WSJ: “A recent report by economists at Goldman Sachs starkly laid this out. In the past, they wrote, 1% more output in China would raise the rest of the world’s output by 0.2% as it pulled in imports. In their new forecast, the Goldman team has concluded that the relationship has turned negative. China’s growth, they write, is being driven by its “leadership’s determination and capability to further advance manufacturing competitiveness and boost exports.” This is positive for other countries insofar as cheaper Chinese goods boost purchasing power. But that benefit is more than offset by the hit to their manufacturing sectors from Chinese competition. The upshot is that Goldman sees China growing 0.5 to 0.8 percentage point a year faster over the next few years, but that will reduce the rest of the world’s growth by 0.1 point a year.”
Carl Frey: “Generative A.I. needs its own course correction — both for the sake of energy efficiency and for its own advancement. Large language models, for all their wonders, can only predict the next thing a human would say. Train one on texts from the late 1800s and it won’t invent airplanes or rockets. It will channel ideas from that period, when leading scientists thought human flight was impossible. If we only scale up our current approach, wasting money on fast-obsolete chips and energy-guzzling data centers, we won’t progress beyond our current technology, which still yields limited, mediocre results…Bubbles are noisy while they inflate. When they burst, the froth clears and you can see which ideas hold up without subsidy. If the A.I. boom cools, what survives will be the systems that do more with less.”
NBC News: “More of Silicon Valley is building on free Chinese AI…AI startups are seeing record valuations, but many are building on a foundation of cheap, free-to-download Chinese AI models.”
NYTimes: “My hope is that I am building a future for [my son] Omie in which A.I. helps create a world where we have two varieties of everything: one that is automated and easily created; the other that is painstakingly made only by humans, and is therefore cherished. I want my son and his generation to still value human-made movies and other art — while also using A.I. to help tell stories about themselves, where they are agile and inventive superheroes, overcoming future challenges we have yet to imagine.”
