Ersatz
'AI' is Our Polyester ⓧ The Verifying 'AI' Bottleneck ⓧ Still a 'AI' Sceptic?
There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening—Marshall McLuhan
👋 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 ⚡
📚 Reading
GenAI is Our Polyester:
AI art is already in very poor taste: not just because it recycles existing conventions in a way that looks outmoded, but because it's already overly associated with less-than-prestigious institutions. GenAI art has already reached polyester status, and this is just the beginning. Despite all the techno-utopian promises, our brains see it as ersatz.
W. David Marx—Culture | 6 minutes
AI Prompting → AI Verifying:
The concept of verification as the bottleneck for AI users is under-discussed. Yes, you can try formal verification, or critic models where one AI checks another, or other techniques. But to even be aware of the issue as a first class problem is half the battle. For users: AI verifying is as important as AI prompting.
Balaji Srinivasan—X | 1 minute
My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts:
Part of being a senior developer is making less-able coders productive, be they fleshly or algebraic. Using agents well is both a both a skill and an engineering project all its own, of prompts, indices, and (especially) tooling. LLMs only produce shitty code if you let them…Also: let’s stop kidding ourselves about how good our human first cuts really are.
Thomas Ptacek | 16 minutes
🎧 Listening
The New Rules of Silicon Valley:
Every founder has to have two parallel organizations. One I call it forward motion and one I call lateral motion. So forward motion is the things that are working. How do you scale those things? And lateral motion is what are the portfolio of risks that you are taking to create something new, zero to one, that will be relevant three to five years from today. And you have to pay attention as a founder CEO on both sides of the equation. That how do you continuously do lateral movement?
Bipul Sinha—The Logan Bartlett Show | 66 minutes
How Human-Centered AI Actually Gets Built:
The way information is encoded and transmitted and distributed has drastically changed. We now have computers, we now have the internet, we now have AI…We have tools to do lifelong continuous learning…AI is a huge opportunity in terms of using technology to help serving people. In every single industry, wee can find human-centered AI examples.
Fei-Fei Li—High Signal | 23 minutes
Rethinking the Straight-Line Path to AGI:
We are underestimating the number of technical breakthroughs that we would have to have to really get into a place where these [AGI] visions come true…if we don't solve the problems I'm describing with adaptable context, intent over time, the ability to sort of make optimizations across multiple partial rewards, we're going to be in trouble from a perspective of wanting all of this AI magic to come true.
Nate B Jones—AI News & Strategy Daily | 9 minutes
💎 Timeless
1️⃣ year ago—The Evolution of Stupidity (and Octopus Intelligence)
2️⃣ years ago—Why Chatbots Are Not the Future
3️⃣ years ago—Too Big To Think: Why Prestigious Institutions Stopped Generating Good Ideas