Weekly Link Roundup #24
The joy of getting answers, why you should read scifi and funny animal pics!
With Gemini on Android, Google Points to Mobile Computing’s Future—and Past - Google’s new upgrades to Gemini and Circle to Search offer a look at how the operating system might change and revolve around artificial intelligence: From the article “Circle to Search—which the company debuted a few months ago—is more interactive than just typing into a search box. (You literally circle what you want to search on the screen.) Burke says, “It’s a very visceral, fun, and modern way to search … It skews younger as well because it’s so fun to use.” > > So now picture yourself telling a new hire maybe 12-24 months in the future, that instead of circling something on their screen with their cursor or stylus or finger and getting an instant answer, they will need to get out of that system, and open up another system and then search, not for an answer but for a course, then take that course and maybe, maybe, get the information they need to arrive at their answer. How’s that going to go over? Especially when the job description said you were a “fast-paced company".”
The 30 Comedy Pet Photo Awards Finalists Are Adorable and Hilarious: Look, I know I write a lot about AI and learning and innovation, yadda yadda. I also love funny animal pics. They used to be the heartbeat of the Internet.
LLMs ‘for all official EU languages’ on horizon for Finnish startup: This is key. “Helsinki-based Silo AI calls the new large language model Viking 7B. It covers Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish, as well as English and programming languages. Evaluations indicate best-in-class performance in all the Nordic languages — without compromising the English outputs.” > > If you’re a global company, you’re going to probably have to deal with multiple LLMs, certainly an LLM trained on multiple languages and wait until you see multi-lingual hallucinations. Not saying you don’t move ahead but this should be an element in your planning and it should include reality checks with local speakers.
AI in Gmail will sift through emails, provide search summaries, send emails: Am I the only one who read this as “AI sends email, AI reads email, lather, rinse, repeat”? I mean I don’t have anything (in theory) about email as a medium between humans but when AI is mediating the communication ON BOTH ENDS, then I think we need to be considering what comms looks like going forward.
Why ‘Multimodal AI’ Is the Hottest Thing in Tech Right Now: Every time I see a story like this, I hope that somewhere, an L&D team is reading it in a weekly or daily standup and cranking out in short order, content for their org and leaders on why this is a tech development to be aware of and what its impacts could be.
OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever is officially leaving: File under not surprising but still makes the foundations a little shakier and argues for having a diversified AI vendor package.
Aldous Huxley Explains How Man Became “the Victim of His Own Technology” (1961): Almost like Huxley knew what he was talking about (also, read scifi): “if you plant the seed of applied science or technology, it proceeds to grow, and it grows according to the laws of its own being. And the laws of its being are not necessarily the same as the laws of our being.”
Internet use statistically associated with higher wellbeing, finds new global Oxford study: “Researchers examined data 2,414,294 individuals from 168 countries, from 2006-2021. The poll assessed well-being with face-to-face and phone surveys by local interviewers in the respondents’ native languages in relation to internet use and psychological well-being across 33,792 different statistical models and subsets of data, 84.9% of associations between internet connectivity and wellbeing were positive and statistically significant.” > > Longitudinal data across multiple countries with huge positive results. I contrast that with the critique of The Anxious Generation; a sample "On March 29, Candice L. Odgers, a psychology professor at UC Irvine, published one such assessment in Nature. “[T]he book’s repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science,” she writes. “Worse, the bold proposal that social media is to blame might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental-health crisis in young people.” Maybe popular science is more popular than science at times.
The Gartner Emerging Tech Impact Radar highlights the technologies and trends with the greatest potential to disrupt a broad cross-section of markets: First, let me say that I like radar more than the hype cycle - mainly because I think we’re at the point where things can leap across segments on the hype cycle so it ends up portraying an image of a clean path that doesn’t really exist. This radar is missing something and that a vector - see we all know these are supposed to be moving to the center but I want to see how fast its moving and if its speed is steady, increasing or decreasing. You can read the report at the link above but I wanted to point out this one headline from it - “Use the emerging tech impact radar to plan investments and strategy.” That’s exactly right and exactly what I’d wager, 99.9% of all orgs have zero processes or programs to do. This report and a lot of the trend reports contain loads of great info and I haven’t seen one org that has a programmatic way to intake and digest the useful bits from those reports.
How the Year 2440 Was Imagined in a 1771 French Sci-Fi Novel: “Many Americans might think of Rip Van Winkle as the first man to nod off and wake up in the distant future. But as often seems to have been the case in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the French got there first. Almost 50 years before Washington Irving’s short story, Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s utopian novel L’An 2440, rêve s’il en fut jamais (1771) sent its sleeping protagonist six and a half centuries forward in time. Read today, as it is in the new Kings and Things video above, the book appears in roughly equal parts uncannily prophetic and hopelessly rooted in its time — setting the precedent, you could say, for much of the yet-to-be-invented genre of science fiction.”
Generative AI Doesn’t Make Hardware Less Hard: File under “yep”
Five Emerging Technologies In Leadership Development: Hey look - someone else recommending creating digital twins of the people in your org. Like here, and oh yeah, here.
The leaders of IKEA, ServiceNow, Coursera, and Publicis Sapient offer different visions of how AI will impact their companies: OK, cool…now please do a follow-up in 6 months and a year and see how close these visions match the reality. Not for a score keeping purpose but really to understand how they got there, or even how they came up with these visions and what roadblocks they actually encountered.
David Sacks reveals Glue, the AI company he’s been teasing on his All In podcast: I only include this to say that you can save some time and never ask me about this or any product, company, or service backed by David Sacks.