FT: “How did stalemate become the pattern of our century? And how can it not have something to do with the internet? Unequal performance often rests on unequal knowledge. That is much harder to achieve now. If a tactic works on the battlefield, the other side can share it among their comrades at digital speed. If a political movement whips up its members online, the opposing movement learns to do the same. (Pre-internet, the two sides might not have even encountered the other.) An industrial secret is easier to pinch if a photo of it can be emailed home in seconds. This is doubly true if, as is often the case now, the secret is itself just a piece of code, not an engine or warhead. In our world, an initial advantage does not last for long. ”
Bloomberg: “Global investors, who not long pushed India close to rivaling China in emerging-market portfolios, are now chasing themes the country’s market largely lacks: chip manufacturing, computing infrastructure and AI models. While India has talent, demand and digital scale, few of its corporate champions are directly linked to that buildout. That increasingly leaves the market tied to the domestic consumption story.” [via NDTV Profit]
Thinking Machines Lab: “An interaction model is in constant two-way exchange with the user—perceiving and responding at the same time. Some domains take such interactivity as a given—the physical world demands that robotics and autonomous vehicles operate in real time. Audio full-duplex models are another example where interaction is bidirectional and continuous. Applying the same principle, we set out to build an interaction model native to this regime—one that perceives and responds in the same continuous loop, across audio, video, and text. The result is a system architected around two ideas: a time-aware interaction model that maintains real-time presence, and an asynchronous background model that handles sustained reasoning, tool use, and longer-horizon work.”
Carl Benedikt Frey: “We have been told that A.I. will take people’s jobs. What no one mentions is that many of those jobs are landing on us. The A.I. revolution involves a huge transfer of labor — not from worker to machine but from worker to consumer. The ability to do everything ourselves may be satisfying, but it can gradually overload us with busywork without our noticing. Tasks that we used to delegate will still be done. They will simply move out of the work force and into the household as new forms of invisible, unpaid labor. The movement toward self-service is one of the most powerful and least appreciated forces in the history of work.”
