Latest AI Articles

Jun 3

Import AI 375: GPT-2 five years later; decentralized training; new ways of thinking about consciousness and AI

…Are today's AGI obsessives trafficking more in fiction than in fact?...

Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on lattes, ramen, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this (and comment on posts!) please subscribe. SPECIAL EDITION! GPT2, Five Years On: …A cold eyed reckoning about that time in 2019 when wild-eyed technologists created a (then) powerful LLM and used it to make some ver…

Jack Clark ∙ 38 LIKES

Bernard

•

You mentioned the P(Doom) debate. I’m concerned that this debate may focus too much on the risk of extinction with AGI, without discussing the risk of extinction without AGI. For a proper risk assessment, that probability should also be estimated. I see the current p(Doom) as very high, assuming we make no changes to our current course. We are indeed making changes, but not fast enough. In this risk framing, AGI overall lowers the total risk, even if AGI itself carries a small extinction risk

It’s a plausible story to me that we entered a potential extinction event a few hundred years ago when we started the Industrial Revolution. Our capability to affect the world has been expanding much faster than our ability to understand and control the consequences of our changes. If this divergence continues, we will crash. AI, and other new tools, give us the chance to make effective changes at the needed speed, and chart a safe course. The small AGI risk is worthwhile in the crisis we face.

Rohit Krishnan

•

This was an excellent, excellent, retrospective on GPT-2 and the difficulties of arbitrarily "creating a power floor" in AI regulation.

The best idea is still to increase our knowledge, monitor the models, run evals, understand how they work, and then we will know enough that come the right time we know enough to know how to solve the problems they might cause!

Blood in the Machine

Jun 3

Understanding the real threat generative AI poses to our jobs

There will be no robot jobs apocalypse, but there's still plenty to worry about. How *will* generative AI impact our jobs?

Hello, and welcome back to Blood in the Machine: The Newsletter. (As opposed to Blood in the Machine: The Book.) It’s a one-man publication that covers big tech, labor, and AI. It’s all free and public, but if you find this sort of independent tech journalism and criticism valuable, and you’re able, I’d be thrilled if you’d help back the project. Enough…

Brian Merchant ∙ 67 LIKES

J T

•

Small but important note -- even if you don't have a union, if you and your coworkers *collectively* take some form of action (e.g. a jointly signed letter to management expressing concern about poorly-implemented AI), that is still legally protected by labor law, so it would be illegal for your employer to engage in any kind of retaliation. It's called "concerted activity" if you wanna get technical about it, but the legal standard is basically "do something with at least one other person."

Jenni

•

> "Who stands to profit, after all, from the rise of job-stealing software that costs

> a monthly fee to license?"

As well as being about as reliable as a Yugo's transmission. And who has to fix the problems? PEOPLE! And just as people need time off for vacations and illnesses, software "takes time off" when it's down. These idiots who want to fire everyone and just use software doesn't understand that.

I know someone whose company went all out a few years ago with getting all sorts of time-saving, money-saving software. They laid off 25% of their workers. Now they have more problems than they can count, are far behind, and are spending much more money (on software) to achieve the same results. Last December for the first time ever they could not pay out bonuses because all their money went to fixing the software that was going to save them all that money. And this is "reputable" software, from companies like Salesforce, Oracle and Google. At conferences they talk to others in their industry who tell the same story, so it's not just them. When I asked my friend why they did this when it was clearly a losing move, she replied, "Because everyone else [i.e., their competitors] is doing it." Brilliant. Reminds me of Apple's infamous "Lemmings" commercial. It angered people who saw it, but Apple told the truth, and everyone hated them for it.

Import AI

May 27

Import AI 374: China's military AI dataset; platonic AI; brainlike convnets

Plus, a poem about meeting aliens (well, AGI)

Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on lattes, ramen, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this (and comment on posts!) please subscribe. Berkeley researchers discover a suspiciously military-relevant Chinese dataset:

Jack Clark ∙ 18 LIKES

Process This

Jun 3

Introducing My First Substack Conversation Series on Artificial Intelligence

Featuring Kester Brewin and Numerous AI Experts

Hi Friends! I’m excited to launch my very own Substack called “Process This” (think blog that shows up in your inbox) where I’ll have more of an opportunity to connect with Homebrewed listeners around fascinating topics. To get started, I’m hosting a conversation series on

Tripp Fuller ∙ 21 LIKES

Candace Adams

•

Yay! Welcome to Substack, Tripp!

