WSJ: “Researchers looked at more than 800,000 online reviews for beauty and fashion items listed on Amazon’s website. They found that online reviews written in the present tense were more likely to be “liked”—that is, receive a thumbs-up emoji from readers—than reviews written in the two other tenses. “A 50-word review only using verbs in the present tense is about 5.5% more likely to be ‘liked’ than a 50-word review using no present-tense verbs at all,” says David Fang, a doctoral student at Stanford University and one of the paper’s authors.” Also: “We found that consumers give, on average, a higher overall rating when asked to rate the overall experience and several attributes of the experience compared with when they are asked to rate the overall experience alone. In other words, when consumers can speak to what specifically they didn’t like about an experience, they weight those negative aspects less heavily in their overall ranking.”
Ruchir Sharma: “In his farewell address, Ronald Reagan described America as the “shining city on a hill”, open to “anyone with the will and heart to get here”. I was one of those inspired to try, and today the dynamic mix of academics and entrepreneurs who energise the world’s technology leader still strikes me as a marvel. Of the top 100 US companies, 10 now have chief executives who were born in my home country, India, a breakthrough that could have happened only in a capitalist meritocracy. Nonetheless, I worry about where the US is leading the world now. Faith in American capitalism, which was built on limited government that leaves room for individual freedom and initiative, has plummeted. Most Americans don’t expect to be “better off in five years” — a record low since the Edelman Trust Barometer first asked this question more than two decades ago. Four in five doubt that life will be better for their children’s generation than it has been for theirs, also a new low…America has become unhealthily dependent on loose money and big government.”
Wired: “[Microsoft’s] Bubeck says these results seem to indicate that making future AI systems smarter will require more than just scaling them up to still greater sizes. And it also seems likely that scaled-down models like Phi-3 will be an important feature of the future of computing. Running AI models “locally” on a smartphone, laptop, or PC reduces the latency or outages that can occur when queries have to be fed into the cloud. It guarantees that your data stays on your device and could unlock entirely new use cases for AI not possible under the cloud-centric model, such as AI apps deeply integrated into a device’s operating system.”
Ted Sarandos: “I think that A.I. is a natural kind of advancement of things that are happening in the creative space today, anyway. Volume stages did not displace on-location shooting. Writers, directors, editors will use A.I. as a tool to do their jobs better and to do things more efficiently and more effectively. And in the best case, to put things onscreen that would be impossible to do. Think about this gigantic leap from hand-drawn animation to computer-generated animation, and look how many more people animation employs today than it used to…I have more faith in humans than that. I really do. I don’t believe that an A.I. program is going to write a better screenplay than a great writer, or is going to replace a great performance, or that we won’t be able to tell the difference. A.I. is not going to take your job. The person who uses A.I. well might take your job.”
Economist: “A resumé is not a list of every job you ever had. It is not your autobiography. It is, like that hair-care advert, a marketing tool. Your audience is made up of recruiters and hiring managers. Like cocktail-party guests, they do not take a long time to decide if they want to keep talking. According to one study, such professionals spend an average of 7.4 seconds skimming a job application.”
