👋 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
What does it look like for the web to lose?
Why do companies like Apple and Google want you to write native apps over web apps? I can’t pretend to know the minds of entire industry giants, but control seems like one easy answer. [..] One gets the feeling that if any of the huge platform-producing tech companies could have their way, they’d have us all writing proprietary apps for their platform only. Right this second, the web feels like it’s in a good spot, but it also feels like the native vs. web battle is a swinging pendulum.
Chris Coyier | 5 minutes
Is the Business of AI More Like Steel or VBA?
[I]t's useful, at least as a tentative exercise, to ask what the shape of AI's economic impact might be. This doesn't require some kind of maximalist view that AI will replace all knowledge workers once GPT-5 ships, because that’s fundamentally unpredictable. All we really need is to remember this general rule: when some category of product gets radically cheaper, the use cases become surprisingly abundant.
Byrne Hobart—The Diff | 14 minutes
Money Crypto vs Tech Crypto:
I’ve noticed that when people talk about Why Crypto Matters and where The Big Opportunity is, they often begin from different assumptions and starting points. More importantly, there are often different endgames in mind [..] While there’s overlap between these belief systems, to be sure, they have different aims, different approaches, and different philosophical underpinnings — which leads to some of the confusion.
Erik Torenberg | 11 minutes
🎧 Listening
Is ChatGPT A Step Toward Human-Level AI?
OpenAI] have done a good job of integrating things that have been proposed in literature and engineered a system that produces impressive demos because that's the economic model; that's how they are going to raise money from Microsoft and others. Whereas if you are Meta or Google, you could not think about putting out a system of this type that you know is going to spew nonsense; because you're a large company and have a lot to lose, and it's not clear what the benefits are.
Yann LeCun—Big Technology Podcast | 63 minutes
Generative AI:
You are feeding the statistical engine logical steps. You are saying: "double plus this, minus that, conclude this, deemphasize that, emphasize this", and you have ended up with a whole paragraph of instructions, which is actually a formula. You have given it an Excel formula effectively. [..] It's hilarious to have people saying this is going to destroy creativity; that's exactly what this is!
Benedict Evans—Another Podcast | 35 minutes
How We Make Decisions:
The problem with digital is it's infinitely malleable, meaning you can design and make it whatever you want it to be; it can do all these things at once. And so, the constraints of physicality don't get in front of you making hard product decisions in a lot of cases [..] Faced with competitive pressure and the ability to make anything in digital, you get a lot of stuff that migrates from its original use case. And that's where design takes real courage.
Troy Young—People vs Algorithms | 50 minutes