Jensen Huang on AI’s iPhone moment: “There are five million applications in app stores, there are probably several hundred PC applications, there’s 350,000, maybe 500,000 websites that matter — how many applications are there going to be on large language models? I think it will be hundreds of millions, and the reason for that is because we’re going to write our own! Everybody’s going to write their own. This is a phase shift, a difference, an inflection point, a different way, there’s definitely a new computing model here, this is profound. We’re going to look back and we’re going to say “Hey, guess what, we were there”. The day this thing came to realization we were all there, we internalized what it meant to us, and we took advantage of it. A lot of companies are asking themselves, “What does this mean? What does this mean to us? What does this mean to our industry? What does this mean to our competition? What does this mean to our products? What does this mean to our business model?” This is happening right now as we speak, a very big deal, a really really big deal.”
Shankkar Aiyar: “India faces a water crisis of untold magnitude. There is the rolling spectre of the El Nino effect – which haunts this year’s monsoon – and there is the long-term stress and scarcity scenario..The World Water Development Report 2023…states that the global urban population facing water scarcity will touch 2.4 billion – and “India will be the most severely affected country”.”
WSJ: “Conversation, when it is performed for an audience, has a structure and order that is impossible in real life…The unscripted interview or talk show is perhaps the closest we can come to the performance of authentic conversation. Unfortunately, most such shows are either trivial in subject matter or hew obsessively to a party line. For entertaining conversation in this format, we have to go back in time to the golden age of the talk show, overseen by Jack Paar, Dick Cavett and Johnny Carson. Between 1965 and 1980, Carson’s show, for example, lasted 90 minutes—a very long time—and he would interview authors in the last half hour, resulting in some memorable conversation. Although I’m not much of a sports enthusiast, I see the closest approximation to these veteran conversationalists in shows like “Inside the NFL” and “Inside the NBA,” where ex-players parse a game with the same laser precision with which literary scholars analyze “Paradise Lost.””
FT: “The idea that there could be “another me”, a doppelgänger or identical copy of oneself, has long had a powerful hold on the popular imagination. Now, science is beginning to breathe glimmers of reality into the concept, at least in digital form. In Virtual You Peter Coveney, professor of chemistry and computer science at University College London, and Roger Highfield, science director at London’s Science Museum, show how far researchers have got in their quest for accurate digital simulations of humans in general — and of particular individuals. The prospect is for personalised medicine far more accurate than the primitive version based on genetics that is available today. Your digital twin will predict accurately your risk of disease and recommend drug, diet and lifestyle changes to extend your healthy lifespan. There may also be troubling questions if the technology permits really reliable “healthcasts”; do you want a precise forecast of how and when you will die?”
