WSJ: “Protectionism and industrial policy misallocate resources and reduce economic efficiency. When firms in a free market produce outputs that consumers won’t buy, the money entrepreneurs and investors lose is their own. When protectionists and industrial-policy planners make mistakes, they often mask them with more subsidies and tariffs—at taxpayers’ expense. Think, in the first case, of Ford: When Americans didn’t buy the Edsel, the company lost money and stopped selling the model. Conversely, when Americans haven’t bought heavily subsidized electric vehicles, the government has imposed tariffs on EV imports—taxes that consumers pay. Adam Smith was on to something when he wrote: “Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.””
NYMag: “One problem with using AI to summarize everything is that it gets stuff wrong — not most of the time, but far more than you’d want in the roles it’s playing (paralegal, nurse aide, personal assistant, intern). Another problem is that if the products I’ve been testing recently are any indication, the plan is to summarize lots of things, many of which are already in some way summarized, having been produced with brevity and a specific audience in mind.”
The Atlantic: “Even if generative AI is a bubble, that still doesn’t mean all this investment is for nought. Chatbots seem unlikely to yield $600 billion in annual revenue in the next few years, but that doesn’t mean other sorts of AI won’t transform society by 2040, or some decade after that. The spending frenzy might just be far too concentrated and far too early. Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft burning hundreds of billions of dollars to build data centers means future tech start-ups might be able to use those computing resources at lower costs. For now, attitude is more important than any product—that tech companies are willing to spend so much is their proof that AI will pay off. And perhaps even more important in Silicon Valley than a messianic belief in AI is a terrible fear of missing out. “In the tech industry, what drives part of this is nobody wants to be left behind. Nobody wants to be seen as lagging,” Joshi said. Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft are defending their empires. Go all in on AI, the thinking goes, or someone else will. Their actions evince “a sense of desperation,” Cahn writes. “If you do not move now, you will never get another chance.” Enormous sums of money are likely to continue flowing into AI for the foreseeable future, driven by a mix of unshakable confidence and all-consuming fear.”
Eugenia Kuyda: “Replika is an AI friend. You can create and talk to it anytime you need to talk to someone. It’s there for you. It’s there to bring a little positivity to your life to talk about anything that’s on your mind…My belief is that there will be a lot of flavors of AI. People will have assistants, they will have agents that are helping them at work, and then, at the same time, there will be agents or AIs that are there for you outside of work. People want to spend quality time together, they want to talk to someone, they want to watch TV with someone, they want to play video games with someone, they want to go for walks with someone, and that’s what Replika is for.”
