#82: Cutting through the AI hype

💎 Word gems

AI looks like a bubble (Napkin Math / Evan Armstrong)

This is a fantastic and well-reasoned take on the current state of AI. It cuts through the hype and argues how the established companies are still in a position to benefit most from AI.

The key for this so-called product is that the hard part isn’t the AI. It’s doing the change management! Getting buy-in from the customer’s executive team, integrating it into existing systems, and rolling it out to the company will take months, if not years. When I chatted with employees at the company, they all mentioned some version of, “The product requires the company to invest a ton of time and resources to get value out of it.” That’s OK, but very hard to sell to clients worried about a recession. It especially challenging when there are options like GPT-3 easily available (more on that in a sec).

Chat GPT is the birth of the real Web 3.0, and it's not going to be fun (Johan Lajili)

Similarly, this piece challenges the hype by arguing how the web is going to get worse because of the speed and scale AI can generate crap.

But the final nail in the coffin of the regular web is the adtech industry. The web is made to show advertisement, except for a few paywalled newspapers and the magical wikipedia, anything else is here to shove advertisment down our throat. Tiktok and facebook have proven to be horible ways to show relevant advertisement that people will click on. But I believe ChatGPT is going to outshine them all.

The junkification of Amazon (NYMag / John Herrman)

This one isn’t directly about AI. I’ve shared before how Google search is getting worse, and this is a similar reality for Amazon. As existing platforms (and new ones) change with AI features, this reality is only going to proliferate.

Late last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon’s customer satisfaction had fallen sharply in a range of recent surveys, which cited COVID-related delivery interruptions but also poor search results and “low-quality” items. More products are junk. The interface itself is full of junk. The various systems on which customers depend (reviews, search results, recommendations) feel like junk. This is the state of the art of American e-commerce, a dominant force in the future of buying things. Why does it feel like Amazon is making itself worse? Maybe it’s slipping, showing its age, and settling into complacency. Or maybe — hear me out — everything is going according to plan.

💩 Cool shit

A man sitting on a couch looking at something - This is a fascinating self-surveillance study. A webcam taken every 30 mins is translated using AI into a journal entry.

Mindmelt party - A ‘hallucinatory’ music video experience.

Literary Britain - Find places of literary significance in Britain.

Phind - While we wait to fully see how Bing and Google’s AI-supported search will shape up, check out this site. It might be an indicator for the future of search.

MusicML -  An incredible, interactive research paper from Google that generates music from text.

Uperba - I’m honestly not sure what this is.

Growing - A generative poem with link to the words it uses.

Smooth Talker - A funny pickup line generator.

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