Found 49 bookmarks
Newest
Generative AI’s Act Two
Generative AI’s Act Two
This page also has many infographics providing an overview of different aspects of the AI industry at time of writing.
We still believe that there will be a separation between the “application layer” companies and foundation model providers, with model companies specializing in scale and research and application layer companies specializing in product and UI. In reality, that separation hasn’t cleanly happened yet. In fact, the most successful user-facing applications out of the gate have been vertically integrated.
We predicted that the best generative AI companies could generate a sustainable competitive advantage through a data flywheel: more usage → more data → better model → more usage. While this is still somewhat true, especially in domains with very specialized and hard-to-get data, the “data moats” are on shaky ground: the data that application companies generate does not create an insurmountable moat, and the next generations of foundation models may very well obliterate any data moats that startups generate. Rather, workflows and user networks seem to be creating more durable sources of competitive advantage.
Some of the best consumer companies have 60-65% DAU/MAU; WhatsApp’s is 85%. By contrast, generative AI apps have a median of 14% (with the notable exception of Character and the “AI companionship” category). This means that users are not finding enough value in Generative AI products to use them every day yet.
generative AI’s biggest problem is not finding use cases or demand or distribution, it is proving value. As our colleague David Cahn writes, “the $200B question is: What are you going to use all this infrastructure to do? How is it going to change people’s lives?”
·sequoiacap.com·
Generative AI’s Act Two
How to validate your B2B startup idea
How to validate your B2B startup idea
There are four signs your idea has legs:People pay you money: Several people start to pay for your product, ideally people you don’t have a direct connection toContinued usage: People continue to use your prototype product, even if it’s hackyStrong emotion: You’re hearing hatred for the incumbents (i.e. pain) or a deep and strong emotional reaction to your idea (i.e. pull)Cold inbound interest: You’re seeing cold inbound interest in your product
Every prosumer collaboration product, including Figma, Notion, Coda, Airtable, Miro, and Slack, spent three to four years wandering in the dark until they stumbled on something that clicked.
·lennysnewsletter.com·
How to validate your B2B startup idea
Lessons from scaling Spotify: The science of product, taking risky bets, and how AI is already impacting the future of music | Gustav Söderström (Co-President, CPO, and CTO at Spotify)
Lessons from scaling Spotify: The science of product, taking risky bets, and how AI is already impacting the future of music | Gustav Söderström (Co-President, CPO, and CTO at Spotify)
·lennysnewsletter.com·
Lessons from scaling Spotify: The science of product, taking risky bets, and how AI is already impacting the future of music | Gustav Söderström (Co-President, CPO, and CTO at Spotify)
Who needs film critics when studios can be sure influencers will praise their films?
Who needs film critics when studios can be sure influencers will praise their films?
Critiques the current state of film criticism, arguing that studios are manipulating the narrative by using influencers and free tickets to control reviews and devaluing the role of knowledgeable critics. The article suggests that audiences still crave thoughtful films and good criticism, and that both Barbie and Oppenheimer are examples of films that have inspired good writing.
·theguardian.com·
Who needs film critics when studios can be sure influencers will praise their films?
The algorithmic anti-culture of scale
The algorithmic anti-culture of scale
Ryan Broderick's impressions of Meta's Twitter copycat, Threads
My verdict: Threads sucks shit. It has no purpose. It is for no one. It launched as a content graveyard and will assuredly only become more of one over time. It’s iFunny for people who miss The Ellen Show. It has a distinct celebrities-making-videos-during-COVID-lockdown vibe. It feels like a 90s-themed office party organized by a human resources department. And my theory, after staring into its dark heart for several days, is that it was never meant to “beat” Twitter — regardless of what Zuckerberg has been tweeting. Threads’ true purpose was to act as a fresh coat of paint for Instagram’s code in the hopes it might make the network relevant again. And Threads is also proof that Meta, even after all these years, still has no other ambition aside from scale.
·garbageday.email·
The algorithmic anti-culture of scale
After “Barbie,” Mattel Is Raiding Its Entire Toybox
After “Barbie,” Mattel Is Raiding Its Entire Toybox
Just as Marvel had gone from ailing comic-book publisher to Hollywood behemoth, the toymaker could leverage its intellectual property at the multiplex. Kreiz told me, “My thesis was that we needed to transition from being a toy-manufacturing company, making items, to an I.P. company, managing franchises.”
