Weekly Link Roundup
I know...goes against the 'share now' impetus but maybe taking a beat will help....
So I guess the idea here will be fairly self-explanatory - a weekly writeup of the links I found and some short thoughts about them. Probably fewer in number that what I sent out on Twitter…so maybe less activity but more value ;-)
Runway’s Gen-2 update is blowing people’s minds with incredible AI video: text to video and image to video generation gets big improvements. I think about this in terms of everything from training content generation to building compelling proof of concept pieces.
What Problems Should Technology Focus on?: The MIT Technology Review asked a wide range of notable folks, what problems they thought tech should focus on solving. I like a group of diverse viewpoints and they do talk to so of my favs (Cory Doctorow, Annalee Newitz) but I have two issues with the piece. First is that it stays surface level. There is not additional deep dive into any of the issues so its like a great start to a brain storming session but doesn’t go anywhere. My second issue is that I disagree with their framing premise: “Technology is all about solving big thorny problems.” It can be but it doesn’t have to be and what some people might mistake as not being “big thorny problems” like access to clean water or toilets or even how to get light into their houses are actually huge problems that affect big swaths of the world.
Brave responds to Bing and ChatGPT with a new ‘anonymous and secure’ AI chatbot: Anonymity will be a compelling feature going forward. Also, I’m here for anything that keeps competition going on making better browsers. I think we’ve all started just accepting Edge or Chrome or maybe Firefox as the default but I love that ones like Brave and Opera are out there as well.
Factory wants to use AI to automate the software dev lifecycle: I’m always looking for how/when activities that have been construed as value, get automated. There is opportunity and risk in those moments.
Study identifies human–AI interaction scenarios that lead to information cocoons: Add this to the list of dangers to be on guard against. When I was at Amazon, we thought about staring a kind of hall of fame for launching documents so that people could see for example, the docs that launched the Kindle or AWS but we thought the danger there would be creating homogenous docs going forward and we’d lose some creativity. AI-enabled systems will allow us to flirt with that danger at scale and speed.
CIOs Assess Whether Microsoft’s AI Copilot Justifies Premium Price: I know this is from the CIO column on WSJ and that should worry folks. Nothing against CIO’s but unless they’re conducting pilots with well considered criteria to match against productivity measures but are merely making a cost decision with nothing behind it…that’s going to be a problem. Addtl article: https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-copilot-launches-tomorrow-what-the-hell-is-it-1850976086
Turns out I have a lot of links to get out…been hoarding them evidently but wanted to get this out on a Friday to map to the whole weekly thing so I’ll just keep working through them next week. Please let me know if you think this format is helpful.