How They Make Money

May 24

🤖 NVIDIA: Industrial Revolution

AI factories are reshaping the future of computing

Welcome to the Friday edition of How They Make Money. Over 100,000 subscribers turn to us for business and investment insights. In case you missed it: ♾ Meta: The Anti-Apple 💊 Pharma Titans Visualized 📊 Earnings Visuals (4/2024) 💰 Hedge Funds' Top Picks in Q1

App Economy Insights ∙ 67 LIKES

Wonder Tools

May 23

📓 Make an AI notebook

Wonder Tools ✍️ Introducing Google’s NotebookLM

Google’s NotebookLM is a new free service that lets you apply AI to your own notes and documents. You can use it to surface new ideas and find fresh connections in your thoughts and research. Read on for how I’m using it, what I like most about it, its limitations, and two interesting alternatives.

Jeremy Caplan ∙ 57 LIKES

(AI + Real Life) x Purpose

•

May 23

It's an interesting tool, but I've found that if you just move the same documents into a folder in your Drive, you can prompt Gemini and tell it to look at the documents in that folder and it seems to be more intelligent / less limited to the documents themselves.

Tom Parish

•

May 25

Very good summary of the tool. I've been on their Discord server and using NotebookLM since last fall. It's been a work in process for sure. But I think they are on to something important. There is a major upgrade coming that we've all been patiently waiting for.

But even if Google's NotebookLM project does not become widely used, I have a hunch we're going to see the same concept for tools like this soon. We'll have to wait until Apple's Dev event in June to see what they will bring forward.

So learning how to use AI-based notebooks will become an important skill all of us will want to learn regardless of which vendor(s) we end up using.

The VC Corner

Jun 2

Seed is broken🌱, AI Startups By Country🌍, The AI Index Report📈

Welcome to The VC Corner, your weekly dose of Venture Capital and Startups to keep you up and running! 🚀 The Creator MBA: Build a lean, profitable internet business in 2024 The Creator MBA delivers a complete blueprint for starting, building, and sustaining a profitable Internet business.

Ruben Dominguez Ibar ∙ 14 LIKES

Rafael Campos

•

How would dilution play out with 2 seed rounds? Would this mean founders could lend after series A with less than 50% stake and funds should accept that easier?

Chamath Palihapitiya

Jun 2

What I Read This Week...

Salesforce stock drops more than 20% after releasing Q2 earnings, investor sentiment is shifting on generative AI, and a new drug offers the possibility of tooth regeneration in humans

Watch All-In E181 Read our latest deep dive into semiconductors Caught My Eye… Salesforce’s share price dropped more than 20% after releasing its Q2 2024 earnings, despite earnings falling just 0.3% below Wall Street analysts' expectations. What's going on? Two factors appear to be responsible for this decline. First, a slowing economy poses a risk to reve…

Chamath Palihapitiya ∙ 70 LIKES

Andrew

•

When will the deep dive on the creator economy be published?

Kevin

•

Outside of investor sentiment, the actual utility of LLM's is also losing its shine. Trying to find some use of AI in equity research. Looking for the intersection of 3 Venn diagrams: The quality of the prompts / The quality of the LLM / The quality of the data. It's the last one that is lacking. I've tried uploading all annual reports and documents of a specific company to get a "company Chatbot" to talk to, but the results are mixed.

Working Theorys

Jun 3

The Rise of the Software Creator

In the age of AI, software creators, like content creators, will emerge as the industry’s non-professional creative class.

No, this isn’t the end of software, but it is the beginning of a new software era. And I like the media industry analogy, but it’s an evolution, not a death. [1] Legacy media was dominated by high-budget mass producers of film, television, radio, and print. It was technically complex, expensive, and centrally controlled by a few big players. The internet revolutionized this, lowering costs, increasing access, and giving rise to giant “streaming” and user-generated content platforms.

Anu ∙ 47 LIKES

Aki Taha

•

I really enjoyed this post.

Feels like software is a part of the shift from mass to niche then; that it’s becoming more personalized.

