WSJ: “Exclusive lounges—one of the few aspects of flying that travelers seem to enjoy—are driving increased loyalty for credit-card companies and airlines. The goal is to create a network of airport lounges that will persuade a customer to pay hundreds of dollars a year for a high-fee credit card that will help them gain entrance. And it’s working. “Lounge access is the No. 1 reason that people will acquire our co-brand” Reserve card with American Express, said Dwight James, Delta Air Lines’ senior vice president of customer engagement and loyalty.”
Neal Mohan: “There’s lots and lots of sources of information on which AI technologies are built. I think the interesting story there is, again, just the use of these amazing — these tools are amazing — literally being able to type in an idea and out of thin air produce an amazing video that perhaps millions of people will watch, that is amazing. But I really think the true amazing thing is that you take that same tool and you put it in the hands of two different people, you’re going to get two very different results. One of them might generate tens millions of views and set the culture, another one might be relegated to kind of the dustbin of history and that’s the point, which is at the end of the day, it’s about the creative person who’s in charge using these tools as opposed to the other way around.”
Bloomberg: “On a scorching July afternoon in Shanghai, dozens of Chinese students hunch over tablet screens, engrossed in English, math and physics lessons. Algorithms track every keystroke, and the seconds spent pondering each question. A pair of teaching assistants linger quietly in the background, intervening only when necessary. For Derek Li, the 47-year-old founder of Chinese ed-tech company Squirrel Ai Learning, this is the future of education: adaptive software powered by artificial intelligence that’s able to pinpoint knowledge gaps, measure progress and adjust lessons on the fly. He compares it to autonomous driving, where a computer takes over the main tasks under minimal human supervision…Squirrel’s software is built around adaptive learning — using algorithms to continuously personalize lessons for students. Each subject is broken down into thousands of knowledge points. An initial diagnostic test identifies a student’s strengths and weaknesses before plotting out an individual learning path. Students receive real-time feedback, and a dashboard shows their proficiency.”
WSJ on the creator of ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’: “Even some of those who are unfamiliar with Adams’s inspired mashup of P.G. Wodehouse, Monty Python and science fiction may by now know, as we learn in the first series, that the answer to the “Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything” is: 42. But Arvind Ethan David’s “Douglas Adams: The Ends of the Earth,” an audiobook that is also a sort of documentary profile of Adams, suggests we may have underestimated the range and utility of his accomplishments during his brief life. (Adams died in 2001, at 49.) He argues that Adams foresaw many of our current problems and identified practicable solutions. Many of Adams’s outlandish futuristic imaginings from the late 20th century can seem prescient today. Earlier this month Apple introduced automatic in-ear translation to its AirPod line, a technology reminiscent of Adams’s “Babel Fish” (a tiny piscine creature his characters placed in their ears). Eddie, an annoyingly chipper artificial intelligence equipped with “Genuine People Personality,” will be easily recognized by anyone who has been slavishly flattered by an AI chatbot.”
