Lucky Breaks
In a nod to how often people are looking for AI answers instead of search results, Google is testing a feature that replaces its “I’m feeling lucky” button with an AI mode button. One can imagine the traditional search button also eventually being replaced by an AI mode button, then all buttons being replaced by AI buttons, until ultimately, buttons themselves will be replaced. (Don’t feel too bad for buttons, you’ll probably be replaced before them.) Let’s catch up on some AI trends, the good, the bad, and the ugh-ly, starting with education. We already know that students are using AI like crazy. Well, so are professors. Which begs the question (that one might want to ask ChatGPT) of how much tuition one should be paying for AI lessons. NYT (Gift Article): The Professors Are Using ChatGPT, and Some Students Aren’t Happy About It. “Oh, how the tables have turned. Now students are complaining on sites like Rate My Professors about their instructors’ overreliance on A.I. and scrutinizing course materials for words ChatGPT tends to overuse, like ‘crucial’ and ‘delve.’ In addition to calling out hypocrisy, they make a financial argument: They are paying, often quite a lot, to be taught by humans, not an algorithm that they, too, could consult for free.”
+ One of the most promising areas for AI is health. One reason for that is because our current health system is so disjointed. WSJ (Gift Article): “A neurologist focused on my head pain but not my diet; a gastroenterologist examined gut inflammation and ignored my migraines; an ear, nose and throat doctor probed sinus inflammation, missing other factors. Each offered partial help, but no one connected all the dots … That’s precisely where AI excelled.” AI Helped Heal My Chronic Pain. (When I entered my symptoms into AI, it suggested my chronic pain could be coming from sitting at my computer talking to AI all day…)
+ For companies and governments, it’s not personal, it’s strictly business. But consumers are encouraged to make it very personal. And that’s tricky business.
The Verge: AI therapy is a surveillance machine in a police state. “We’re watching the impending collision of two alarming trends. In one, tech executives are encouraging people to reveal ever more intimate details to AI tools, soliciting things users wouldn’t put on social media and may not even tell their closest friends. In the other, the government is obsessed with obtaining a nearly unprecedented level of surveillance and control over residents’ minds: their gender identities, their possible neurodivergence, their opinions on racism and genocide.”
+ Whether AI is a benefit or a cost depends largely on who’s deploying it. Increasingly, that includes anyone with a big enough bank account. A Saudi AI opportunity worth $1 trillion wins over Wall Street. “Under the deal, Nvidia will sell 18,000 next-gen Blackwell chips to power the Kingdom’s first supercomputer … Days before the trip, the U.S. Commerce Department rescinded the Biden-era AI Diffusion Rule, a sweeping framework that would have imposed tiered export controls across dozens of countries.”
+ Meanwhile, in the AI trenches, no one is slowing down long enough to worry about any of this stuff. The race to change everything is on. The Atlantic (Gift Article): Silicon Valley Braces for Chaos. “Sure, tariffs are stupid. Yes, democracy may be under threat. But: What matters far more is artificial general intelligence, or AGI, vaguely understood as software able to perform most human labor that can be done from a computer.”