And it seems that it’s also part of a big, sweeping trend in which people/users are losing trust in a powerful center; because they are not getting their needs met by that center.

So content, and media and software, yes, but you see the same decentralization (or “fractionalization” or “unbundling”, if you like) happening in:

- crypto — from traditional to centralized finance

- at work

People opting out of or unbundling from traditional, centralized work, is spurring decentralization in these other realms; while those realms becoming more of an option into which to unbundle our work is in turn feeding the unbundling of work. Round and round it goes and I imagine the cycle accelerates as it becomes easier and more socially acceptable to do non-traditional, non-one-job-at-a-time work.

Melissa

•

I currently maintain two private repos with my blockchain blogging software. Software creation has definitely evolved in the innovative blockchain and AI space in recent years, especially when it comes to participating in creator - focused hackathons. I've witnessed many weekend hackathon projects become full on businesses and as well as become abandon. I think today's creators are more empowered with so many incentives from organizations willing to pay for the space to create and see what happens next.

TheSequence

Jun 2

Mistral Codestral is the Newest AI Model in the Code Generation Race

Plus updates from Elon Musk's xAI , several major funding rounds and intriguing research publications.

Next Week in The Sequence: Mistral Codestral is the New Model for Code Generation Edge 401: We dive into reflection and refimenent planning for agents. Review the famous Reflextion paper and the AgentVerse framework for multi-agent task planning. Edge 402:

Jesus Rodriguez ∙ 10 LIKES

Educating AI

Jun 3

AI Agents Are Really AI Tools

Troubling the Agent vs. Tool Dichotomy

Greetings, Amazing Educating AI Readers!!! Before I begin, I want to thank my readers who have decided to support my Substack via paid subscriptions. I appreciate this vote of confidence. Your contributions allow me to dedicate more time to research, writing, and building Educating AI's network of contributors, resources, and materials.

Nick Potkalitsky ∙ 27 LIKES

Michael Woudenberg

•

This is a good case study for why I like to entrust AI to specific tasks / roles vs. just 'trusting' AI as an amorphous, autonomous, system. I wrote about that in more detail here:

https://www.polymathicbeing.com/p/dont-trust-ai-entrust-it

Pascal Montjovent

•

According to Alain Damasio, a sociologist and "disciple" of Baudrillard, technological tools can never be neutral. Their development is funded by investors, these technologies are designed to create strong dependency, and they are built to exploit our desires and habits. This implies they are not neutral but intentionally influential and manipulative.

In his latest book, just published and not yet translated into English ('Vallée du Silicium'), Damasio brilliantly exposes how new technologies, including artificial intelligence, shape our lives and behaviors. This book is not a diatribe; it’s a series of chronicles and encounters. Several interview videos with Damasio are available on YouTube, and you can activate subtitle translation to understand them better.

https://youtu.be/ofs-9_yzcvY?si=RuRUupi7UO41oSN9

Exponential View by Azeem Azhar

Jun 2

🔮 AI & creativity; exponential compute; peak GHGs, recycling concrete & marriage saves lives ++ #476

Hi, I’m Azeem Azhar. In this week’s edition, we explore AI’s capacity for divergent thinking and how this can help the scientific process. And in the rest of today’s issue: Need to know: Modest gains Daron Acemoglu’s latest research looks at the next decade of AI’s macroeconomic impact.

Azeem Azhar ∙ 37 LIKES

Charles Fadel

•

Thanks for brining up Creativity, Azeem.

I'd like to be a bit more precise in language: Creativity is a number of different attributes, including but not limited to divergent thinking. My Center's extensive review of the learning sciences literature comes up with 5 subcompetencies for Creativity:

* Developing personal tastes, aesthetics, and style

* Generating and seeking new ideas

* Being comfortable with risks, uncertainty, and failure

* Connecting, reorganizing, and refining ideas into a cohesive whole

* Realizing ideas while recognizing constraints

In an AI world, incremental innovation is no longer sufficient - we agree, as AI can analogize/mimic and extrapolate, as humans do. The radical innovation side - imagination - is harder to do, but humans also need to wade through a lot of increments to come up with brilliance (Mozart etc. also did plenty of pedestrian work, with occasional flashes of brilliance).

