A Professor's Last Lecture on How to Live

It's not unusual for retiring professors to give a last lecture. When Carnegie Mellon University's Randy Pausch gave his in 2008, he wasn't retiring. He was dying of cancer. Today, his now famous lecture has 21 million views on YouTube and is still inspiring many to follow Pausch's advice about what is important in life.

At the time, he was the father of three small children, and he said in a USA Today interview, "I was trying to put myself in a bottle that would one day wash up on the beach for my children." From his lecture, Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, here are a few of his points about life:

• Never underestimate the importance of having fun. I'm dying and I'm having fun every day because there's no other way to play it.

• Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted.

• No one is pure evil. Find the best in everybody. Wait long enough and people will surprise you.

• It's not about achieving your dreams but about living your life. If you live the right way, the dreams will come.

• You can't get anywhere without help. Ask yourself: What kind of person do people want to help? Then you'll know the answer to: What kind of person should I try to be?

• Be grateful when someone is making you work hard: When you are screwing up and no one is saying anything to you, that means they gave up.

Investors Pour Billions into AI Ideas

From 1848 to 1850, San Francisco's population surged from a thousand people to over 25,000 amid the California Gold Rush. Now, a gold rush of a different sort is seeing billions poured into artificial intelligence, even as investments dry up in other parts of the tech sector. In some cases, even AI startups still working on the basics of their business concepts are attracting massive investments.

When two tech stars from Google, Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar, decided to strike out on their own, they quickly raised millions for their startup, Essential AI. They didn't have a business plan or even a company name, but the potential for AI is so hot that investors are willing to roll the dice.

The biggest focus right now is on generative AI, which means using artificial intelligence to create content, images, and the like. In 2018, just $400 million was invested in AI solutions. It's estimated that $4.5 billion was invested in 2022. But this year, analysts expect far more money to pour in. Already, Microsoft has invested at least $10 billion in OpenAI, the organization behind the popular AI solution ChatGPT.

The influx of cash into AI comes even as investing in startups cools off, according to The Wall Street Journal. In the first quarter of 2023, venture capital investments weighed in at only $37 billion, down more than 60 percent from its peak in the 4th quarter of 2021. Industry experts believe that artificial intelligence could have a profound impact on everything from customer service to Hollywood movie production.