The Hype Is Eating Itself
While Gen Z rage-quits the AI dream, OpenAI lobbies for mass-casualty immunity, and laziness turns out to have been load-bearing all along
Dear Friend,
The, quite possibly, craziest story to emerge this week from the ever-nutty world of AI hype is, of course, the rebrand/relaunch of sneaker company Allbirds as an AI company – resulting in a $127 million increase in stock market value. I don’t even comment on how absurd all of this is. You know something is up when even the most die-hard AI-boosting publications start calling BS… Anyway – time for your weekly dose of news and analysis…
And now, this…
Headlines from the Future
Better Drug Side Effects Monitoring through Reddit? It shouldn’t come as a surprise that by harvesting the massive data trove that is Reddit, one can find drug side effects that are underreported in clinical trials. Reminds us of a pharma client of ours who mentioned that they consider Apple a massive threat to their business – as the company has a humongous amount of data on healthy people, whereas pharma companies typically only have data on sick people.
Using artificial intelligence to scan more than 400,000 Reddit posts, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania documented numerous reports of possible GLP-1 side effects that may be underrecognized in clinical trials – including menstrual changes, fatigue, and temperature sensitivities.
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Let’s Talk About AI’s Energy Footprint (Again). The linked article is a good and accessible summary of where we stand on AI’s energy footprint. The tl;dr is that AI’s current energy footprint is modest (comparable to streaming video). But demand is growing fast, reasoning models use 10–100x more energy than basic queries, and efficiency gains keep getting reinvested into more capability rather than saved. And what electricity powers the data centers is a much bigger question: Clean grid = net climate okay. Gas/coal grid = real problem.
Stop feeling guilty about prompts. Your Wh per query is not the lever that matters. You’ll do more climate good by eating one less steak, taking one fewer flight, or voting for better energy policy than by boycotting LLMs. What matters at the individual level is where you direct your attention. Demand the acceleration of the deployment of clean generation to meet data center demand; grid interconnections, nuclear licensing, transmission lines, and permitting reform are the bottleneck, not GPUs.
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The GenZ AI Tide is Turning. GenZ, supposedly the most AI-savvy generation entering the workforce right now, is not too thrilled about that whole AI thing.
Anger over AI is increasing among Gen Z at the same time excitement is fading. Nearly one-third of the survey’s respondents, 31%, said AI makes them feel angry, up 9 percentage points from last year. And just 22% said the technology makes them feel excited, down from 36% the prior year.
Reconcile this with the growing pressure on entry-level jobs, as well as overall job losses due to AI, and you have a storm brewing.
What We Are Reading
The Air Is Full of DNA - Here’s What Scientists Are Using It for Genetic breadcrumbs in the air reveal ecosystem secrets, spot sneaky invaders, and even track humans! @Jane
My Quest to Solve Bitcoin’s Great Mystery A detailed read about one man’s journey to find out who’s behind Satoshi Nakamoto. @Mafe
How To Future-Proof Your Career In The Age Of AI If cognitive flexibility, taste, and good judgment become critical differentiators in a world of abundant intelligence, does the most valuable background begin to look a lot like a classical interdisciplinary, liberal arts education? @Jeffrey
Will AI Start ‘Going Rogue’? the Chorus of Warnings Is Getting Louder When the people building the tech warn about loss of control, it may be a signal worth paying attention to. @Kacee
The Peril of Laziness Lost Here is an interesting argument from the world of software development: Laziness (in coding) leads us to more elegant, better-performing, and cleaner code. With AI coding tools, laziness suddenly has stopped being a virtue – if nothing else, AI happily keeps churning… And with laziness becoming a lost art, software will become worse. I’d venture to say that this is what is happening in every area AI touches. @Pascal
Down the Rabbit Hole
🍸 Rejoice! It is now legal to distill your own alcohol in the United States: US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional.
☠️ Nothing to see here. OpenAI backs bill that would limit liability for AI-enabled mass deaths or financial disasters.
🧑⚕️ Surprised is no one: Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real.
🎲 Ever wanted to increase your chances of beating your niece at Connect Four? Here’s the mathematically best way to do it: WeakC4, or distilling an emergent object.
🇪🇺 European tech sovereignty is a thing. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in long run. Latest point in case: France ditch Windows for Linux to cut reliance on US tech.
🔌 Have we reached the tipping point? Seven countries now generate 100% of their electricity from renewable energy.
✈️ Desperate times call for desperate measures. Great at gaming? US air traffic control wants you to apply.
🧑🎨 Life imitates art. This feels like it’s right out of an episode of Black Mirror: Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly building an AI clone to replace him in meetings.
✍️ You become what you write: Biased AI writing assistants shift users’ attitudes on societal issues.
📶 Data becomes a right. South Korea introduces universal basic mobile data access.
🤓 Nerd alert! Fascinating approach to improving AI’s coding abilities: Having a coding agent read a series of papers on the topic at hand before coding results in significant improvements in code quality.
📚 Lovely read: Stewart Brand on how progress happens.
🤔 More than half of Americans are ‘getting tired of hearing’ about AI, survey finds.
📈 From the MIT Tech Review: Want to understand the current state of AI? Check out these charts.
🪖 PSA: Wear your helmet! E-bike and scooter crashes are leading to more brain injuries.
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Should We Work Together?
Hi! I’m Pascal from radical. This newsletter is our labor of love. When we’re not writing, we run radical, a firm that helps organizations navigate the future without the “innovation theater.” Most leaders want to seize new opportunities, but they hate endless strategy decks that go nowhere. At radical, we don’t run “projects”; we build your organization’s internal capacity to handle disruption and change. Our goal is to make you future-proof so you can stop reacting to the world and start shaping it. If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if we’re a good fit. Click here to speak with us.