Happy Friday! We’re about to undergo a grueling trip back to Mexico City that will see us arrive at 4:00 am tomorrow. But rather than dwell on that too much, let’s kick off this weekend a bit early. If only to distract from the above.
🔍 Google on the rise
jrzoomer asks:
Paul, Gemini topped ChatGPT in the Apple App store recently. They are really coming on strong after starting way behind. Do you see Google's new AI image generation 2.5 Flash (aka nano banana) as a potential tipping point when we look back, similar to what IE3 and IE4 did to Netscape?
Yes. Google’s new image-to-video model is impressive and I think it served as a wake-up call that it has caught up, generally speaking, in AI. Though to be fair to Google, this really happened quite a while ago. But it is interesting how badly its first missteps, with Bard and then its original image generation tech, set it back from a public perception perspective. Plus, the weird popularity of ChatGPT.
But Google releases so many AI updates now I can’t even keep up. This company is really moving quickly, and though one could argue (and I have) that its pace is as chaotic as what Microsoft is doing, it doesn’t feel as slapdash, if that makes sense. Both companies clearly see AI as both their greatest opportunity ever and a potential existential threat in the sense that if others take the lead, they will become less relevant and start shedding customers.
🛟 But is it safe?
ianceicys asks:
Paul, after reading Apple in China I started reading If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All
I'm a daily user of Copilot, ChatGTP, Perplexity, and Claude. Would love your take on AI Safety and your views on the unseen dangers of AI.
As with most things, I’m hitting this one from the middle until I see any evidence to the contrary. Meaning, AI is like any other technology in that it will be used for good and for bad and that the problem here isn’t technology, it’s people. It’s almost always people. AI is made by people, so it’s flawed. On and on we go.
We have a curiously good grounding in the possible issues here, thanks to the classic sci-fi writers of the 1950s to 1980s, people like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clark, and so on, plus others like Michael Crichton. The trick is keeping it out of the hands of bad actors, which is impossible.
I probably told this story, but a couple of decades ago I went to some zombie movie with two friends and we were hanging out in a coffee shop afterward talking about it. One of them said something about how they would handle a zombie uprising. And then the other chimed in about a robot uprising. We agreed that in both cases, the course of action was pretty clear.
But after a moment of silence, the first one suddenly asked, “Yeah, but what do we do if both of those things happen at the same time?” My response to this was that you can only plan so much and that if that were to happen, we w...
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