Update #4: Progress towards Kickstarter and omg so many spreadsheets
Update #4: Progress towards Kickstarter and omg so many spreadsheets
Sssh but we're also working on the industrial design
Hey gang! This is a newsletter about the AI Clock — a new ChatGPT poem every MINUTE on a gorgeous e-ink screen. We’re working towards a Kickstarter! You’re getting this email because you subscribed for updates. If you need it, the unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. If you’re sticking around, thank you :)
🧗Ascending Mt. Kickstarter
It has been busy! I have made:
A massive spreadsheet. There are tabs for development, manufacturing, fulfilment, future ops, and the campaign itself. I’m glad that’s done.
The draft of the Kickstarter campaign page. It’s neat to see the story in one place, and unpack the design and technology. It’s also possible to see what the gaps are.
FYI — I’m not sure I should be shared this? Dunno. I’ll tell you anyway. Adding up the COGS, COS, and forward opex allocations, right now the campaign goal looks like 1,262 units or $160k (not final numbers). I’m not planning on paying myself out of this. The campaign is achievable… just. It’s punchy.
So I feel like the Kickstarter campaign has a better chance if the industrial design is more progressed from my P1 and P2 prototypes. i.e. what will the final thing look like, and let’s have a render of the CAD please.
That’s the other half of what I’ve been doing.
I am very lucky to be working with the AMAZING industrial design studio [REDACTED] on this. Here’s a tease: this morning I met them to see the second round of designs and the first 3D-printed model, and whoa.
More of that next time! 🙊
(The quick snap at the top of this email is from the first IRL convo I had with the folks at [REDACTED], unpacking ambitions, constraints and issues, looking at references… and covering bits of paper in sketches.)
🙋 A reader question: how come I’m not charging for the AI-composed poems? Isn’t that a risk?
(Sorry I’ve lost my note of who sent in this question! If this was you, thank you!)
This is a detailed question, so let’s really dig into this.
Every time you generate a poem using OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT), it costs money. Yes ChatGPT is free, but for commercial use it costs money. And we’re doing it every minute!
If your clock were to generate the poems itself, it would cost you several $100/year, just to run the thing. That’s no fun. And then there would be the carbon cost, multiplied up for every clock!
INSTEAD we can make it work like this:
I compose the poem once with my backend server, paying the AI cost myself, and then share it out to all clocks simultaneously.
But then, I don’t charge for sharing it out. You don’t pay anything beyond the price for the clock itself, no monthly fees.
Now (continues the question), isn’t that a problem? See, as a consumer, there’s a big risk in buying an internet-connected product: the company behind it may go out of business, and my device stops working. If the company isn’t charging for the poems, that’s not commercially sustainable, and that makes the product risky.
You’re right. So I’m dealing with that risk in two ways:
I’ve worked out how much it’ll cost to pay for the AI and run the servers for all the clocks for 3 years. This is the "forward opex allocation” part of the budget. A % of the revenue for every single unit goes straight in a bank account, and won’t be touched except to pay server fees. We’re all paying a little in advance to share the cost between us.
As an additional backup - for more technical folk - you’ll be able to change where the clock looks for its backend server, from the device itself, and I’ll publish the spec for the API it uses. So you’ll be able to make and run an alternative backend server for you and your friends, if you like.
Long story short, you’ll get 3 years of free service.
What happens then? Well in 3 years I imagine we’ll be on ChatGPT 9 and AI will have gone exponential, escaped the server farms and transmuted the Moon into pure thinking computronium, specks of which will end up ambiently floating in the atmosphere before we inhale them and they burrow deep into our cerebellum, setting up symbiotic cognition such that GPT knows our thoughts just as we know its — at which point we’ll all have direct consciousness of the time, and physical clocks - sluggish matter, crude matter - will be moot for such luminous dual-beings as we, thank you very much.
That’s my guess.
💃 Until next time
Matt x