👋🍿 Your weekly snack of the most remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture. Three reads and three listens; no fluff, just stuff ⚡
The past is written, but the future is left for us to write. And we have powerful tools, openness, optimism, and the spirit of curiosity – Capt. Jean-Luc Picard
📚 Reading
What Happened to the New Internet?
[T]he pushback by various groups of actors against social media, tech monopolies, platform capitalism, and the attention economy; the counter proposal of an indie web, a decentralized web, a Peer-to-Peer web, a permissionless web, even erasing the web entirely […] the cultural backlash against 'tech bros' and startup culture; the call by many for slow, open, and humane technology. I'm thinking of the people who likened computers to gardens.
Bryan Lehrer | 64 minutes
The New New Moats:
If it were not for the release of LLaMA, I would imagine most of the value would accrue to companies like Google or startups like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Inflection that have access to capital (and GPUs) to train these models. One question ahead of us is the balance between models with trillions of parameters versus smaller models. If the race favors bigger and bigger models, then perhaps scale becomes the ultimate moat.
Jerry Chen—Greymatter | 27 minutes
A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft:
In chess, which for decades now has been dominated by A.I., a player’s only hope is pairing up with a bot. Such half-human, half-A.I. teams, known as centaurs, might still be able to beat the best humans and the best A.I. engines working alone. Programming has not yet gone the way of chess. But the centaurs have arrived […] Everywhere I looked I could see GPT-4-size holes; I understood, finally, why the screens around the office were always filled with chat sessions
James Somers—The New Yorker | 23 minutes
🎧 Listening
Bumper Sticker Gurus:
I think we are not going to be communicating or interacting with each other like the way we have had in the past because the cost of interacting online is extreme now. One word out of place and you are vilified for actually having a half baked heart. There is no room for forgiveness. There is no room for nuance. So what do you do in a situation like that? You retreat to your corner and just say, you know what, I think I should avoid it.
Om Malik—Full Stack Whatever | 60 minutes
Why (and How) SMBs and Creators Will Win With AI:
AI clearly benefits the really big platforms […] But then if you're super small, just as cloud let you basically compete with way more leverage and scale than ever before, this is just like that on steroids. So you can be two, three, five people and just do incredibly... In a niche, own it, do incredibly valuable things faster and more efficiently than ever before with AI. So it's like a great time to be a very profitable, non-venture-back small business
Sam Lessin—More or Less | 62 minutes
OpenAI DevDay: Beyond the Headlines
There's so much opportunity for startups being created. I think the reality is, if your startup was a super, super thin wrap around something, you didn't really have a startup. You just had some project that you were working on that was building off of an API […] The barrier to entry for new startups and for people to build extremely compelling products has never been lower. And there's never been more amazing technology to build with.
Logan Kilpatrick—Cognitive Revolution | 74
☄️ History
1️⃣ year ago: Our machines crossed the threshold of being genuinely creative.
2️⃣ years ago: Nostalgia in, nostalgia out: when algorithms train on our past behaviours and tastes.
3️⃣ years ago: What everyone got wrong about the Long Tail.