The Daily Economy: “Jacobin, Marxists, Piketty, and most progressives look only at “the economy,” supposing that it’s the elemental organism, with a will of its own, that produces all the wealth that we observe, and, thus, that “the economy” imposes its will on investors, workers, and consumers. But they are deeply mistaken. The elemental decision-making creatures in any economy are individuals. Much or little wealth is produced depending on how much or little individuals are prompted to choose and act in ways that lead to the production of wealth. There’s a reason, after all, why the “socially created” wealth in countries such as the United States, Sweden, and Singapore is multiple times greater than is the “socially created” wealth in countries such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Malawi.”
NYTimes: “Physical Intelligence [is] an artificial intelligence start-up seeking to create brains for a wide variety of robots…The company wants to make foundational software that would work for any robot, instead of the traditional approach of creating software for specific machines and specific tasks. “What we’re doing is not just a brain for any particular robot,” said Karol Hausman, the company’s co-founder and chief executive. “It’s a single generalist brain that can control any robot.” It’s a tricky task: Building such a model requires a huge amount of data on how to operate in the real world. Those information sets largely do not exist, compelling the company to compile its own. Its work has been aided by big leaps in A.I. models that can interpret visual data.”
WaPo: “After decades of lithium-ion batteries dominating the market, a new option has emerged: batteries made with sodium ions. Scientists have been researching alternatives to lithium for years. Much of the world relies on this kind of battery, but the mining and processing of its materials can be harmful to workers, local communities and the environment. Sodium has recently emerged as one of the more promising options, and experts say the material could be a cheaper and more environmentally friendly alternative to lithium.”
Andrew Chen: “Product launches in the social media era are fundamentally different…Social media has changed the way we launch products. Instead of a Big Bang Launch — a single spike of attention — we have Always Be Launching, the idea that what you need is nonstop/constant talk about your product, its capabilities, case studies, and achievements. You don’t “save up” info for announcements, you just go. This is the optimal strategy in world of abundance — an abundance is caused by infinite feeds, plentiful influencers, and a short news cycle that devours new content every hour.”
Ted Gioia: “Guess what? These same four companies—Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Google—have a new dream technology built on fakery…But their AI plans aren’t much different than the virtual reality debacle. In VR, we go into a fake world to interact with real people. In AI, we remain in the real world but interact with fake people. That’s not much of an improvement. By my measure, it’s actually a step backward.” [via Arnold Kling]