This and other 9 competencies are described in the book I shared with you as pdf a few months ago: https://curriculumredesign.org/our-work/education-for-the-age-of-ai/ happy to discuss when you turn your attention to the consequences on education.

Be well, Charles

Write More with Simon K Jones

Jun 3

It's not artists who should fear AI

AI might be an extinction-level threat, but not in the way we think

As artists, we’ve been living in a state of perpetual fear and uncertainty since 2022. Sorry, I meant since 1422. Maybe earlier. But that constant sensation of being an endangered species intensified dramatically in 2022 with the arrival of generative AI.

Simon K Jones ∙ 110 LIKES

Johnathan Reid

•

Think you've set the correct acerbic tone for the many creatives amongst us. One of the issues to note which came up on a foresight exercise I participated in a while back is related to this scenario you flagged:

"The most useful AI tools will [be] assisting doctors and experts and researchers, or aiding those who have immense skill in specific areas..."

The problem here is that to reach the levels of expertise demanded of surgeons, lawyers, engineers etc requires years of training under the supervision of said experts. But if they begin to use AI assistants for reasons of cost, efficiency and availability, then there won't be any trainees coming up through the ranks to replace them. This means expertise degrading irrespective of long-term demand. It's not a great scenario.

Caz Hart

•

The joy also used to be in the research. Apparently, according to Google, we can make do with an AI synopsis, which might or might not bear any relationship to primary materials or reality. This is a concerning business decision, a dumb decision.

The Connector

May 30

Time to Calm Down About AI and Politics

It turns out generative AI isn't going to be the Meetup or Facebook or Twitter of this election cycle.

Hello to all my new subscribers! If you’re here because you read the tome I put out last week about how race, class, and identity were playing out in my home congressional district, as incumbent Rep. Jamaal Bowman and challenger George Latimer clash in the wake of the Israel-Palestine rift among Democrats, be forewarned: The Connector is my forum for re…

Micah L. Sifry ∙ 7 LIKES

spiky

•

13h

>Related: I’m intrigued by Sourcebase.ai, an AI platform designed for journalists, researchers, and professionals who need to make sense of massive amounts of source material.

Oh, you doogie-woogies. Aren't you supposed to be the ones making sense of things? If you're just repeating the sense an AI made of it, with a little bit of personal noodling at the start and the end, what do we need you for?

This has already sort of happened, though - it's pretty easy to tell when an article is just things the author saw on twitter or reddit with nothing of substance added. So no, AI isn't going to make a huge difference - lazy journalists have been able to rehash the internet instead of thinking for twenty years already...and boy have they.

You know who'll come out on top of all this? The few people who stay original, or at least rehash things other people haven't seen yet. It's them that the AI & thereafter everyone else will be rehashing.

It's not just "ideas" we're talking about. They who, like Shakespeare, invent words, lead -- it is by their clever fingers that our stage is painted bright and gaily furnish'd.

The God Pod

Jun 5

AI Image Of Trump Only Time He Will Ever Be Happy

In reality, he is miserable and disliked.

In a blatant display of digital deception, an AI-generated image of former President Donald Trump smiling at a cookout surrounded by Black supporters has surfaced online. This doctored image is notable not only for its artificial nature but also because it may be the only time in his life that Trump will ever be happy.

God ∙ 114 LIKES

Jasmine Wolfe

•

The lead up to this election is going to be rife with AI generated disinformation😕

Rich M

•

I'd prefer to see him miserable for the rest of his days, few may they be.

But yeah, the pic is funny 😂

Growth Memo

May 27

The traffic impact of AI Overviews

An analysis of 1,675 keywords shows AIOs could reduce organic clicks

A warm welcome to 115 new Growth Memo readers who joined us since last week! Join the ranks of Amazon, Microsoft, Google and 12,500 other Growth Memo readers:

Kevin Indig ∙ 20 LIKES

Barry Adams

•

May 27

Great analysis dude. And perfectly timed as I’m presenting on this on Wednesday - I’ll definitely be citing you!

Salvador Lorca

•

May 28

I wrote about this article of yours, which I liked:

https://estilo.substack.com/p/ai-overviews-google-esta-jugando

After, I posted a note: https://substack.com/@leyderecho/note/c-57481889

The Present Age

May 24

Google's AI-Generated Search Results Keep Citing The Onion

Plus other stories!

