Notices by Dare Obasanjo (carnage4life@mas.to), page 3

When you use sayings but don’t understand what they mean

An experiment has confirmed an intuitive impact of using AI to aid writing; one person using AI will produce more creative ideas than without but a group end up with very similar writings.

It’s like using Google search for writing ideas. If we all did, it’d be repetitive.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/12/experiment-finds-ai-boosts-creativity-individually-but-lowers-it-collectively/

It’s amazing to me how quickly OpenAI speed ran the cycle from “we’re just a bunch of nerds building cool tech to change the world” to “we’re at war with our employees who think we’re a soulless for-profit corporation”.

It took Google decades to run through what’s taken OpenAI months

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/07/13/openai-safety-risks-whistleblower-sec/

In a 180° turn from last week, Apple is no longer going to join OpenAI board and Microsoft has left the board as well.

This is in response to regulators in the EU and US investigating these relationships as a form of antitrust violation.

OpenAI will instead host regular meetings with partners such as Microsoft and Apple and investors Thrive Capital and Khosla Ventures.

Since they had non-voting board seats this is effectively the same thing. Your move regulators. 😇

https://www.ft.com/content/ecfa69df-5d1c-4177-9b14-a3a73072db12

Illinois has enacted a ground breaking law that requires influencers whose kids appear in 30% or more of their social media content to pay their children. The money should be kept in a trust until the kid is 18 and if not, the child has the right to sue the parents.

This is good. Every state should enact similar laws.

https://fortune.com/2024/07/09/illinois-child-influencer-law-social-media/

The Gartner hype cycle is a useful tool for understanding how excitement about a new technology works. It’s also helpful to combine it with the idea of crossing the chasm.

The hype cycle implies all technologies will be useful but crossing the chasm reminds us they need adoption.

For example, the hype cycle would give you the impression that NFTs would one day hit the plateau of productivity. In reality, it never crossed the chasm because it didn’t solve any real problems well.

Goldman Sachs issues a report about generative AI; currently too expensive to justify ROI, no killer app and looming power & chip shortages.

That said they see money to be made if a killer app is found and also simply because bubbles take a long time to burst.

You can read the entire 31 page report below https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/pages/gs-research/gen-ai-too-much-spend-too-little-benefit/report.pdf

The fact Biden has to tweet he’s not too senile to be president and won’t step down while Trump faces no pressure to defend his candidacy despite being a convicted rapist, fraudster and widely acknowledged racist is everything wrong with American politics.

Google is worried that it’ll lose its antitrust case about paying Apple $20B/year to be the default search in Safari.

So it considered making AI overviews only available in its apps to drive usage but decided against it at the last minute. I don’t think it’d have worked either.

I think the chances of Google losing this case are quite low since it penalizes the companies Google is paying for search defaults like Apple & Mozilla more than it does Google.

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-struggles-to-lessen-reliance-on-apple-safari

I’m curious what outcome the EU expects from passing laws with the option to fine companies 10% of GLOBAL revenue if it’s decided their features aren’t open enough.

It’s quite believable Apple would get charged under the law for only including ChatGPT but not Claude or Gemini.

The EU has created a situation where their citizens get worse products than the rest of the world while not incentivizing homegrown alternatives. At least China got that part right in their protectionist policies.

Weight loss drugs are the new iPhone

Amazon hiring the founders of Adept AI which raised $415M is reminiscent of Microsoft hiring the founders of Inflection AI.

I see this as a sign that even with hundreds of millions raised, startups simply can’t keep up with the cost of competing with big tech.

https://www.geekwire.com/2024/amazon-hires-founders-from-well-funded-enterprise-ai-startup-adept-to-boost-tech-giants-agi-team/

Every American watching the debate right now.

Had a great dry run of my #FigmaConfig2024 talk this afternoon. I’ve heard the talk is sold out in a 1,900 person room which is both humbling and intimidating.

I’m looking forward to meeting a bunch of you in person.

The movie industry is a great example of stated versus revealed preferences. People claim they want original ideas at the box office and hate sequels then when given the choice it’s Bad Boys 4 and Inside Out 2 all the way.

Apple will not ship Apple Intelligence, iPhone Mirroring and SharePlay Screensharing in the EU this year because of the Digital Markets Act.

The company blames interoperability requirements which would force them to compromise user privacy and data security. 🙃

The EU’s journey to legislate getting shittier versions of American tech products is almost complete. It’s all going according to plan I guess. 🤷🏾♂️

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-21/apple-won-t-roll-out-ai-tech-in-eu-market-over-regulatory-concerns?embedded-checkout=true

Who is asking for this?

This goes to show that generative AI is so expensive that giving the features away for free doesn't make sense even at Amazon's scale. Hard to see how continuous spending on GPUs without clear business value won't slow down eventually.

A key reason I dislike online and corporate social justice efforts is that they are mostly performative and inconsequential while real injustice is ignored.

Google will happily police if you can say “guys” in a meeting while systematically underpaying 15,500 women for years.

The BBC has a story about how 60 writers and editors who did content marketing for a tech company were reduced to a staff of one editor who edits articles and blog posts written by ChatGPT.

This is an extreme example of how entire fields will be decimated.

I expect a similar pattern will show up in graphic arts, animation and VFX. We will see entire teams of artists reduced to a handful who primarily fix up the errors generated by AI.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240612-the-people-making-ai-sound-more-human

In April 2024, Dell announced a new policy that makes fully remote employees ineligible for promotions, with the exception of hybrid workers. Nearly half of the company's employees have said given this choice, they'd rather work from home than be eligible for promotion.

Based.