She told me, “There are people who adore Barbie, people who hate Barbie—but the bottom line is everyone knows Barbie.” She wanted a film adaptation to confront those “sharp edges, ” but when she met with Kreiz she led with her desire to take the brand seriously.
Kreiz, meanwhile, hired a veteran of Miramax, Robbie Brenner, to head up the newly minted Mattel Films. Her first task: assemble a team of development executives to rummage through Mattel’s toy chest and identify I.P. that could be fodder for Hollywood studios. Mattel would help match properties with writers, actors, and directors; studios would provide all the funding. The brands, and audiences’ familiarity with them, were their own form of currency. Brenner told me, “In the world we’re living in, I.P. is king. Pre-awareness is so important.”
Jeremy Barber, an agent at U.T.A. who represents Gerwig and Baumbach, is close with Brenner, so he could be blunt. “Are you crazy?” he told her. “You should’ve come into this office and thanked me when Greta and Noah showed up to write a fucking Barbie movie!”
Barber told me that Mattel had figured out how to “engage with filmmakers in a friendly way.” Gerwig, meanwhile, was looking to move beyond the small-scale dramas she was known for. “Greta and I have been very consciously constructing a career,” Barber explained. “Her ambition is to be not the biggest woman director but a big studio director. And Barbie was a piece of I.P. that was resonant to her.”
Although Barber was pleased with the “Barbie” partnership, he was clear-eyed about its implications. “Is it a great thing that our great creative actors and filmmakers live in a world where you can only take giant swings around consumer content and mass-produced products?” he said. “I don’t know. But it is the business. So, if that’s what people will consume, then let’s make it more interesting, more complicated.”
The future of moviegoing now seems increasingly tenuous, and studios have leaned on pre-awareness as a means of drawing people to theatres: a nostalgia play like “Hot Wheels” is seen as a safer bet than an original concept. The box office has borne this out: the ten highest-grossing films of 2022 were all reboots or sequels. Disney’s much derided strategy of remaking “Aladdin” and other animated classics as live-action spectacles has largely paid off; by contrast, Pixar’s recent attempt at an original story, “Elemental,” bombed.
The mandate for audience recognition has pushed artists to take increasingly desperate measures—including scrounging up plotlines from popular snacks. Eva Longoria recently directed the Cheetos dramedy “Flamin’ Hot”; Jerry Seinfeld is at work on “Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story.”
creating “a story where there hadn’t been a story” felt like solving “an intellectual Rubik’s Cube.”
Whereas Scott’s “Monopoly” was shamed into nonexistence, advance screenings of “Barbie,” billed as “blowout parties,” are selling out. Nevertheless, the film’s slogan—“If you love Barbie, this movie is for you. If you hate Barbie, this movie is for you”—is indicative of the tightrope it has to walk. “Barbie” is somehow simultaneously a critique of corporate feminism, a love letter to a doll that has been a lightning rod for more than half a century, and a sendup of the company that actively participated in the adaptation.
When Robbie’s character ventures beyond Barbie Land, Gerwig explained, the film’s visual language also changes: “The way the camera moves and the way it feels is different once we’re in the real world.”
Mattel was sometimes uneasy with Gerwig’s interest in the brand’s missteps. In 1964, the company released a doll named Allan, whose packaging marketed him as “Ken’s buddy,” with the tagline “All of Ken’s clothes fit him!” Allan was soon pulled from shelves. When Gerwig learned about him, she found the ad copy both sad and amusing. In “Barbie,” Allan is played by Michael Cera, and much is made of the fact that his relationship to Ken is his main identifying feature. The company, Gerwig remembered, required some convincing: “There was just an e-mail that went around where they said, ‘Do you have to remind people that this was on the box?’ ”
Gerwig told me, “Barbie seems so monolithic, and there’s a quality where it just seems as if she was inevitable, and she’s always existed. I think all the dead ends are a reminder that they were just trying stuff out.” Although she understood why Mattel wanted “to protect Barbie,” she felt that “dealing with all the strangeness of it is a way of honoring it.”
