Jamie Thingelstad

AI

This AI display at the Microsoft Technology Center is a great way to show real-time AI capabilities. It showed picture description, object identification, speech recognition, and language translation in real time.

Microsoft display showing four AI panels with real-time image captioning, object detection, speech transcription, and English-to-Spanish translation. Microsoft Surface Hub on a rolling stand displaying a split-screen AI demo with image recognition, translation, and object detection in a modern office hallway.

I created my very first custom GPT tonight — GTD Coach. This GPT is designed to help practitioners of GTD that use OmniFocus improve their practice and get advice. I started with more robust questions around different levels of planning and gave great suggestions.

Illustrated avatar of a smiling man in a suit holding a tablet, above the title GTD Coach and tagline Friendly casual GTD advice using OmniFocus

Seems like $4 billion is the minimum cost to Amazon for missing the LLM wave.

Amazon will invest up to $4bn in Anthropic, an American AI startup founded by former employees of OpenAI, who have built a chatbotcalled Claude. Amazon will acquire a minority stake in the company, which was valued at $5bn earlier this year, to better compete in generative AI. Anthropic will work closely with Amazon Web Services, the tech giant’s cloud-computing arm. — Economist Espresso, Sep 25, 2023

I think there is a huge potential for Generative AI in tools, but this is a heavy expense that is going to make it a tough decision.

Microsoft announced that it would charge $30 a month for AI features in its productivity software. That could mean a cost increase of up to 83% for the millions of subscribers to products such as Word and Excel. Shares in the firm jumped to a record high at the prospect. — Economist Espresso, July 19, 2023

🤔

Another example of generated content fooling people. We are going to see a massive acceleration of this. We need to start signing content to have any hope of proving it is real.

A fake image showing an explosion near the Pentagon went viral on Twitter, triggering a brief dip in stockmarkets. The picture, which appears to have been generated by AI, was shared by several verified accounts on the social-media platform including one that falsely claimed to be associated with Bloomberg News. The image was probably tweeted first by an account promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory. — The Economist Espresso on May 23, 2023

A thesis I’ve pondered for years and won’t go away…

The real “threat” to capitalism isn’t socialism or communism. The thing that may break capitalism is technology.

Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world. — Archimedes

Technology is leverage. Technology allows a small number of people to create immense output. The potential present in AI will allow new kinds of output that were never before possible, in some cases with no people at all. Technology has brought efficiency improvements for as long as it has existed, and we should assume that will continue.

With so much leverage the labor market fails. There is no market to exchange your abilities for. There may be no buyer for human capacity. It isn’t a question of retraining if there isn’t anything to train to.