Epizone

Intelligence as a Service ⓧ Fixing Social Media’s Original Sin ⓧ AI Civilization

👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture. Three to read and three to listen to—no fluff, just stuff ⚡

There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening—Marshall McLuhan

📚 Reading

Intelligence as a Service:

You can think of software as writing code once and then executing it efficiently forever (with updates along the way). In contrast, selling intelligence is an ever changing and evolving conversation that is far more complex, valuable, and hardware intensive (while every version of a piece of software is the same, every conversational AI instance/reasoning will be varied due to the nature of tokenization of language.

Brad Slingerlend—SITALWeek | 9 minutes

AI Can Fix Social Media’s Original Sin:

[AI] sees a much more complex version of who you are than the old-school social media algorithms that saw you through a keyhole … Technology changes how we see ourselves. In a world where algorithms can only see clicks and watch time, we thought we were a degenerate bunch. Now that algorithms can talk to us, we see a much richer reflection in the mirror.

Dan Shipper—Every | 10 minutes

Epizone AI: Outside the Code Stack:

AI needs to have its own culture in order to evolve faster, just as humans did. It cannot remain just a thread of improving software/hardware functions; it must become an embedded ecosystem of entities that adapt, learn, and improve outside of the code stack. This AI epizone will enable its cultural evolution, just as the human society did for humans.

Kevin Kelly—The Technium | 7 minutes

🎧 Listening

AI Writing, Thought Design & Solo Foundership:

A lot of things that are revolutionary in the history of technology have taken something that was encoded into the substrate and then made it an abstraction. The first calculators, the operations of addition and subtraction and division were printed on the circuit board; it wasn't running Linux … Before LLMs, we had machine-learned algorithms that encoded all of this intelligence … but now you can create new intelligence with a prompt. And a prompt is software to the LLMs.

Nathan Baschez—Infinite Loops | 91 minutes

AGI is Still 30 Years Away:

[The whole idea of the intelligence explosion is] not a very useful concept. It’s kind of like calling the Industrial Revolution a horsepower explosion. Sure, during the Industrial Revolution, we saw this drastic acceleration in raw physical power, but there are many other things that were maybe equally important in explaining the acceleration of growth and technological change that we saw during the Industrial Revolution.

Tamay Besiroglu—Dwarkesh Podcast | 128 minutes

Blockchains, AI, and the Future of the Internet:

With the internet, something like 90% of the net new value, went to startups, went to new organizations that didn't exist before the internet, Amazon, Google, and such. With mobile, on the flip side, something like 90% went to incumbents […] Will AI be like mobile or like the internet? […] The concern would be, it's more like mobile and that it just ends up reinforcing the strengths of the big companies.

Chris Dixon—Conversations with Tyler | 63 minutes

💎 Timeless

1️⃣ year ago—Fear and Loathing of A.I.

2️⃣ years ago—Against Safetyism

3️⃣ years ago—How Pattie Maes Almost invented Social Media