The Catalysts
AI's new Internet Business Model ⓧ AI as Organisational Change ⓧ AI's Culture War
👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture. Three reads and three listens; no fluff, just stuff ⚡
We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely —E.O. Wilson
📚 Reading
What If LLMs Change the Business Model of the Internet?
Instead of Reddit building product experiences that create good advertising data to earn more on ads, Reddit will launch product experiences that produce more valuable data to feed to LLMs. The LLM vendors should pay more for better data. User data remains the currency of the realm, but it’s packaged & sold in a very different way. Cookies, the moribund technology that created the ad world, will be replaced by data-purchasing contracts.
Tomasz Tunguz | 2 minutes
Could AI Be A Catalyst For Wider Organisational Change?
AI doesn’t just automate tasks but also blends roles, making each team member’s contributions more interdisciplinary. This concept, seen in startups and increasingly in larger companies, suggests a shift where middle managers might need to evolve into roles that amalgamate leadership, product development, and direct customer engagement.
Lee Bryant—Post*Shift | 5 minutes
AI Companies Are Getting the Culture War They Deserve:
A major problem for all LLM-based tools and one that image generators exemplify in a visceral way: They’re basically interfaces for summoning stereotypes […] hard to solve and awkward to acknowledge in full […] Google really is concealing its model’s biases — and, by extension, AI companies’ lack of candor about how their models work and the data on which they’re trained — with clumsy, automated attempts at representation.
John Herrman—Intelligencer | 6 minutes
🎧 Listening
Who Will Shape the Future of AI?
Over the course of the last 10 years, 15 years, almost everybody who sits on a stage like this would tell you, it is vital that your children learn computer science. Everybody should learn how to program. And in fact, it's almost exactly the opposite. It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody has to program, and that the programming language is human. Everybody in the world is now a programmer. This is the miracle.
Jensen Huang | 24 minutes
Creativity & Digital Experiences in the Age of AI:
One of the reasons why AI is so relevant is because in most areas of business and life, hallucination is a bug; in creativity, hallucination is a feature […] And so you've seen creators come in and start playing. I always feel like novelty precedes utility […] This question of, is this technology democratizing creativity? In which case, it's also maybe commoditizing? Or is it raising the ceiling for what's possible?
Scott Belsky—Robin Hood Summit | 31 minutes
Breaking and remaking media:
What was it about your analog product that got broken or not broken by digital? […] Were you bolting a revenue model onto that in ways not fundamentally native to the product? Does the internet then provide much better ways of getting the content, breaking that bundle apart, give advertisers much better ways, give partners a better way of solving the same underlying need? […] And that gets broken apart.
Benedict Evans—Another Podcast | 39 minutes
💎 Timeless
1️⃣ year ago—Productivity
2️⃣ years ago—A New Look For Innovation: Less Heroes, Fewer Processes
3️⃣ years ago—Proof of Passion
🎁 One More Thing
In this week’s episode of It’s Just a Model, Peet and I zig-zag into the End of the Beginning of ‘Tech’:
If you have a technology that is so generative, so malleable, so hackable, as anything digital […] it’s about this empathy from the technology provider to “users”, who of course are creators, innovators, inventors, composers in their own right. The platforms are collaborating with those people, and I don’t think that the composers are collaborating with the platforms.