Hi all, Parker here. A Google search for the phrase “how many rocks should I eat each day” returned an AI-generated result citing “UC Berkeley geologists” who suggest people eat “at least one small rock a day.” It turns out that the actual source of this information was

Parker Molloy ∙ 141 LIKES

Sean Corfield

•

May 24

I'm so glad I switched from Google to Bing years ago...

Yes, Bing uses AI to provide summarized results as well, but at least it clearly annotates which sites/pages it drew parts of the summary from and provides a list of footnotes.

As for the misinformed American public... I despair! How are so many people -- a majority or near-majority on those issues -- so out of touch with reality? Is the news media doing such a poor job, or is it the politically motivated media just overwhelming any good news coming out of the mainstream?

Terry Cook

•

May 24

Yet no comments on the CIA protocols on usage of purple vs. green ink on document markups?

TheSequence

May 26

Generative AI Unicorn Capitulation

Adept and Humane are looking for buyers.

Next Week in The Sequence: Edge 399: Our series about autonomous agents continues with an overview of external aid planning. We dive into IBM’s Simplan method for planning in LLMs and review the Langroid framework for autonomous agents. Edge 340: A must read about AlphaFold 3 which expanded capabilities to predict many of the life’s m…

Jesus Rodriguez ∙ 20 LIKES

Lenny's Newsletter

Jun 2

Inside Canva: Coaches not managers, giving away your Legos, and running profitably | Cameron Adams (co-founder and CPO)

Brought to you by: • WorkOS—Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs • Attio—The powerful, flexible CRM for fast-growing startups • Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security. — Cameron Adams is the co-founder and chief product officer of Canva. Canva is one of the world’s most valuable private software companies, used by 95% of Fortune 500 companies. Since its launch in 2013, Canva has grown to over 150 million monthly users in more than 190 countries, generating $2.3 billion in annual revenue. Prior to Canva, Cameron ran a design consultancy, worked at Google on Google Wave, and founded the email startup Fluent. He is also an author of five web design books and a regular speaker at global conferences. In our conversation, we discuss:

Lenny Rachitsky ∙ 54 LIKES

Fabricated Knowledge

May 27

Nvidia Earnings Overview: Networking in Focus

The AI giant continues to climb the wall of worry, and we have the first quarter of networking revenue broken out of results.

Doug O'Laughlin ∙ 61 LIKES

Brian Mushonga

•

May 29

Thanks for this. Any idea what the lifespan of a GPU used in a data center is likely to be? Any reason to believe there will be a replacement cycle in 3 - 5 years for GPUs currently being installed?

Caravaggio

•

What's the next wall of worry? :) It looks worries about competition, air pocket, and maybe even ethernet has died off. Has the market realized nvidia is king yet?

Dwarkesh Podcast

Jun 4

Leopold Aschenbrenner - China/US Super Intelligence Race, 2027 AGI, & The Return of History

The trillion dollar cluster...

Chatted with my friend Leopold Aschenbrenner about the trillion dollar cluster, unhobblings + scaling = 2027 AGI, CCP espionage at AI labs, leaving OpenAI and starting an AGI investment firm, dangers of outsourcing clusters to the Middle East, & The Project.

Dwarkesh Patel ∙ 20 LIKES

Nathan Lambert

•

Honestly this feels like he (and other intelligence explosion people) has a huge blind spot. The exponential is *one way* AGI *could* happen but it requires the log linear graph to continue without interruption.

With this logic, we would’ve already had “the big earthquake” a few times. There’s nothing assuring scaling to keep working, it’s one narrow path. Feels sort of like smart people have been brainwashed to believe this.

It’s a good thought experiment, but it’s certainly not proven reality.

(AI + Real Life) x Purpose

•

FOUR HOURS?!?

Well, folks... it finally happened. I finally found a reason to use AI to summarize something for me.

Detection Engineering Weekly

May 30

Det. Eng. Weekly #71 - AI next-gen cloud-based detection data ocean

Branding so good not even Kevin Mandia could leave my company

Welcome to Issue #71 of Detection Engineering Weekly! I had an amazing time at SLEUTHCON last week! It was a privilege to be around so many like-minded threat intel and research professionals. I’ll make sure to link some talks once the recordings go up on YouTube, but if you have a chance to go, please do!