A rival, Kenner, was having runaway success with “Star Wars” action figures, and Mattel scrambled to launch a science-fantasy saga of its own. Play-testing had revealed that young boys fixated on the notion of “power,” and that a muscle-bound hero was more appealing than the slighter action figures of the era. This intelligence yielded He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. When a retailer pointed out that kids would have no idea who these characters were—even then, pre-awareness was a consideration—Mattel hastily produced comic books that explained their backstories.
Brenner sat at the head of a long table while her right hand, Kevin McKeon, provided updates on various projects. His descriptions sometimes sounded like a Hollywood version of Mad Libs. A screenwriter, he informed the group, was at work on an American Girl script that would be “ ‘Booksmart’ meets ‘Bill & Ted.’ ” Jimmy Warden, the screenwriter of “Cocaine Bear,” had devised a horror-comedy about the Magic 8 Ball.
McKeon seemed most excited by Kaluuya’s Barney project, which would be “surrealistic”; he compared the concept to the work of Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze. “We’re leaning into the millennial angst of the property rather than fine-tuning this for kids,” he said. “It’s really a play for adults. Not that it’s R-rated, but it’ll focus on some of the trials and tribulations of being thirtysomething, growing up with Barney—just the level of disenchantment within the generation.” He told me later that he’d sold it to prospective partners as an “A24-type” film: “It would be so daring of us, and really underscore that we’re here to make art.”
Talk turned to a few recent pitches that had surprised the team. “Somebody just asked me about Bass Fishin’, which is, like, a toy fishing rod,” Bassin said. The pitch was for an “intense sports drama about this cheating scandal in competitive fishing”—an attempt, it seemed to me, to Trojan-horse a story that the writer actually wanted to tell into a conceit that might be green-lighted.
Gerwig’s “Barbie,” for all its gentle mockery of Mattel, has already paid dividends for the company. A fifty-dollar doll resembling Robbie as she appears in the film, unveiled in June, has sold out; so has a seventy-five-dollar model of Stereotypical Barbie’s pink Corvette.
·newyorker.com·
After “Barbie,” Mattel Is Raiding Its Entire Toybox
Google has a company strategy, not a product strategy
Google has a company strategy, not a product strategy
The VP in charge of Google Plus hosted the Friday all-hands several times to get us all excited about what they were building. It was obvious to me and many others that there was no reason for people already on Facebook to switch from Facebook. Someone asked a direct question, but the VP deflected and talked about how easy it would be to group your friends with the Circles feature — which was not at all a reason to switch.It seemed like Google didn’t have the processes or experience to get the product strategy right. “Who are our potential users and what does it take to win them?” is product strategy 101. Maybe someone raised this question in an exec review, but it didn’t become a launch blocker. Google+ never took off, and was eventually shut down.
If Google didn’t start with a conviction that they needed the product, it makes sense that they wouldn’t have the stamina to keep iterating and investing. Most other companies don’t have the money to build and launch products with such little conviction and oversight. Other companies need their products to succeed, so they try harder & smarter to make the products successful.
IME people often don’t realize that product strategies are actually way more important and influential than company strategies. Simply because it’s the products that have an impact on people’s lives, not the company.
Google has a company strategy, but they don’t make product strategies.
Google’s company strategy is “Hire all the smart people.” Hire all the smart people and let them build. Hire all the smart people so they can’t work at a competitor. Hire all the smart people even if we don’t have something important for them to work on.Google acts like a venture capitalist, investing in promising people with the expectation that most will fail. They invest broadly in search of the idea that will deliver 100x. Let 1000 flowers bloom, and see which are the best.
·jackiebavaro.substack.com·
Google has a company strategy, not a product strategy
Seven Rules For Internet CEOs To Avoid Enshittification
Seven Rules For Internet CEOs To Avoid Enshittification
People forget that when Bezos introduced Amazon Prime, Wall St. flipped out, because they insisted that it would cost way too much for too little benefit. But, through it all Amazon survived (and thrived) because Bezos just kept telling investors exactly what his plan was, and never backed down, no matter what Wall St. kept saying to him.
This is too easily forgotten, but your users are everything if you run an internet business. They’re not “the product.” They’re what makes your site useful and valuable, and often provide the best marketing you could never buy by convincing others to join and providing you with all of the best ideas on how to improve things and make your service even better for the users. The moment you’re undermining your own community, you’re beginning to spiral downward.
