Mint: “Microdramas [are] a new digital storytelling sensation that has spawned a multi-billion dollar industry. These are addictive, professionally-produced, vertically-shot series designed for mobile viewing, with each title comprising of 50-100 episodes of around a minute each—roughly the length of a feature film. The format first emerged in China in 2018 and has grown increasingly popular over the last few years in other global markets. One report by Bloomberg states that China now churns out more than 5,000 microdrama series a year. The rapidly expanding industry earned close to $7 billion last year, surpassing China’s theatrical box office. Individual shows can generate millions of dollars through a mix of advertising and a pay-per-view model on dedicated microdrama apps such as WeTV, MangoTV, Douyin and Youko.”
WSJ: “What if there were a way for the world to break its dependence on China’s rare earths, which the country has repeatedly used as a way to retaliate during trade wars? That’s the promise of new kinds of electric motors—the main place those rare earths are needed—that don’t require them, at all. A new startup called Conifer, which has unveiled a cheap, easily manufactured motor using magnets made from everyday iron is particularly interesting…What they’re doing is risky—the technology they’re playing with hasn’t been used in applications like this before, because historically it’s been hard to manufacture. Iron magnets, meanwhile, haven’t delivered enough power. But if they get the combination of cost and manufacturability right, their motor has the potential to become a go-to low-cost power plant for countless applications.”
Quanta: “In 2019, Quanta reported on a then-groundbreaking NLP system called BERT without once using the phrase “large language model.” A mere five and a half years later, LLMs are everywhere, igniting discovery, disruption and debate in whatever scientific community they touch. But the one they touched first — for better, worse and everything in between — was natural language processing. What did that impact feel like to the people experiencing it firsthand? Quanta interviewed 19 current and former NLP researchers to tell that story. From experts to students, tenured academics to startup founders, they describe a series of moments — dawning realizations, elated encounters and at least one “existential crisis” — that changed their world. And ours.”
FT on Disco Corp: “Can you run a company as a perfect free market?…For over a decade, a $20bn manufacturer has been conducting a radical experiment. No one has a boss or takes orders. Their decisions are guided by one thing, an internal currency system called Will…Within this state of perfect freedom, most of their decisions will be guided by Will, as Disco’s internal currency is known. Employees earn Will by doing tasks. They barter and compete at auction with their colleagues for the right to do those tasks. They are fined Will for actions that might cost the company, or compromise their productivity. Their Will balance determines the size of their bonus paid every three months.”
Russ Roberts in conversation with Dwarkesh Patel on past and future of AI. Dwarkesh: “If you look at what changed between primates and humans, it was our ability to–Joseph Hendrick has this wonderful book about this–it wasn’t just intelligence. It wasn’t even mainly intelligence. It was our ability to coordinate with each other, to share knowledge, to accumulate knowledge over generations. Now, when we think about AI, instead of thinking of a single AI, super-intelligent AI, what if we thought about billions of beings who are thinking at superhuman speeds who are able to communicate with each other in a way that a human simply cannot. They can literally share their mind-states with each other. They can distill their insights. They can literally merge; they can copy themselves for arbitrary amounts of time. So if you have a super-skilled worker or who has some tacit knowledge, you can just make arbitrary copies of them for pennies per copy. Fundamentally, you have this much larger population size. And if you believe–a lot of theories of economic growth say that more people means more ideas; and that feeds back on itself.”
