Vertebrate Technology
Chatbots in the bullshit wars, evolution favors modules, and selling the secular or the sacred
šĀ On time for your weekend: a round-up ofĀ this weekās remarkable storiesĀ at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture. Three reads and three listens; no fluff, just stuff ā”
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 āĀ Capt. Jean-Luc Picard
š Reading
Plausible Sentence Generators:
ChatGPT can take over a lot of tasks that, broadly speaking, boil down to ābullshitting.ā It can write legal threats. If you need 2,000 words about āthe first time I ate an eggā to go over your omelette recipe in order to make a search engine surface it, a chatbotās got you. Looking to flood a review site with praise about your business, or complaints about your competitors? Easy [ā¦] In the bullshit wars, chatbots are weapons of mass destruction.
Cory DoctorowāLocus Magazine | 6 minutes
Vertebrate technology:
Hierarchy is emergent, not imposed from above. This is why we see hierarchy in natureācentral nervous systems, keystone species, cells, organs, and organismsāeven though there is no boss of nature [ā¦] Hierarchy also emerges in evolving systems, because evolution happens through composition. Complex things, like animals, are composed of simpler things, like cells, DNA, molecules, atoms. Evolution favors modules.
Gordon BranderāSubconscious | 6 minutes
Are YouĀ Selling the Secular or Sacred?
This is a framework by which you can evaluateĀ whyĀ users of your platform engage with it. By utilizing the tools of economics and behavioral psychology, atomic value swaps let you understand why people use your product. It strips everything down to the base levelāthe more confidently you can answer the question of why users engage with your core product loop, the better youāll be able to build around it.
Chris PaikāEvery | 7 minutes
š§ Listening
Googleās PaLM-2:
We've seen a really powerful increase in our ability to serve these models efficiently [ā¦] And that is really, really interesting to me because we don't want to wind up in a world where the only people who have access to these incredibly powerful tools are people who can afford to pay a premium for accelerators. We should be trying to find ways where we can have really, really super powerful models, but with a much smaller footprint.
Paige BaileyāCognitive Revolution | 55 minutes
Agility, Agreeableness, Alchemy & the Arena:
I'm convinced that for any smart investor or entrepreneur, the mind is always going. There's always an itch to do something, to find something that's interesting. So if you're sitting in the office all day in the market, you don't really get it. It's very hard, I think, to resist the urge to play unless you're like, "Okay, I'm gonna do these other things right now, solve some math problem, play golf, go learn something new and make sure that temptation doesn't take over."
Frederik GieschenāInfinite Loops | 74 minutes
Is AI a Good Investment for VC:
Do I believe that like some new studio is going to come out and take out Pixar? Nah, Pixar will just make a few more films [...] The cost of production and therefore the war of content gets more intense for sure. You'll get to a point where if you don't use this stuff, you're going to get f***ed. But just because the competition level rises doesn't necessarily change the scorecard very much about how these things go.
Sam Lessin, Emad MostaqueāUpstream with Erik Torenberg | 59 minutes