Arnold Kling: “It takes a long time for people to accept that an industry is dying. Twenty years ago, people who worked as reporters or editors at local newspapers still thought they had a future. More recently, I have a relative who worked in the Hollywood ecosystem who ignored my warnings that his occupation was threatened. And there are plenty of young people who want to try becoming college professors. All of these are instances where the consumer demand still exists. People consume plenty of news. They consume more entertainment than ever. And people want to learn. The problem is with the business models of the legacy providers. The demand is there, but they are not meeting it efficiently. As the market evolves, someone who wants employment in a declining segment ought to adapt. Instead of adapting, too often people go into denial and end up yelling at consumers to stop choosing their preferred options.”
IBD: “”The AI vector search market is nascent,” said JPMorgan analyst Pinjalim Bora in a [recent] report. “The main ask from enterprise (customers) is how to empower LLMs (large language models) with proprietary enterprise data, while at the same time preserving the privacy and governance of the data.”…In the long-run, vector technology will play a role in search across massive data sets of semi-structured and unstructured data — images, social media posts, emails, audio files and sensor data. “Traditional databases are optimized for storing data such as tables, documents, and key-value pairs,” added JPMorgan’s Bora. “However, with advancements in AI and natural language processing, increasing quantities of semantic vector data have required new repositories. Vectors allow for storing the intrinsic meaning of unstructured content, such as images, videos and natural language in a machine-readable format.””
New Yorker: “However dynamic or sociable they become, Web-site home pages will continue to reckon with the structural problems of the social Internet. Facebook still works to track its users around the Internet, and uses the data to target them with advertising. Readers often log on to publications like the Times with their Gmail accounts, further entrenching Google as a Internet gatekeeper. Consumers’ attention is still largely dictated by algorithmic feeds, and TikTok continues to provide the best opportunity to draw new eyeballs, at least until it gets banned by the United States government. Individual sites trying to replicate the dynamism of social platforms must reckon with the fact that they are doing so at a far smaller scale. Loyal audiences are pointedly not everyone; there is a limit to how much revenue can be juiced from them. Moving away from the traffic firehose of the wider Internet seems counterintuitive, in that sense, but it may be the only viable option left.”
WSJ: “Artificial intelligence is making it possible for companies to replace humans in tasks that range from modeling sweaters to participating in clinical trials. AI systems can take in data on a person’s individual characteristics—such as appearance, shopping preferences and health profile—then predict how they would look in an item of clothing, how they would answer a question or be affected by a disease. This AI content, sometimes referred to as a person’s digital twin, is already being used for a variety of tasks. Los Angeles-based startup AI Fashion uses photos of real models to generate completely new AI images of them modeling various pieces of clothing for fashion campaigns and e-commerce sites. Another startup, Brox AI, created digital versions of 27,000 individuals, with information about their brand preferences and shopping habits, that allows companies to ask the AI focus-group-style questions. And San Francisco-based Unlearn is using AI to generate digital twins of people based on their health data to predict how disease might progress over time for those individuals—aiming to make clinical trials more efficient and effective.”
Nate Silver: “I think political beliefs are primarily formulated by two major forces: Politics as self-interest. Some issues have legible, material stakes. Rich people have an interest in lower taxes. Sexually active women (and men!) who don’t want to bear children have an interest in easier access to abortion. Members of historically disadvantaged groups have an interest in laws that protect their rights. Politics as personal identity — whose team are you on. But other issues have primarily symbolic stakes. These serve as vehicles for individual and group expression — not so much “identity politics” but politics as identity. People are trying to figure out where they fit in — who’s on their side and who isn’t. And this works in both directions: people can be attracted to a group or negatively polarized by it. People have different reasons for arguing about politics, and can derive value from a sense of social belonging and receiving reinforcement that their choices are honorable and righteous.”
