AI Losses, Productivity Puzzles, and Surprising Tech Insights
From billion-dollar AI deficits to hydrogel crop boosts, this week's digest explores the complex realities of technological progress
The Thin Wisps of Tomorrow
Everybody is Losing Money in AI — AI darling OpenAI is scheduled to lose a whopping $5 billion this year (and they surely aren’t the outlier—training and running AI systems is insanely expensive). Meanwhile, consulting firms are raking in the money—IBM just announced that their profits are up, thanks to AI consulting. Maybe consultants should subsidize AI firms, given how good they are for business?!
Maybe it’s Because AI is Hampering Productivity — Take it with a grain of salt, as the study was done by Upwork (a freelance platform), but a recent study showed that three-quarters of employees report increased workloads and reduced productivity by using AI. Which is all quite different from the narrative that soon we will all be poets and painters while the AI will do the work...
It’s Not Just AI That’s Losing Money — Voice assistants, once hailed as “the next big thing,” have their moment in the valley of despair. Amazon’s Alexa is heavily subsidized, yet fails to materialize any meaningful revenue...
Spreadsheets Meet AI — Remember Clippy? Of course, how could you forget? Researchers at Microsoft have created SpreadsheetLLM, a novel approach to encoding complex spreadsheets so that large language models can understand them. This means the days of struggling to recall how to create pivot tables will soon be a thing of the past.
Doctors Meet AI — We wrote about this before, but doctors are increasingly turning to AI for help, and it seems to work. The latest: British GPs use AI to boost their cancer detection rate by a solid 8%.
Price Revolution — OpenAI’s recently released smaller language model, GPT-4o Mini, is highly cost-effective, making it profitable to use AI for generating content that can be monetized through ads. Brace for slob taking over the Internet.
The Sprinkle in Your AIs — Want to spot a deepfake? Trust the folks at the Royal Astronomical Society! It turns out that identifying stars is also useful for finding the stars in our eyes—or the lack thereof. The reflection of lights on eyeballs seems to be something AI truly isn’t good at, and thus can be used to detect fake photos.
Grow Baby, Grow — Adding hydrogel to soil can boost crop yields by 138% while reducing water usage by 40%. Not every innovative solution requires artificial intelligence…
Cultivated Meat Doesn’t Grow — Cultivated meat, much like quantum computing and cold fusion, has long been touted as the “next big thing,” perpetually on the cusp of breakthrough. However, the reality is that developing this technology has proven challenging.
What We Are Reading
🌟 What Sets Genius Teams Apart A psychologist who worked with executive teams for 20+ years explains what sets the best teams apart: their members’ raw capacity, the scale of their aspiration and achievement, and their constant generative tension. @Jane
🎟️ Expert Explains The Hidden Crowd Engineering Behind Event Venues The Copa America made me curious about how crowds are dealt with at massive events; this quick video is a great summary of how to safely control people going in and out of events. @Mafe
📉 Understanding The New Tech Right Is a rightward political shift in tech primarily a response to slowed growth in the industry? @Jeffrey
🤔 Why Do We Celebrate Incompetent Leaders? This sparks a great reflection on whether we pay attention to truly great leaders or great stories of leaders. Stories that are more appealing and fascinating but don’t actually describe better leadership. Preparedness, consideration, and flawless execution might be less exciting but deserve much more storytelling. @Julian
⚡ Stress And Performance Stress can have positive effects on performance according to neuroscience. @Pedro
🔬 What Would It Take To Recreate Bell Labs? Bell Labs famously invented many pieces of our modern-day technology, but could we recreate it today, or was it a true outlier? @Pascal
The Fun Stuff
The Steve Jobs Archive recently published a long-lost talk that Jobs delivered at the 1983 International Design Conference in Aspen, Colorado. The talk, along with Jony Ive’s introduction, provide an incredible glimpse into the mind of one of history’s most creative technologists, making this a must-watch.
🧑🏼💻 Tired of typing on your keyboard or dictating into your phone? Try slamming the lid of your laptop in Morse code to type. It might not be as efficient nor fast as touch typing, but it surely is more satisfying.
😴 It’s crazy to think that we still don’t fully comprehend the mechanism of action for one of the most widely used general anesthetic agents, propofol. However, recent findings suggest that the answer lies in the realm of sheer chaos.