👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture.
Three articles and three podcasts wrestled from this week’s relentless algorithmic feeds and icky click-bait chum. No fluff, just stuff⚡️
📚 Reading
End-to-End:
[O]ur technology should be designed to make a best effort to deliver the speaker’s message to the person who asked to get it […] Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube and other dominant social media platforms treat the list of people we follow as suggestions, not commands. When you identify a list of people you want to hear from, the platform uses that as training data for suggestions that only incidentally contain the messages that the people you subscribed to.
Cory Doctorow | 10 minutes
Google vs. ChatGPT told by aglio e olio:
If generative AI tools make the internet a worse place for a bit, that will only be because we are used to a certain type of internet that is taxed by big tech and subsidized by ads. If we are inundated with even more spam, and our search result become even more useless, it’ll only mean that we should move past those business models. I am glad OpenAI is held up as a real challenger to Google. The king is dead. I wholeheartedly welcome our new AI overlords.
Can Duruk | 7 minutes
Remote Bureaucracy:
In the past, the office and corporate bureaucracies were tasked with turning idiosyncratic humans into standardized cogs. Today, the companies themselves need people to be idiosyncratic. Corporate success is no longer about throwing the highest quantity of resources into a meat grinder [..] In a world of non-linear output, companies need to be more flexible, to experiment with different people and projects.
Dror Poleg | 6 minutes
🎧 Listening
The Grand Redesign:
The current education system is a conveyor belt with no control over speed or the number of items [..] I don't know what percentage of kids are doing well at the standard pace, but I'd guess it's not a majority. And this is exactly what we need. We need the ability to teach at somebody's pace, in their style, with the number of repetitions that they need, the frequency that they need, the connections that they need. And it's going to be different for everybody.
Sam McRoberts—Infinite Loops | 69 minutes
The Future of Generative AI, Real-Time Movies, Societal Impact:
It allows people just to create anything, and the value of creativity versus consumption can't be underestimated [..] How many people listening to this believe they can create? Probably very few, but the reality is everyone can, but they don't have the tools to, and they have barriers to it. These barriers will be removed as of next year. You'll be able to create anything you can imagine; first in 2d, then in audio, then in 3D, then in video.
Emad Mostaque—Cartoon Avatars | 57 minutes
In conversation with Sam Altman (OpenAI):
We had the model for ChatGPT in the API for ten months before we made ChatGPT, and I thought someone was going to just build it; that enough people had played around with it [..] One thing I very deeply believed was the way people wanted to interact with these models was via dialogue, and we kept telling people this; we kept trying to get people to build it, and people wouldn't quite do it, so we finally said we're just going to do it.
Sam Altman—Strictly VC | 39 minutes
🤔 Musing
Three articles and three podcasts, and for the third time in a row, there's no escaping the "A.I." fever. Now, the "intelligence" moniker is mostly a clever marketing ploy to anthropize what, in the end, is just software.
In the case of ChatGPT, it's software that cranks out text-shaped fluff with little regard for accuracy or content. Good enough to automate listicles, publicity emails, and LinkedIn humblebragging, but is that deserving of our collective brouhaha?
Maybe it's the promise of challenging existing institutions and rebuilding them—the aspirations of “Web 3” certainly fell flat. To respawn social media as social networking, to move education away from its industrial origins, and to rethink the shape of the post-world war corporation.
Time will tell; and it is on us.