Noah Smith: “My interview with Azhnyuk clarified exactly why drones are in the ascendant as the universal modern weapon of war. The reason is cost. Drones are simply so cheap to produce in huge numbers that they can overwhelm any more expensive system.” [via Arnold Kling] More from Arnold: “If the defensive goal is to repel an invader, then as of now drones create a big advantage to the defender. An invasion requires large, visible forces. These can be mauled by low-cost drones. If the defensive goal is to protect civilian infrastructure and military bases, then drones give the attacker the advantage. As a defender, you have to bury and/or disguise your important assets.”
John Doerr: “[The latest AI revolution is the ] biggest thing ever. Since everything. It has been underhyped. We don’t know how AI is going to shape the new world of education, employment, healthcare—life as we know it. But I do know there is an insatiable hunger and appetite for electrons, and as in previous tsunamis, there will be winners and there will be losers. My job as an investor is to help these entrepreneurs find, fund and accelerate their success.” More: “What I look for first [in an entrepreneur] is, would I mind getting into trouble with them? Because no matter how successful these ventures look from the outside, the truth is you take the lid off the can and inside it’s a can of worms. It’s a struggle to build any of these companies. The most amazing entrepreneurs see the world differently than everyone else. They are fluent in using technology to change that world, to realize that new world. They have a sense that it takes a team to do something extraordinary, so they’re very good at recruiting. And finally, I find that they’re good at selling. They’re selling their vision, they’re selling their teammates, they’re selling their customers.”
Axios: “Google’s overhaul of the search bar…washes away one of the last vestiges of the internet’s halcyon era — when search tools felt empowering, social media and swiping were novel, and popular disillusionment had yet to set in…The AI era and the TikTok-ification of social media have produced a digital world that’s responsive to the market demands of today and unrecognizable from a decade ago…The blue links that colored the Google user experience for decades have been demoted to a secondary offering as zero-click answers get top billing.”
Marc Andressen: “The obvious next step: the bots will start running their own bots. one human in charge of 20 bots, each in charge of 20 more bots. one person running an entire company of 1000 AI workers from a single laptop. this is months away, not years.” [via Ole Lehmann]
