Technology

In the first of many annual letters ChamathPalihapitiya will be penning as part of his firmnew era as a technology holding company,the founder of Social Capital criticized the venture capital industry.

After highlighting the latest trends within VC — i.e. SoftBankVision Fund,private equity activity in VC deals and inflated valuations — Palihapitiya divulged the asset classbiggest problems. A copious amount of capital is flowing through the industry and VCs have an insatiable appetite for &unicorn status.& As a result, investors are paying more and more for equity in startups at all stages, hurting both startup employees and limited partners, who ultimately have to foot the bill.

&The dynamics we&ve entered is, in many ways, creating a dangerous, high stakes Ponzi scheme,& Palihapitiya, a former Facebook executive, wrote.&Highly marked up valuations, which should be a cost for VCs, have in fact become their key revenue driver. It lets them raise new funds and keep drawing fees.&

LPs and startup employees are suffering as a result of VC greed. Why According to Palihapitiya, LPs are seeing delayed returns and startup employees are being offered stock options at inflated prices to match a companysky-high valuation.

&VCs bid up and mark up each otherportfolio company valuations today, justifying high prices by pointing to todayuser growth and tomorrownetwork effects. Those companies then go spend that money on even more user growth, often in zero-sum competition with one another. Todaylimited partners are fine with the exercise in the short run, as it gives them the markups and projected returns that they need to keep their own bosses happy.&

&Ultimately, the bill gets handed to current and future LPs (many years down the road), and startup employees (who lack the means to do anything about the problem other than leave for a new company, and acquire a ‘portfolio& of options.)&

Social Capital has had a rough go of it lately. The firm made the call to stop accepting outside capital about a month ago, with plans to investoff a &multi-billion dollar balance sheetof internal capital only.& That decision followed a string of high-profile exits that cemented the supposition that Social Capital, as we&ve known it, was over.

In his new role as a leader of a tech holding company, not a VC firm, Palihapitiya claims to have the solution to theaforementioned problem plaguing the venture and startup industry: &Return to the roots of venture investing.&

&The real expense in a startup shouldn&t be their bill from Big Tech but, rather, the cost of real innovation and R-D,& he said. &The second is to break away from the multilevel marketing scheme that the VC-LP-user growth game has become. At Social Capital, we did this by actively shifting away from funds and LPs to rely only on our own permanent capital moving forward.&

&Are we crazy to reject tens of millions of dollars a year in fees We think not, and we believe ittime to wait patiently as the air is slowly let out of this bizarre Ponzi balloon created by the venture capital industry.&

You can read the full letter here.

Twitter is digging one of its most important new features out of its settings and putting it within easy reach. Twitter is now testing with a small number of iOS users a homescreen button that lets you instantly switch from its algorithmic timeline that shows the best tweets first but out of order to the old reverse chronological feed that only shows people you follow — no tweets liked by friends or other randomness.

Twitter had previously buried this option in its settings. In mid-September, it fixed the setting so it would only show a raw reverse chronological feed of tweets by people you follow with nothing extra added, and promised a more easily accessible design for the feature in the future. Now we have our first look at it. A little Twitter sparkle icon in the top opens a menu where you can switch between Top Tweets and Latest Tweets, plus a link to your content settings. It would be even better if it was a one-tap toggle.

TwitterVP of Product Kayvon Beykpour tweeted that &We want to make it easier to toggle between seeing the latest tweets the top tweets. So we&re experimenting with making this a top-level switch rather than buried in the settings. Feedback welcome.. what do you think&

Given the backlash back in 2016 when Twitter started shifting to an algorithmically sorted timeline based on what you engaged with, many users will probably think this is great. Whether you&re trying to follow a sports game, a political debate, breaking news, or are just glued to Twitter and want the ordering to make more sense, there are plenty of reasons you might want to switch to reverse chronological.

Still, Twitterapprehension to make the setting too accessible makes sense. Hardcore users might prefer reverse chronological, but for most people who only open Twitter a few times per day or week, that&d mean they&d likely miss the tweets from their closest friends that could be drown out by the noise of everyone else. Twitteruser growth rate perked up after the shift to algorithmic.

