👋 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 chop shops and icky click-bait chum. No fluff, just stuff⚡️
📚 Reading
When The Internet Becomes Chat:
AI breakthroughs are leading to a broader reconsideration of how we create and navigate information. Ground zero for that change is the spine that holds the internet together, search [..] I suspect you feel it too. The internet has become a cluttered mess of misaligned incentives. The pressure is mounting to evolve at a structural level. AI is creating a crack, and the economic incentives to disrupt Google's position are tantalizing.
Troy Young—People vs Algorithms | 10 minutes
Google is losing control:
[S]ome upstart immune to acquisition, had triggered the next phase of evolution for the search engine, and that they had done so in a highly public way that captured the imagination of everyone from industry leaders to the tech-avoidant. The real twist of the knife came unexpectedly from Microsoft [..] Whether their investment in OpenAI was preternatural foresight or fortunate serendipity, at some point it became clear that they had backed a fast horse.
Devin Coldewey—TechCrunch | 10 minutes
1979:
I love technology and gadgets, and all the things they can do for me. But thinking about what things were like in 1979 reminds me that life is perfectly possible without all our modern “conveniences” and their hidden costs and unseen consequences. For instance, my old drawings and artwork could be lost in a fire or flood. But they may well still be around hundreds of years from now, and they won’t need any special device or software to be seen.
Mark Simonson | 8 minutes
🎧 Listening
AI & Evolution: Learning to do More with Less:
[W]hen these models are open, in the sense that people can tinker and develop them collectively, you get all sorts of innovations that you will never get at big companies. Stable Diffusion is an example where I would say, we're not really optimizing for pure state-of-the-art performance. We're optimizing for the best performance, given the constrained resources that we have.
David Ha—Infinite Loops | 56 minutes
ChatGPT versus Google:
You have Github Copilot, and it's writing code for you, but you are a coder, and you can look at it and check. So what are the domains where you can tell it's wrong versus what are the domains where being wrong is a problem; a 2x2 matrix of how much does it matter versus how much can you tell? [..] Wrong is on a sliding scale: qualitative in some things, and binary and logical in other things.
Toni Cowan-Brown, Benedict Evans—Another Podcast | 34 minutes
The Pixel Revolution:
I think you should expect that we're only going to give users more and more control over the kinds of creations that they make [..] I think prompts are going to be less and less valuable in time [..] There's is WYSIWYG—What You See Is What You Get—but what I would really like to do is What You Think Is What You Get [..] If you can imagine it, I’d like to be able to produce that for you.
Suhail Doshi—Cognitive Revolution | 81 minutes
🎁 One More Thing
In Scenius Mag this week, we ran a few stories on how the old kind of gatekeeping favoured standardised over weird and how connecting back to our weirdness is what will build, grow, and capture loyal audiences.