Currently holed up in Suffolk. And I almost got away without mentioning Apple…
1. The Atlantic gets it
AI "will change the way people find us, it will change all the architecture of the media business, and we’ve got to figure out how to continue to succeed in it,” says Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic. And he's absolutely right. He's also right to focus on high-quality writing, because one of the things which AI means for publishers is no more mass-market cheap traffic.
2. Twenty five years
Meanwhile Sam Bankman-Fried is going to prison for 25 years, and Molly White wrote a great piece in The Guardian pointing out that, in real terms, nothing in the industry has changed. The only lesson that people in the crypto world learned was "I'm smarter than Sam so I won't get caught".
3. The decline and fall of Elon
I've noted before that the main reason Elon Musk wanted to borg OpenAI into Tesla was he knows that the car company is moving beyond the point at which it will be regarded as a "growth" stock, and he needs to maintain its massive and entirely unwarranted share price. Ed Zitron wrote a great article on Musk's finances which, I think, backs up that point: Musk is almost entirely dependent on Tesla's share price for his wealth, because he has a lot of loans secured against Tesla stock. If Tesla starts to be valued as what it it – a mid-tier company in a much more competitive market – he could soon find himself with debts he can only sustain with difficulty.
4. Britain is so screwed
I have some sympathy with Labour's constant refrain that there's "no magic money tree". The point isn't that the government can't invest: it's that fourteen years of Tory mismanagement has left virtually every part of public infrastructure in desperate need of investment. Schools, transport, NHS, higher education: you name it, it's basically been run down, sometimes for idealogical reasons and sometimes because of sheer ineptitude. The week, it's water taking a turn, and Adam Almeida wrote a lovely piece about the absurdity of London's water being run for the benefit of Canadian pensioners.
5. Masters of the universe, apparently
Speaking of Sam Bankman-Fried, it's well worth reading this 14,000 word hagiography of him which appeared on the website of Sequoia, one of the idiot VC firms that tried to hype FTX stock, just a few short months before the whole thing collapsed. These are people who are so smart that when SBF appeared on a call playing League of Legends and giving the most basic answers to questions, they decided he was a genius. "I LOVE THIS FOUNDER" indeed. And these people think they're smart.
6. AI loneliness
There's a lot of really interesting research starting to appear about the second-order effects of the adoption of LLMs (and AI more broadly). I'm generally a long-term optimist, but there's a plethora of societal effects which are less predictable and will need to be taken into account. This paper looks at how using LLMs (or "AI chatbots" as they call them) affects the social lives of students. Well worth a read.
7. Amazon spends a lot of money
One hundred and fifty billion dollars, in fact, on datacentres intended to provide the cloud and AI services of the future. All of which points to one conclusion: where the personal computer revolution rewarded the individual, the cloud computing and AI booms put the power firmly back into the hands of companies capable of raising vast amounts of capital. We're entering a feudal era.
8. Frank Sinatra has a cold
You have all read this, right? If not, do so now and enjoy what good magazine writing looks like.
9. Speaking of classics
Another one to spend some time reading: Wired's nearly 50,000 word piece from 2000 about the Microsoft antitrust trial. So much good stuff in this.
10. And speaking of feudalism and classics…
This article by Bruce Schneier from 2012 notes the similarity between the way that some commentators think about computer security and feudalism: you are expected to pledge your allegiance to one of the big companies like Apple, Google or whoever if you want to be secure from "the bad guys" out there. But sooner or later, King Richard wanders off and King John arrives in his place…