As you’re developing a business model, the best way to make sure that you’re serving your users best, and not enshittifying everything, is to constantly make sure that you’re only capturing some of the value you’re creating, and are instead putting much more out into the world, especially for your community.
Push the power to make your service better out from the service to the users themselves and watch what they do. Let them build. Let them improve your service. Let them make it work better for you. But, you have to have some trust here. If you’re focused on “Rule 3” you have to recognize that sometimes your users will create value that you don’t capture. Or even that someone else captures. But in the long run, it still flows back to you, as it makes your service that much more valuable.
If you’re charging for something that was once free, you’re taking away value from your community. You’re changing the nature of the bargain, and ripping away the trust that your community put in you. Instead, always look for something new that is worth paying for above and beyond what you already offered.
There are ways to monetize that don’t need to overwhelm, that don’t need to suck up every bit of data, that don’t need to rely on taking away features users relied on. Focus on adding more scarce value, and figuring out ways to charge for those new things which can’t be easily replicated.
You start learning acronyms like “ARPU” (average revenue per user) and such. And then you’re being measured on how much you’re increasing those metrics, which means you need to squeeze more out of each individual user, and you’re now deep within the enshittification stage, in which you’re trying to squeeze your users for more money each quarter (because now everything is judged in how well you did in the last 3 months to improve that number).
·techdirt.com·
Seven Rules For Internet CEOs To Avoid Enshittification
Spotify
Spotify
Spotify dominates the music streaming industry with over 500 million monthly active users and 210 million paid subscribers, and is expanding into new areas like podcasts and audiobooks. The company aims to generate $100 billion in annual revenue by 2030 through expanding margins, increasing prices, and growing its userbase to 1 billion monthly active users. According to the author's analysis, Spotify represents a significant investment opportunity with a potential stock price increase of around 7 times by 2030.
·purvil.bearblog.dev·
Spotify
Vision Pro — Benedict Evans
Vision Pro — Benedict Evans
Meta, today, has roughly the right price and is working forward to the right device: Apple has started with the right device and will work back to the right price. Meta is trying to catalyse an ecosystem while we wait for the right hardware - Apple is trying to catalyse an ecosystem while we wait for the right price.
one of the things I wondered before the event was how Apple would show a 3D experience in 2D. Meta shows either screenshots from within the system (with the low visual quality inherent in the spec you can make and sell for $500) or shots of someone wearing the headset and grinning - neither are satisfactory. Apple shows the person in the room, with the virtual stuff as though it was really there, because it looks as though it is.
For Meta, the device places you in ‘the metaverse’ and there could be many experiences within that. For Apple, this device itself doesn’t take you anywhere - it’s a screen and there could be five different ‘metaverse’ apps. This iPhone was a piece of glass that could be anything - this is trying to be a piece of glass that can show anything.
A lot of what Apple shows is possibility and experiment - it could be this, this or that, just as when Apple launched the watch it suggested it as fitness, social or fashion, and it turn out to work best for fitness (and is now a huge business).
Mark Zuckerberg, speaking to a Meta all-hands after Apple’s event, made the perfectly reasonable point that Apple hasn’t shown much that no-one had thought of before - there’s no ‘magic’ invention. Everyone already knows we need better screens, eye-tracking and hand-tracking, in a thin and light device.
It’s worth remembering that Meta isn’t in this to make a games device, nor really to sell devices per se - rather, the thesis is that if VR is the next platform, Meta has to make sure it isn’t controlled by a platform owner who can screw them, as Apple did with IDFA in 2021.
On the other hand, the Vision Pro is an argument that current devices just aren’t good enough to break out of the enthusiast and gaming market, incremental improvement isn’t good enough either, and you need a step change in capability.
Apple’s privacy positioning, of course, has new strategic value now that it’s selling a device you wear that’s covered in cameras
the genesis of the current wave of VR was the realisation a decade ago that the VR concepts of the 1990s would work now, and with nothing more than off-the-shelf smartphone components and gaming PCs, plus a bit more work. But ‘a bit more work’ turned out to be thirty or forty billion dollars from Meta and God only knows how much more from Apple - something over $100bn combined, almost certainly.
So it might be that a wearable screen of any kind, no matter how good, is just a staging post - the summit of a foothill on the way to the top of Everest. Maybe the real Reality device is glasses, or contact lenses projecting onto your retina, or some kind of neural connection, all of which might be a decade or decades away again, and the piece of glass in our pocket remains the right device all the way through.
