👋 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 ⚡
There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening—Marshall McLuhan
📚 Reading
What We Learned from a Year of Building with LLMs (Part III): Strategy
LLM driven systems should not be the primary drivers of most workflows today; they should merely be a resource. By centering humans and asking how an LLM can support their workflow, this leads to significantly different product and design decisions. Ultimately, it will drive you to build different products than competitors who try to rapidly offshore all responsibility to LLMs—better, more useful, and less risky products.
Radar—O’Reilly | 21 minutes
Seeing Like a Data Structure:
How do we move past this era of breakdown? It’s not by eschewing technology. We need our complex socio-technical systems. We need mental models to make sense of the complexities of our world. But we also need to understand and accept their inherent imperfections. We need to make sure we’re avoiding static and biased patterns—of the sort that a state functionary or a rigid algorithm might produce—while leaving room for the messiness inherent in human interactions.
Barath Raghavan Bruce Schneier—Belfer Centre | 27 minutes
The Evolution of Stupidity (and Octopus Intelligence):
Why, other than the fact that octopuses are stupefyingly interesting, should we care about this? Because it implies a profound idea: there are multiple evolutionary pathways and biological architectures that create intelligence. The study of cephalopods can yield new ways of thinking about artificial intelligence, consciousness, and plausible imaginings of unknown alien intelligence.
Brian Klaas—The Garden of Forking Paths | 15 minutes
🎧 Listening
What should an AI's personality be?
AI models are in this honestly strange position as characters and one way I've thought about it is, they have to kind of interact with people from all over the world with all different values, from all different walks of life […] I think that a person who's in that situation often is actually quite authentic, but they're also open minded and thoughtful and they engage in discussion and they politely disagree.
Amanda Askell—Anthropic | 38 minutes
Empty Innovation: What are we even doing?
I think innovation is way too important to hand it over to tech companies. We need to take it back. I think that there's a great way for you, each and every one of you, to innovate, even if you have nothing to do with tech. The best way for you to actually innovate is by telling your peers and your communities about the world you want and the life you want […] put back the politics into innovation because change always is political by definition.
tante—re:publica | 33 minutes
Startups to Start: Media Edition
I think the part missing from all of this is the nature and quality of the content. If you're building a business based on that, your passion, your ideas need to be what differentiates that. The second you go and say, actually, my goal is going to be driving up on this chart on this platform, you are giving up that insight of what you believe needs to exist in the world […] you're fundamentally not building what you need to build; you're building it to someone else's specifications.
Jessica Lessin—More or Less | 49 minutes
💎 Timeless
1️⃣ year ago—Why Chatbots Are Not the Future
2️⃣ years ago—Why Prestigious Institutions Stopped Generating Good Ideas
3️⃣ years ago—Business, The Octopus Game