Category: Data

Data. Is. Not. Oil. Can It Be A Public Good?

The Economist, August 2017

“Data is the new oil.”

It’s the metaphor that won’t die, though for the next little bit, I’ll do my part to advance its expiration date. Yesterday came news that Google purchased the entire data corpus of Spirit Airlines, which is selling its assets in a bankruptcy process. Google isn’t planning on launching an airline – instead, it believes Sprit’s data will help train more capable AI models. Cementing the role AI plays in reviving the “data is oil” narrative, Google won the auction over Mercor, a firm that pays contractors to train AI systems.

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The Valley Is Terrified of AI

Today Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg joined the chorus of multi-billionaires who feel compelled to issue periodic manifestos about the impact of AI on society. Unlike Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who posts on his own site, or Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who recently posted a long form manifesto on X, Zuckerberg took a page from his board … Continue reading “The Valley Is Terrified of AI”

Credit to the WSJ and Reddit

Today Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg joined the chorus of multi-billionaires who feel compelled to issue periodic manifestos about the impact of AI on society. Unlike Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who posts on his own site, or Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who recently posted a long form manifesto on X, Zuckerberg took a page from his board colleague Marc Andreessen and issued his proclamation in the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal.

In “The AI Future Is for Everyone,” Zuckerberg broadly aligns himself with Nadella (and by extension, Palantir CEO Alex Karp), both of whom have recently warned that the frontier labs (Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic) can not be trusted with the power they seem to be accruing.

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Will AI Ever Become a True Platform? Not Without Us….

Yesterday Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella published a fascinating essay that reads as both a rebuke to frontier AI model companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, as well as a call to arms to the entire business community.

Nadella is worried that OpenAI and Anthropic are about to eat everyone’s lunch – Microsoft included. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of the firm in an AI-driven economy,” he opines. “The last thing any of us want is a world where every company across every sector is ceding value to a few models that eat everything they see.”

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Your Conversations With AI Are Now On Sale

OpenAI’s early Ads Manager interface, as posted on Search Engine Roundtable.

Data-driven performance advertising built the modern internet, warts and all. Data has become the most valuable resource in our economy, and the world’s most profitable companies have all organized around enclosing, extracting, processing, refining, and exploiting this new asset class.

Yesterday, OpenAI released its first performance advertising product. Marketers can now purchase “cost per click” advertising on ChatGPT, which means they can compare how money spent on OpenAI measures up to similar platforms like Google, Meta/Instagram, Apple, and Amazon, among many, many others. And if OpenAI’s offerings fail to compete, the company will have no choice but to modify its products to drive better performance.

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