I think the price and the challenge of category creation are tightly connected. Apple has decided that the capabilities of the Vision Pro are the minimum viable product - that it just isn’t worth making or selling a device without a screen so good you can’t see the pixels, pass-through where you can’t see any lag, perfect eye-tracking and perfect hand-tracking. Of course the rest of the industry would like to do that, and will in due course, but Apple has decided you must do that.
For VR, better screens are merely better, but for AR Apple thinks this this level of display system is a base below which you don’t have a product at all.
For Meta, the device places you in ‘the metaverse’ and there could be many experiences within that. For Apple, this device itself doesn’t take you anywhere - it’s a screen and there could be five different ‘metaverse’ apps. The iPhone was a piece of glass that could be anything - this is trying to be a piece of glass that can show anything.
This reminds me a little of when Meta tried to make a phone, and then a Home Screen for a phone, and Mark Zuckerberg said “your phone should be about people.” I thought “no, this is a computer, and there are many apps, some of which are about people and some of which are not.” Indeed there’s also an echo of telco thinking: on a feature phone, ‘internet stuff’ was one or two icons on your portable telephone, but on the iPhone the entire telephone was just one icon on your computer. On a Vision Pro, the ‘Meta Metaverse’ is one app amongst many. You have many apps and panels, which could be 2D or 3D, or could be spaces.
·ben-evans.com·
Vision Pro — Benedict Evans
Isn’t That Spatial? | No Mercy / No Malice
Isn’t That Spatial? | No Mercy / No Malice
Betting against a first-generation Apple product is a bad trade — from infamous dismissals of the iPhone to disappointment with the original iPad. In fact, this is a reflection of Apple’s strategy: Start with a product that’s more an elegant proof-of-concept than a prime-time hit; rely on early adopters to provide enough runway for its engineers to keep iterating; and trust in unmatched capital, talent, brand equity, and staying power to morph a first-gen toy into a third-gen triumph
We are a long way from making three screens, a glass shield, and an array of supporting hardware light enough to wear for an extended period. Reviewers were (purposefully) allowed to wear the Vision Pro for less than half an hour, and nearly every one said comfort was declining even then. Avatar: The Way of Water is 3 hours and 12 minutes.
Meta’s singular strategic objective is to escape second-tier status and, like Apple and Alphabet, control its distribution. And its path to independence runs through Apple Park. Zuckerberg is spending the GDP of a small country to invent a new world, the metaverse, where Apple doesn’t own the roads or power stations. Vision Pro is insurance against the metaverse evolving into anything more than an incel panic room.
The only product category where VR makes difference is good VR games. Price is not limiting factor, the quality of VR experience is. Beat Saber is good and fun and physical exercise. Half Life: Alyx, is amazing. VR completely supercharges horror games, and scary stalking shooters. Want to fear of your life and get PTSD in the comfort of your home? You can do it. Games can connect people and provide physical exercise. If the 3rd iteration of Vision Pro is good for 2 hours of playing for $2000 Apple will kill the console market. Playstations no more. Apple is not a gaming company, but if Vision Pro becomes better and slightly cheaper, Apple becomes gaming company against its will.
·profgalloway.com·
Isn’t That Spatial? | No Mercy / No Malice
Leviathan Wakes: the case for Apple's Vision Pro - Redeem Tomorrow
Leviathan Wakes: the case for Apple's Vision Pro - Redeem Tomorrow
The existing VR hardware has not received sufficient investment to fully demonstrate the potential of this technology. It is unclear whether the issues lie with augmented reality (AR) itself or the technology used to deliver it. However, Apple has taken a different approach by investing significantly in creating a serious computer with an optical overlay as its primary interface. Unlike other expensive headsets, Apple has integrated the ecosystem to make it appealing right out of the box, allowing users to watch movies, view photos, and run various apps. This comprehensive solution aims to address the uncertainties surrounding AR. The display quality is top-notch, finger-based interaction replaces clunky joysticks, and performance is optimized to minimize motion sickness. Furthermore, a large and experienced developer community stands ready to create apps, supported by mature tools and extensive documentation. With these factors in place, there is anticipation for a new paradigm enabled by a virtually limitless monitor. The author expresses eagerness to witness how this technology unfolds.
