The Subprime AI Crisis
The Other Bubble
It’s Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word
The technologies never quite work out like the Altmans of the world promise, but the stories keep regulators and regular people sidelined while the entrepreneurs, engineers, and investors build empires.
We’re in a race to the bottom that everyone saw coming and no one is happy with. Meanwhile, the search for product-market fit at a scale that would justify all the inflated tech-company valuations keeps coming up short. Even OpenAI’s latest release, o1, was accompanied by a caveat from Altman that “it still seems more impressive on first use than it does after you spend more time with it.”
The project of techno-optimism, for decades now, has been to insist that if we just have faith in technological progress and free the inventors and investors from pesky regulations such as copyright law and deceptive marketing, then the marketplace will work its magic and everyone will be better off.
Altman’s entire job is to keep us all fixated on an imagined AI future so we don’t get too caught up in the underwhelming details of the present
AI scaling myths
This is where your smartphone battery begins
AI Has Become a Technology of Faith - The Atlantic
Gen AI: too much spend, too little benefit?
AI Is a False God | The Walrus
The problems facing Canada or the world—not just climate change but the housing crisis, the toxic drug crisis, or growing anti-immigrant sentiment—aren’t problems caused by a lack of intelligence or computing power. In some cases, the solutions to these problems are superficially simple. Homelessness, for example, is reduced when there are more and cheaper homes. But the fixes are difficult to implement because of social and political forces, not a lack of insight, thinking, or novelty. In other words, what will hold progress on these issues back will ultimately be what holds everything back: us.
OpenAI Just Gave Away the Entire Game
It’s not stealing to build the future if you believe it has belonged to you all along.
The Tech Baron Seeking to “Ethnically Cleanse” San Francisco
The State of the Culture, 2024
The Map is Eating the Territory: The Political Economy of AI
Rather than appealing to some vague notion of the awesomeness of progress, or the malignity of technology, we want, collectively, to coordinate on paths of technological development that will have spread benefits as broadly as possible, while mitigating for, or compensating for the costs.
LLMs should not be viewed as a substitute for high quality human generated knowledge. They should instead be viewed as an obligate complement to such knowledge - a means of making it more useful, which doesn’t have much independent worth without it.
Rebecca Solnit · In the Shadow of Silicon Valley: Losing San Francisco
We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus - Charlie's Diary
The Cult of AI
We wouldn’t, and we won’t, unless he can convince us doing so is the only way to solve every problem that terrifies us. Climate change, the cure for cancer, an end to war or, at least, an end to fear that we’ll be victimized by crime or terrorism, all of these have been touted as benefits of the coming AI age. If only we can reach the AGI promised land.
The Rise of Techno-authoritarianism
The Downward Spiral of Technology
What I Learned About AI in 2023
Marc Andreessen is a Techno-Extremist
The Techno-Optimist Manifesto | Andreessen Horowitz
How 9/11 affected the Digital Future
What exactly are the economics of AI?
"VC qanon" and the radicalization of the tech tycoons - Anil Dash
The algorithmic anti-culture of scale
Threads is also proof that Meta, even after all these years, still has no other ambition aside from scale.