Zack 'techy' Allen ∙ 4 LIKES

Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter

May 29

Eating Rocks

If the grid goes down, how am I supposed to know how many pebbles to eat?

On May 10, I saw the northern lights in southern Missouri. I didn’t know they were coming. I was on a river sandbar looking for the Milky Way. It was early, so my husband and I were counting stars. It is easy to see stars in a place with no people. A white streak emerged, wider than a strobe and more defined than a galaxy.

Sarah Kendzior ∙ 352 LIKES

John Gontero

•

Other than because I have been very fortunate in financial matters, I subscribe to make sure I do not miss nuggets like “Eating Rocks”

I do think that many of Ms Kendzior’s fans do enjoy being off the grid for a while, such as the walks my wife and I take along the shores of Maine.

I am often challenged to understand her writings and always love the phrasing ,vocabulary and imagery . But today I knew , or thought I knew, that Sarah made up a great word:”enshittification”. Then I learned it was the 2023 word of the year with a meaning of “systematic decline in quality of online platforms driven by greed”.

Never before have a seen a 4 letter word with prefixes and suffixes with a perfect meaning . I still think Sarah created the word

Erin M

•

Thank you Sarah! Thank you for caring about your readers. We adore you! You are one of the lights in this darkness, for sure!

P.S. In 1987 I told my high school gym teacher to "eat rocks". I got a detention! He was a jerk and detention was a small price to pay for my Truth bomb.

Sly as a Fox

May 13

3 Steps to 6 Figures: How to Survive AI

Table of Contents Introduction Programming Jobs Job Market What Top Companies Look For The Technical Interview Study Strategy The Wrong Way The Right Way What Companies Are Evaluating Prerequisites for Algorit…

BowTiedFox ∙ 98 LIKES

Jefferderp

•

Jan 3

This was great.

Do you have a good litmus test for knowing whether someone would become bored/burnt out after a couple years?

Akash Mohan

•

Oct 3

this was very informative. can you write a guide for senior system design interviews

Future of Talent Weekly Newsletter

May 29

The Future of Hiring: AI-Driven Recruitment for a Software Developer

A Totally Automated Approach

We may never reach Stage 8 of the model I explained in last week’s article, but we can come very close. Although recruiters believe that AI cannot completely replace them and hold on to the assumption that people are always necessary, they have been proven wrong in many other fields. We no longer generally use travel agents, nor do we go to shops when we want to buy a complex product. Online access gives us more information and allows us to research several options. It puts us in control. I believe this is what both hiring managers and candidates want as well.

Kevin Wheeler ∙ 3 LIKES

Top 25 AI Articles on Substack

Latest AI Articles

Import AI 375: GPT-2 five years later; decentralized training; new ways of thinking about consciousness and AI

Understanding the real threat generative AI poses to our jobs

Import AI 374: China's military AI dataset; platonic AI; brainlike convnets

Introducing My First Substack Conversation Series on Artificial Intelligence

🤖 NVIDIA: Industrial Revolution

📓 Make an AI notebook

Seed is broken🌱, AI Startups By Country🌍, The AI Index Report📈

What I Read This Week...

The Rise of the Software Creator

Mistral Codestral is the Newest AI Model in the Code Generation Race

AI Agents Are Really AI Tools

🔮 AI & creativity; exponential compute; peak GHGs, recycling concrete & marriage saves lives ++ #476

It's not artists who should fear AI

Time to Calm Down About AI and Politics

AI Image Of Trump Only Time He Will Ever Be Happy

The traffic impact of AI Overviews

Google's AI-Generated Search Results Keep Citing The Onion

Generative AI Unicorn Capitulation

Inside Canva: Coaches not managers, giving away your Legos, and running profitably | Cameron Adams (co-founder and CPO)

Nvidia Earnings Overview: Networking in Focus

Leopold Aschenbrenner - China/US Super Intelligence Race, 2027 AGI, & The Return of History

Det. Eng. Weekly #71 - AI next-gen cloud-based detection data ocean

Eating Rocks

3 Steps to 6 Figures: How to Survive AI

The Future of Hiring: AI-Driven Recruitment for a Software Developer

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