What can you do with this thing? There’s a good chance that, whatever killer apps may emerge, they don’t need the entire complement of sensors and widgets to deliver a great experience. As that’s discovered, Apple will be able to open a second tier in this category and sell you a simplified model at a lower cost. Meanwhile, the more they manufacture the essentials—high density displays, for example—the higher their yields will become, the more their margins will increase. It takes time to perfect manufacturing processes and build up capacity. Vision Pro isn’t just about 2024’s model. It’s setting up the conditions for Apple to build the next five years of augmented reality wearable technology.
VR/AR doesn’t have to suck ass. It doesn’t have to give you motion sickness. It doesn’t have to use these awkward, stupid controllers you accidentally swap into the wrong hand. It doesn’t have to be fundamentally isolating. If this paradigm shift could have been kicked off by cheap shit, we’d be there already. May as well pursue the other end of the market.
what starts as clunky needn’t remain so. As the technology for augmented reality becomes more affordable, more lightweight, more energy efficient, more stylish, it will be more feasible for more people to use. In the bargain, we’ll get a display technology entirely unshackled from the constraints of a monitor stand. We’ll have much broader canvases subject to the flexibility of digital creativity, collaboration and expression. What this unlocks, we can’t say.
·redeem-tomorrow.com·
Leviathan Wakes: the case for Apple's Vision Pro - Redeem Tomorrow
When to Design for Emergence
When to Design for Emergence
In complexity science, ‘emergence’ describes the way that interactions between individual components in a complex system can give rise to new behavior, patterns, or qualities. For example, the quality of ‘wetness’ cannot be found in a single water molecule, but instead arises from the interaction of many water molecules together. In living systems, emergence is at the core of adaptive evolution.
Design for emergence prioritizes open-ended combinatorial possibilities such that the design object can be composed and adapted to a wide variety of contextual and idiosyncratic niches by its end-user. LEGO offers an example — a simple set of blocks with a shared protocol for connecting to one another from which a nearly infinite array of forms can emerge. Yet as we will see, design for emergence can generate value well beyond children’s toys.
In contrast to high modern design, user-centered design takes a more modest position; the designer does not inherently know everything, and therefore she must meticulously study the needs and behaviors of users in order to produce a good design. User-centered design remains the dominant design paradigm today, employed by environmental designers, tech companies, and design agencies around the world.
In this paradigm, design is about gaining knowledge from the user, identifying desirable outcomes, and controlling as much of the process as possible to achieve those outcomes. ‘Design’ remains synonymous with maximizing control.
But consider even the ‘desire path’ example pictured above. The modal user may be well supported by paving the desire path indicated by their behavior, but what good is a paved path leading to stairs for a wheelchair user? In practice, user-centered design tends to privilege the modal user at the expense of the long-tail user whose needs may be just as great.
User-centered design has a better track record than high modern design, but it still exerts a homogenizing effect. The needs of the modal user are accommodated and scaled through software or industrial manufacturing, while power users and those with edge cases can do nothing but actively petition the designer for attention. In most cases, diverse users with a wide variety of niche use cases are forced to conform to the behavior of the modal user.
In design for emergence, the designer assumes that the end-user holds relevant knowledge and gives them extensive control over the design. Rather than designing the end result, we design the user’s experience of designing their own end result. In this way we can think of design for emergence as a form of ‘meta-design.’
In other words, to address the long-tail problem, the tool must be flexible enough that it can be adapted to unexpected and idiosyncratic problem spaces—especially those unanticipated by the tool’s designer.
In contrast to user-centered design, design for emergence invites the user into the design process not only as a subject of study, but as a collaborator with agency and control.
What all these tools have in common is support for open-ended adaptation to highly contextual problems without the need for technical knowledge. Rather than building a static, purpose-built solution to a single common problem with lots of users (and lots of competitors), they’ve won robust user bases by supporting a broad swath of long-tail user needs.
Design for emergence is composable. It provides a limited ‘alphabet’ and a generative grammar that’s easy to learn and employ, yet can be extended to create powerful, complex applications. As Seymour Papert once remarked, “English is a language for children,” but this fact, “does not preclude its being also a language for poets, scientists, and philosophers.”
·rhizomerd.substack.com·
When to Design for Emergence