We&ve asked whether the setting reverts to the Top Tweets default when you close the app. That might be frustrating to some expert users, but could prevent novice users from accidentally getting stuck in reverse chronological and not knowing how to switch back. The company tells TechCrunch that ittrying out several different duration options for the setting based on user inactivity to see what works best. For example, one version will revert the setting to the Top Tweets default if they&re gone for a day. That method would make sure people who&ve been inactive long enough to forget changing their timeline setting will get the default back and not end up stuck in a chronological abyss.

If Twitter gets the reversion to default situation figured out, the new button could make the service much more flexible, thereby boosting usage. You could start algorithmic in the morning or after a weekend away to see what you missed, then quickly toggle to reverse chronological if something big happens or you&ll be on it non-stop all day to get the real-time pulse of the world.

Robots just want to get things done, but itfrustrating when their rigid bodies simply don&t allow them to do so. Solution: bodies that can be reconfigured on the fly! Sure, itprobably bad news for humanity in the long run, but in the meantime it makes for fascinating research.

A team of graduate students from Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania made this idea their focus and produced both the modular, self-reconfiguring robot itself and the logic that drives it.

Think about how you navigate the world: If you need to walk somewhere, you sort of initiate your &walk& function. But if you need to crawl through a smaller space, you need to switch functions and shapes. Similarly, if you need to pick something up off a table, you can just use your &grab& function, but if you need to reach around or over an obstacle you need to modify the shape of your arm and how it moves. Naturally you have a nearly limitless &library& of these functions that you switch between at will.

Thatreally not the case for robots, which are much more rigidly designed both in hardware and software. This research, however, aims to create a similar — if considerably smaller — library of actions and configurations that a robot can use on the fly to achieve its goals.

In their paper published today in Science Robotics, the team documents the groundwork they undertook, and although itstill extremely limited, it hints at how this type of versatility will be achieved in the future.

The robot itself, called SMORES-EP, might be better described as a collection of robots: small cubes (ita popular form factor) equipped with wheels and magnets that can connect to each other and cooperate when one or all of them won&t do the job. The brains of the operation lie in a central unit equipped with a camera and depth sensor it uses to survey the surroundings and decide what to do.

If it sounds a little familiar, thatbecause the same team demonstrated a different aspect of this system earlier this year, namely the ability to identify spaces it can&t navigate and deploy items to remedy that. The current paper is focused on the underlying system that the robot uses to perceive its surroundings and interact with it.

Letput this in more concrete terms. Say a robot like this one is given the goal of collecting the shoes from around your apartment and putting them back in your closet. It gets around your apartment fine but ultimately identifies a target shoe thatunderneath your bed. It knows that ittoo big to fit under there because it can perceive dimensions and understands its own shape and size. But it also knows that it has functions for accessing enclosed areas, and it can tell that by arranging its parts in such and such a way it should be able to reach the shoe and bring it back out.

The flexibility of this approach and the ability to make these decisions autonomously are where the paper identifies advances. This isn&t a narrow &shoe-under-bed-getter& function, ita general tool for accessing areas the robot itself can&t fit into, whether that means pushing a recessed button, lifting a cup sitting on its side, or reaching between condiments to grab one in the back.

A visualization of how the robot perceives its environment.

As with just about everything in robotics, this is harder than it sounds, and it doesn&t even sound easy. The &brain& needs to be able to recognize objects, accurately measure distances, and fundamentally understand physical relationships between objects. In the shoe grabbing situation above, whatstopping a robot from trying to lift the bed and leave it in place floating above the ground while it drives underneath Artificial intelligences have no inherent understanding of any basic concept and so many must be hard-coded or algorithms created that reliably make the right choice.

Don&t worry, the robots aren&t quite at the &collect shoes& or &collect remaining humans& stage yet. The tests to which the team subjected their little robot were more like &get around these cardboard boxes and move any pink-labeled objects to the designated drop-off area.& Even this type of carefully delineated task is remarkably difficult, but the bot did just fine — though rather slowly, as lab-based bots tend to be.

The authors of the paper have since finished their grad work and moved on to new (though surely related) things. Tarik Tosun, one of the authors with whom I talked for this article, explained that henow working on advancing the theoretical side of things as opposed to, say, building cube-modules with better torque. To that end he helped author VSPARC, a simulator environment for modular robots. Although it is tangential to the topic immediately at hand, the importance of this aspect of robotics research can&t be overestimated.

You can find a pre-published version of the paper here in case you don&t have access to Science Robotics.