[Via Arnold Kling]: “The revolutions are led by the educated-but-blocked: young people with enough knowledge to understand the system and enough frustration to want to tear it down.”
FT: “The wisdom of crowds has never lain in the consensus. It lies in the disagreement. Once everyone thinks alike, crowds are error-prone. ”
NYTimes: “Bending Spoons is not the only firm chasing tech’s castoffs. Constellation Software, a Canadian company with $11.6 billion in annual revenue, specializes in buying business-oriented software and technology companies. A Los Angeles company called MediaLab, run by Michael Heyward, the founder of the anonymous social media app Whisper, has bought the assets of Imgur, the image-sharing site; Kik, the messaging app; and Genius, the music lyrics site. Since it was founded in 2013, Bending Spoons has purchased more than 50 companies. Last year it generated $1.3 billion in revenue.”
Ethan Mollick: “Being on an exponential means each change over a fixed window is larger than the one before it. If your organization wrote an AI plan any time before the winter of 2025, it described a system that could do a couple of hours of work with a fairly high error rate. A few months later, you can get sixteen hours or more of work from a single prompt. This is why AI keeps feeling like it is making leaps, even though it is a curve on a graph, we keep experiencing a steady doubling of capability as a series of shocks. We are very bad at feeling exponentials from the inside, and we are currently inside one.”
