👋 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
The Robots Won't Cause Massive Unemployment This Time, Either:
The broad point here is one we keep having to re-learn: that when creative destruction happens, it’s always easier to see the destruction than the creation. When powerful automation technology appears, it’s easy to foresee that jobs will disappear as rapidly as the technology can spread, and harder to see how humans can add enough value to keep being employed in large numbers.
Andrew McAfee—The Geek Way | 10 minutes
Anti-Technology:
[…] There is a prevalent belief out there that technology is something very modern and exclusively digital. The truth is that every single idea we’ve kept and then passed down from one generation to the next—all of those ideas are a form of technology. Every beneficial idea that paved the way for even better ideas represented a stepping stone along our technological pathway.
Andrew Smith—Goatfury Writes | 5 minutes
AI scaling myths:
[…] Building bigger models does not seem like a wise business move, even if it would unlock new emergent capabilities. That’s because capability is no longer the barrier to adoption […] there are many applications that are possible to build with current LLM capabilities but aren’t being built or adopted due to cost, among other reasons. This is especially true for “agentic” workflows which might invoke LLMs tens or hundreds of times to complete a task, such as code generation.
Arvind Narayanan, Sayash Kapoor—AI Snake Oil | 11 minutes
🎧 Listening
LLMs won’t lead to AGI:
If you scale up the size of your database, and you cram into it more knowledge, more patterns, and so on, you are going to be increasing its performance as measured by a memorization benchmark […] You are increasing the skill of the system. You are increasing its usefulness, its scope of applicability, but not its intelligence […] And that's the fundamental confusion that people run into: that they're confusing skill and intelligence.
Francois Chollet—Dwarkesh Patel | 74 minutes
The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities:
It strikes me that we're in this moment where incremental value of continuing on this path of scaling is leveling off. And what that means is that the value of ideas is about to go up a lot relative to the value of just scale. And what that means to me is that whenever ideas become valuable again, you have an opportunity for startups […] I think the real opportunity for founders is find the next S-curve. And I think we're in a moment where that's actually paused.
Matt Clifford—20VC | 66 minutes
"Embrace The Chaos":
I think saying that we're at the end of the social media area: it's constantly morphing […] It quickly became apparent to all these companies that the follow-your-friends model was just a way of growth hacking way: bring more people into the platform. Getting people to engage with the stream was much more powerful and productive at keeping them on the site because your friends didn't create enough compelling content. And then TikTok just cranked the dial up to 11.
Alex Schleifer—People vs Algorithms | 51 minutes
💎 Timeless
1️⃣ year ago—The LLMentalist Effect
2️⃣ years ago—World-building in hybrid organisations
3️⃣ years ago—Tech Monopolies and the Insufficient Necessity of Interoperability