Dwarkesh Patel: “While this makes me bearish on transformative AI in the next few years, it makes me especially bullish on AI over the next decades. When we do solve continuous learning, we’ll see a huge discontinuity in the value of the models. Even if there isn’t a software only singularity (with models rapidly building smarter and smarter successor systems), we might still see something that looks like a broadly deployed intelligence explosion. AIs will be getting broadly deployed through the economy, doing different jobs and learning while doing them in the way humans can. But unlike humans, these models can amalgamate their learnings across all their copies. So one AI is basically learning how to do every single job in the world. An AI that is capable of online learning might functionally become a superintelligence quite rapidly without any further algorithmic progress.”
FT: “The big AI companies are in effect strip-mining all websites for content to train their models and paying back almost nothing in return to sustain the ecosystem. At present, Google accounts for about 90 per cent of the global search market and directs a torrent of traffic — and advertising — to content sites. Even though they may (understandably) complain about the terms, some content creators fear the trade itself may be in jeopardy because far fewer users would visit their sites. AI models aggregate and summarise the web’s content rather than encouraging users to visit the original content source. That may destroy the financial incentives for creating new content…The obvious survival mechanism for creators is to build walled gardens by erecting more paywalls around their content, or to move to closed channels off the open web.”
Ken Jennings: “Trivia, of all things, is a ray of hope in our moment of national crisis. Somehow, it’s still an arena where ideological projects are completely ignored and the thing that matters — the only thing that matters — is the right answer. On “Jeopardy!” the clues are novel and varied and created every night by gifted human writers, never spun or fact-checked by A.I. The canon from which the questions are drawn is unapologetically evidence-based, the product of scholarly and scientific consensus. And yet the show is, I’m told, one of the last great media monoliths, regular viewing for millions of faithful viewers in red and blue states alike. How do we understand the seeming anachronism of “Jeopardy!”? In a dark time, my secret optimism is that our viewers’ love for quiz games is a sign of what can eventually save us: a practical belief in fact and error that is more fundamentally American than the toxic blend of proud ignorance and smarter-than-thou skepticism that’s brought us to this point.”
2025 Hayek Book Prize: “The Manhattan Institute (MI) is pleased to announce that Johan Norberg has won the 21st annual Hayek Book Prize for his book The Capitalist Manifesto: Why the Global Free Market Will Save the World.”
