX/interface plays a defining role in differentiation. (AirBnB is a great example since it was founded by 3 designers)

Conclusion

I know that joining an AI startup is not everyone’s cup of tea. And I want to emphasize, that this is not the only way to profit from the AI boom.

Most people will succeed by up-leveling in their existing job or finding ways to make side income with AI tools.

However, for those of you that are looking to find the next rocket ship, I hope you found today’s guide compelling.

I will try my best to always cover the latest AI research and funding rounds. And hopefully some of you, just might find the next big thing as a result!

💼 Exclusive AI Jobs

• US Congressional Lead, Global Affairs @ OpenAI

• Analyst, Trust & Safety @ Anthropic

• Senior Product Manager - AI/Infra @ EvenUp

• LLM Expert - Coding Domain Experience (AU) @ Appen

• AI/Computer Vision Engineer @ FullStack Labs

💰AI Fundraising Wrap Up

• Poolside AI: Raised a $126M seed round to allow people to write code using natural language.
  
  Their website is comically bare bones. However, their mission is noble. It’s also founded by the former CTO of Github, Jason Warner.

• Elemental Cognition: A provider of breakthrough AI technology, just closed a $60 billion Series B,.
  
  Participants included Bridgewater Associates, Breyer Capital, AME Cloud Ventures, and others.

• Cohere: Toronto-based AI startup Cohere, which develops large-language models similar to OpenAI's, has engaged JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to help raise a new round of funding.
  
  This comes just a few months after the company raised $270 million in June from investors including Oracle and Nvidia, reaching a valuation of $2.2 billion.