👋 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 went wrong with generative AI:
OpenAI and Anthropic focused on building models and not worrying about products […] Google and Microsoft shoved AI into everything in a panicked race, without thinking about which products would actually benefit from AI […] The generality of LLMs allowed developers to fool themselves into thinking that they were exempt from the need to find a product-market fit, as if prompting is a replacement for carefully designed products or features.
Arvind Narayanan—X | 2 minutes
Some More Thoughts on AI, Jobs, Wages, Skills, the Future, &etc:
When powerful new technologies come along they generally automate less-skilled labor […] The people who used to make a living doing this work either have to acquire new skills […] The new technology also has another effect: it tends to make advanced skills (again, often acquired via education) more valuable. As automobile factories get more mechanized and productive, for example, car designers can command higher pay.
Andrew McAfee—The Geek Way | 7 minutes
Will LLMs do breakthrough scientific research?
LLMs are particularly, exceedingly, marvellously ill-suited to this task. (if you're a researcher, you'll have noticed this already) […] Absolutely any time I try to explore something even slightly against commonly accepted beliefs, LLMs always just rehash the commonly accepted beliefs. As a researcher, I find this behaviour worse than unhelpful. It gives the mistaken impression that there's nothing to explore.
Jeremy Howard—X | 3 minutes
🎧 Listening
AI at Goldman and the Enterprise
If you start from scratch, there is a lot of general knowledge that is common to everybody that you don't really need to spend time or money on […] and that's really what we do. You take an open source model that has learned English, has learned some reasoning, some math, and whatever, and then from there with data, you're making them into not only the PhD, but you make them into the experienced employee.
Marco Argenti—Newcomer | 21 minutes
Insane Facebook AI Slop:
It's zero marginal cost. We can now generate things for zero marginal cost. And so everything will be generated. And we're all just kind of drowning in slop from now until forever. And lies and all kinds of things. So the point is that we've now automated that process. We have now created a god of lies that is better at lying than human liars. You know, we have replaced the human liars with the god of lies.
Noah Smith with Chris Best | 56 minutes
Chip wars, agents, top line vs. bottom line innovation, and the state of AI:
We have a period of five or 10 years in which this will go from being very cool and very exciting and very sexy and very interesting to being really, really boring. That's kind of how software has evolved […] It will be a new wave of automation […] and we'll have a whole kind of new class of pieces of software that will change everything. But we won't notice; they will just disappear inside what we're already doing.
Benedict Evans—Sana | 21 minutes
💎 Timeless
1️⃣ year ago—How we can teach children so they survive AI
2️⃣ years ago—Sufficient Decentralization for Social Networks
3️⃣ years ago—A Project of One's Own