šĀ On time for your weekend: a round-up ofĀ this weekās remarkable storiesĀ at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture. Three reads and three listens; no fluff, just stuff ā”
There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happeningāMarshall McLuhan
š Reading
Seeing Like A Network:
In the era of superfast many-to-many communication, the ideas that spread are the ones which can ātake overā the entire spectrum. Small ideas grow, wither, die. It's only the memetic megafauna that survive. In a sparse network you might have pockets which retain their individuality and survive for longer. Like Galapagos syndrome for ideas. Both good and bad.
Rohit KrishnanāStrange loop Canon | 20 minutes
Latent Expertise: Everyone is in R&D:
Many leaders seem to have adopted a view that the main purpose of technology is efficiency. Following the Law of the Hammer (āto a hammer every problem looks like a nailā), they see AI as a cost-cutting mechanism. Any efficiency gains must be turned into cost savings, even before anyone in the organization figures out what AI is good for.
Ethan MollickāOne Useful Thing | 12 minutes
How to Fix āAIās Original Sinā
Pay for the output, not the training.Ā It may look like a big win for existing copyright holders when they receive multimillion-dollar licensing fees for the use of content they control [ā¦] These fees are likely insufficient to become the foundation of sustainable long-term businesses and creative ecosystems. Once youāve licensed the chicken, the licensee gets the eggs.
Tim OāReillyāRadar | 25 minutes
š§ Listening
GenAI in Hollywood:
You need more swings at bat, at lower cost, you need to give the talent more equity, which all this ties together. You need to use the network as a focus group, not as a marketing tool. You need to have a dialogue, you have to feed stuff onto the network, see what works, and then kill the stuff that doesn't work and feed the stuff that works. You need technology and development to sit next to each other, not the technology guys in the basement.
Doug ShapiroāMoffettNathanson | 44 minutes
What to Build in AI (Part II):
You now have the oldest companies, the Microsoft or whatever, the Apples, are the $3 trillion companies. Yes, they didn't exactly get the internet right. Yes, they didn't exactly get mobile, right? But it doesn't really matter, they've just been around, they have the customers [ā¦] So the question is, is AI a reset? Or is it just make the biggest guys much bigger?
Sam LessināMore or Less | 61 minutes
The State of AI with Marc & Ben:
You take an LLM, you train it on the internet. What is the internet data corpus? It's an average of everything, right? [ā¦] You're teaching it to be very average; it's just because most of the content created on the internet is created by average people [ā¦] How do you prompt it in order to navigate to a different part of the data set that basically is like the super genius part.
Marc AndreessenāThe a16z Podcast | 73 minutes
š Timeless
1ļøā£ year agoāAI and The Burden of Knowledge
2ļøā£ years agoāThe Rise of the Internetās Creative Middle Class
3ļøā£ years agoāMarc Andreessen, VC and tech pioneer