The Story Behind DeepSeek, Bad Bunny Celebrates Puerto Rico and the Uneasy Driverless Car Revolution

Dear Fellow Trend Curator,

It’s a tragic morning here in DC as news of a fatal plane crash is just surfacing. I was driving past DCA airport just 30 minutes before this, so the story feels a bit more personal for me right now. Earlier this week, I was speaking at an AI Symposium hosted by NASA just up the road at their Greenbelt, Maryland location and one of the topics was aviation and how AI might help make both flying and tasks on the ground such as air traffic control safer for all of us. It turned out to be a timely conversation.

On a non-tragedy related front—this week’s stories range from taking a deeper look at the stories behind the story of DeepSeek AI, to a review of how chatbot enabled retail sales might offer a surprising boost in customer loyalty. We will also look at the backlash against driverless cars and a fascinating example of celebrating your heritage from musician Bad Bunny’s latest new tour.

Enjoy and stay curious!

The Stories Within the Story About Why DeepSeek AI Is Such a Big Deal

The big AI news of the week was Chinese startup DeepSeek releasing their AI model which seemingly offers similar functionality to ChatGPT. The news has apparently shocked the tech community “popping the US Big Tech bubble” and sent the share prices of several big tech players rocketing downward. This is the story that seems to be getting the most attention—how a startup from China could upend so much momentum and domination of the generative AI ecosystem that had previously been mainly US-based tech companies. There are two other elements to this story that are emerging and equally interesting to follow.

The first is just how deeply disruptive the technology behind DeepSeek seems to be in terms of its energy consumption. As one writer for MIT Tech Review observes, DeepSeek “poses a threat to the narrative that more computing power is the only thing that’ll unlock AI breakthroughs.” Even as innovation happens in terms of the speed and capability of these tools, there may be similar innovation in terms of how efficiently they can be run. The second story is thick irony of OpenAi’s complaint that DeepSeek used their proprietary content without permission … which is of course how their own tool was trained, using copyrighted intellectual property too.

So what should we take away from this whole emerging AI vs AI saga? Perhaps nothing long term. But it is interesting just how many backstories you can see inside something everyone is talking about if you look for them.

The Revolution of Self Driving Cars Is Not Going to Be Easy

Would you leave a tip for your driverless taxi? This past week a security researcher named Jane Wong shared leaked screenshots apparently showing the autonomous taxi service is planning to experiment with letting riders leave a tip. Before your temperature rises too much, it’s important to note that the tips would go to charity, and you can select the charity … so we can all just calm down a little. The positive PR is probably one big reason Waymo maybe be trialing the feature.

Creating a new market is hard and the company has been losing a reported $2B in the first half of 2024 alone trying to make it work. Along the way, people are revolting … like last week when a crowd of people trashed an idling Waymo vehicle in the middle of a Los Angeles street. This perhaps is the cost of progress and to be expected with something as disruptive as driverless taxis. It doesn’t seem to be deterring the company from forging ahead and expanding their operation to 10 new cities in 2025.

In a sense, they are following a technology model for disruption that is well worn. One player spends and loses billions to create and owns a market. All other players unwilling to lose so much money drop out. And eventually, the biggest company dominates. There are literally TV shows (Super Pumped and The Playlist) explaining how it works.

The Age of the AI Chatbot Salesperson Might Have an Unintended Side Effect

Training an employee to do upselling (and be good at it) is notoriously difficult. When it’s done right, it can drive significant revenue for many types of businesses though so it’s not surprising that some are experimenting with letting AI do the job. An article from WIRED this week showcases a few examples of vendors working on this sort of technology via chatbots that interact with customers as they are placing orders for something like pizza for delivery. The thing that’s even more interesting about this is the sort of dialog opportunities that this offers to go beyond just the task of upselling.

Imagine, for example, retailers accepting orders for delivery could not just take orders but also have entire conversations with customers about the products, share how they are made, answer detailed questions and even share stories that could humanize the business or increase loyalty. These are the sorts of things that are difficult to train real employees to do and nearly impossible for those employees to do given the time constraints of their job. Upselling through chatbots is interesting. Using them to deepen customer loyalty through telling stories and creating connections is potentially even bigger.

Bad Bunny Celebrates Puerto Rico and His Heritage by Creating Exclusive Experience

The first nine shows of Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny’s upcoming summer tour are sold out. That’s not particularly surprising. The interesting thing about them is that they all happen in Puerto Rico and tickets were only available to Puerto Rico residents through in-person sales (to prevent scalpers from getting tickets as much as possible). Obviously there will still be some reselling going on, but the commitment to his hometown is captured in the title of his tour itself “No me quiero ir de aqui.” (I don’t want to leave here). After those first nine shows, there will be an additional 30 date run at the Coliseo de Puerto Rico where his fans will not only be able to buy tickets to the show but also purchase VIP experiences that combine travel and tourism along with the show.

So far, the tour has been a big success with over 400,000 tickets sold in just four hours, so perhaps the example of this might inspire more artists and creators to celebrate their heritage too and make this a trend. In a time when people are looking for new and interesting immersive experiences, the timing on this seems just right.

The Non-Obvious Media Recommendation of the Week:

Flowing Data

You don’t have to be a data nerd to love beautiful visualizations and Flowing Data is a site that not only has those, but also plenty of useful educational content about how to create and present great data visuals yourself.From creating their own charts and graphics to featuring wonderful, submitted creations from across the world, the site is a great compilation of infographics, excellent fodder for materials to include in presentations (with proper accreditation!) and a fun site to just browse for some interesting data visuals when you have a bit of free time and want to read something different.

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week

Humanize: A Maker’s Guide to Designing Our Cities

Imagine a graphic novel that offers a compelling argument for why our cities can be more than just boring backdrops for daily routines. That’s the vision in Thomas Heatherwick’s Humanize and it comes to life through lots of examples, stories and visuals of exactly how cities could be more interesting and exciting. You may not see yourself as someone who is actively “designing cities” and you probably don’t work in urban planning, but the beauty of this book is how approachable the author makes these topics. This wildly original book explores what it means to make human versus inhuman (inhumane?!) places and how we can all change our perspective on what we should demand and expect from the places we inhabit. The world doesn’t need to be boring. Thanks to this book, perhaps we can all imagine a new way to make sure it isn’t.

Buy on Amazon

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About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I will be featuring a new “non-obvious” book selection worth sharing. Titles featured here may be new or from the backlist, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great books that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

Even More Non-Obvious Stories …

Every week I always curate more stories than I’m able to explore in detail. Instead of skipping those stories, I started to share them in this section so you can skim the headlines and click on any that spark your interest:

How are these stories curated?

Every week I spend hours going through hundreds of stories in order to curate this email. Looking for a speaker to inspire your team to become non-obvious thinkers through a keynote or workshop? 

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This Non-Obvious Insights Newsletter is curated by Rohit Bhargava.Copyright © 2024 Non-Obvious, All rights reserved