Top 25 AI Articles on Substack

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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 ∙ 32 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!

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 ∙ 17 LIKES

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 ∙ 57 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.

🤖 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 ∙ 65 LIKES

📓 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 ∙ 56 LIKES
(AI + Real Life) x Purpose
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
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.

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 ∙ 18 LIKES
Candace Adams
Yay! Welcome to Substack, Tripp!

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 ∙ 65 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.

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 ∙ 12 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?

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 ∙ 25 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:
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.

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

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
Great analysis dude. And perfectly timed as I’m presenting on this on Wednesday - I’ll definitely be citing you!
Salvador Lorca
I wrote about this article of yours, which I liked:

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

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 ∙ 77 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.
M. E. Rothwell
Spot on.

🔮 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 ∙ 36 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

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 ∙ 19 LIKES

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
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?

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

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

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

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 ∙ 341 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.

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 ∙ 8 LIKES

"AI Is Not Replacing Workers" And Other Lies About AI

Here are some lies companies have been telling us related to AI.
So far, we have seen many companies launching products with the popular “AI-powered” tagline as a marketing tactic. However, due to this rush to release AI products as quickly as possible, we see that these products often have little relevance to users or simply don’t work.
Kevin Gargate ∙ 15 LIKES
My Social EQ
I've been reading your content for at least a year. I think your knowledge and intuition about what's happening in AI is incredibly valuable. In fact, it's why I get interested in AI coming out of a major slump.
I kept reading about the latest AI news and my mind was open. When I came across a white label Saas option last fall, I jumped on it and built a writing and learning platform for Coaches, Solopreneurs and Freelancers. It was already my niche and I could easily grasp the user case.
Even though companies are downsizing, the jobs being developed in AI are fairly expansive and have the potential to be affirming if we can help people see the opportunities. You've been doing a great job with it!
I'm fairly certain that AI won't replace me since generative AI thrives on creative input. My actual tasks will likely change, but my role will continue to be an AI educator, designer and consultant. 💫

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

Why Trump Is Worse Than Biden on Gaza (and maybe much worse)

Plus: Jake Sullivan, climate menace. AI dreams of SF. Microplastics and fertility. And more!
Robert Wright ∙ 48 LIKES
Grayson Reim
Re: Biden’s Auto Tariffs
Here’s a hypothetical, which I wonder if others have taken the time wrestle with openly: do cars built by a unionized workforce in a different country (e.g., Canada, Mexico, Japan, etc.) represent a bigger threat to the liberal project than cars built by nonunion labor in a right-to-work state in the USA? There is certainly an understandable amount of nationalism that runs through the rank-and-file UAW members, but being more internationally focused would seem to be in their interest, too.
Here is a letter from Shawn Fein, President of UAW, to Katherine Tai, USA trade ambassador, giving comment on the need for tariffs, while giving perspective on previous attempts to increase workers rights in Mexico: https://downloads.regulations.gov/USTR-2023-0013-0013/attachment_1.pdf.
Jack Cargill

Ultimate Tech Update - Acquiring $200K+ Out of School and Surviving AI

Level 3 - DeFi Virgin Analyst
This is a definitive guide to gettting ahead in Tech. Has been a while and is *extremely* detailed and lengthy. This is only for people interested in: 1) going into tech, 2) making a career out of it or 3) helping someone else break into the field
BowTied Bull ∙ 118 LIKES
BowTiedFox
thank you as always Bull, forever indebted to you for changing my life
always open to feedback and questions, let me know if I am incorrect or something could be improved
(btw I'm banned on twitter til Friday for telling someone with addiction to try fasting lmao so I will be camping out here in substack comments until then)
BowTied_Raptor
I've hired a few data scientists at our quant shop.
this is pretty bang on, and works great for data engineers & Machine Learning Engineers too