🔮 Ilya’s resurrection; new news; copyright & AI; heat pumps, telepathic tech leaders, Xi's cities & API bills ++ #479
An insider’s guide to AI and exponential technologies
Hi, I’m Azeem Azhar.
In this week’s Sunday edition, we explore the changing news landscape, the return of Ilya Sutskever, and “architecture of participation” for AI.
Enjoy!
Sunday chart: From Murdoch to Musk
One chart to end your week
Traffic to traditional news outlets in the US is collapsing and it’s not just them – only 22% of people globally now rely on publisher websites as their main source of news, down 10 percentage points since 2018. The long-awaited platform shift is happening, but to what? The picture isn’t clear. Social and video platforms are on the rise, but the landscape is fragmented.
The gatekeepers of control have also changed. Where media moguls like Rupert Murdoch once controlled content, now it’s a mishmash of tech platforms, in a more dislocated ecosystem than we’ve seen in the past decade.
These platforms, which prioritise engaging content, have led to the rise of news influencers. 66% of people worldwide watch short news videos on a weekly basis. At the same time, news avoidance is at an all-time high.
The focus on the individual has mixed effects. The journalistic model isn’t necessarily dead, it’s changing. For every successful individual making journalistic strides on these platforms, like Hugo Decrypt, there are figures like Tucker Carlson who reinforce a lack of editorial integrity.
The question is why this is happening. It’s easy to point to the big tech firms (and they haven’t behaved well) but I think there is more going on. Perhaps we’re experiencing the dissolution of a series of grand metanarratives, to use Jean-François Lyotard’s term, like globalisation, neoliberalism, universalism, perhaps even of the Whiggish notion of progress in the face of climate change. This foments scepticism towards institutions that frame themselves around those metanarratives and fragmentation of authority. The challenge for news institutions is how they find their role in such a changing environment; and for society, how it can establish a sense of truth in a sea of overlapping and often conflicting viewpoints.
On a personal note, what role do you think Exponential View plays in your understanding of the world? I’d love to know.
Spotlight
Ideas we’re paying attention to this week
On the 36th day he rose again. Ilya Sutskever, the AGI “messiah” and former chief scientist of OpenAI, is setting up a new company called Safe Superintelligence Inc with a couple of guys called Daniel.1 He wants it to do what it says on the tin: develop safe superintelligence. Like a dozen or more foundation model makers, Sutskever is pursuing the scaling strategy – the predictable increase in performance as models get bigger by orders of magnitude. There is a lot riding on the continuation of this law – including Nvidia’s share price. Nvidia is, after all, the “shovel seller” of the computing power needed to scale these models. Last week Nvidia was briefly the most valuable company in the world. They will remain near the top if the scaling rules hold. If they don’t…
See also: Anthropic has released Claude 3.5 Sonnet – now arguably the best model out there according to benchmarks.
Paying for AI. Last week, we discussed the difficulty of proving the use of specific data in AI models. Another critical issue is creating a system where data providers have their copyright respected and are incentivised to provide data. As EV reader and Silicon Valley lodestone Tim O’Reilly points out, “We need to achieve both goals […] to have AI produce quality and credible output […] and the creation of original quality, credible and artistic content.” O’Reilly proposes an “architecture of participation” for the AI ecosystem. At O’Reilly Media, their genAI system tracks the use of copyrighted material, provides links to original sources, and shares revenue based on the contribution of each piece of content to the AI output.
See also: Perplexity was found to be scraping content from websites, including those that had blocked its crawler using the Robots Exclusion Protocol. Their method was complex and covert, using unpublished IP addresses and likely using automated web browsers to access and download web pages. This discovery is a great piece of investigative journalism.
AI and the old world. Apple will not roll out key features, including Apple Intelligence, to EU users because of uncertainty from the Digital Markets Act. As I wrote last week, the “firm knocked it out of the park” with Apple Intelligence. It isn’t clear that this outcome is necessarily best for European consumers. As a Brit, this may be an unexpected benefit of Brexit.
Opinion
🤔 Claude 3 is the Macintosh of AI
I marginally prefer using Claude 3 to ChatGPT. I’ve found it has a more ‘approachable’ interface. Think of it as Apple’s Macintosh vs Microsoft’s DOS. Both Apple and Microsoft computers could do similar tasks. But everyday users preferred Apple’s offering because of its graphical user interface (GUI), as computer columnist Bob Ryan
Data
TDK, Apple’s battery supplier, reported that its new small solid-state batteries have an estimated energy density of 1,000 watt-hours per litre, about 100 times greater than its conventional mass-produced solid-state batteries.
87% of firms surveyed by Bain & Co have a genAI programme.
Installing a heat pump is the single biggest step households can take to reduce carbon emissions from their homes, saving nearly 3,000 kg of CO2 per year.
US household stock allocation has reached a record high of 34.5%.
When New Zealand became the first country to give women the right to vote in 1893, only 9.77% of countries had universal male suffrage.
Short morsels to appear smart at dinner parties
🥲 Disinformation fails: when agents of chaos from Russia forget to pay their OpenAI subscription.
🌃 Xi Jinping, China’s supreme leader and part-time urban planner, thinks your city is too weird-looking.
🐙 Claude 3 Sonnet’s leaked system prompt shows the underbelly of its personality.
💭 From Edison to Elon, tech visionaries can’t resist the allure of telepathy.
🍃 Nature-calibrated clocks serve as a reminder of the interconnectedness of all living things.
📄 Is Twitter an effective vehicle for academic knowledge?
End note
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Thanks,
😍 Azeem
What you’re up to – community updates
Annalee Bloomfield’s company, Sustain.Life has been acquired by Workiva. Congrats!
Yoram Wijngaarde argues that Nvidia’s $3 trillion valuation is not a bubble.
Hugh Knowles’ team at Friends of the Earth has won a key case in favour of grassroots and climate campaigners, delivering a significant blow to the fossil fuel industry.
Robyn Scott and Apolitical have been given a $5 million grant by Google to train 1 million public servants in AI skills.
Jamie Smith has launched a newsletter, Customer Futures, about how tech is changing customer relationships. The is a great essay on Apple, AI and privacy in the current issue.
Adam Oskwarek team at Zopeful has created a free 13-day course all about how to decarbonise the world sector-by-sector.
Sarah Gold is hosting a panel discussion on Mindful Friction in AI.
Share your updates with EV readers by telling us what you’re up to here.
Daniel Gross, who at 19 tried to take on Google with his search engine startup Cue, and Daniel Levy, former member of technical staff at OpenAI.
Exponential View is very helpful as a principled content curator, with a level of commentary that is always grounded on reliable data sources. Most journalism is opinion, and analysis but not close to the curation end of the spectrum. Principled curation is a crucial part of a collective-intelligence knowledge ecosystem.
For me it's about consuming via trusted sources who are often aggregators of the sheer volume of news. I deliberately stopped consuming the news via traditional means years ago due to the if it bleeds it leads approach.