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- #44 Marc Andreessen's sure AI will make everything OK
#44 Marc Andreessen's sure AI will make everything OK
AND: Moral panic is a human trait
The AI Plug
June 07, 2023
If you find yourself worrying frantically about AI, fearing what the future holds, you’re not alone. Actually, you're in the majority. 76% of survey respondents say they’re concerned about AI misinformation and job loss. As history shows us, and as we discuss in today’s issue, widespread distrust for emerging technologies is nothing new. Let’s dive in.
In today’s newsletter:
Top News: STOP WORRYING AI will save us, Apple refuses to mention “AI,” and damn ChatGPT is losing a lot of money
TL;DR Rundown: Avatar gets AI makeover, half of the employees at McKinsey use AI, and your social media photos are being used for sex films
Tool of the Day: You didn’t know you needed this one
Free Resource: Google’s no-cost courses to level you up
Benjamin Musk-Button: He’s always working on something
Top News 🔝
Three biggest stories if you’re in a rush
Think of anything we use today - video, recorded sound, telephones, books, bicycles, cars - all were emerging technologies when they first came out (no shit, Sherlock). Each and every one of them was also met with negative media sentiment and moral panic upon first being released to the public. Even Teddy bears couldn’t escape social moral panic, with doctors and priests proclaiming they threatened humanity’s future by “suppressing the maternal instincts of little girls.”
Sound familiar? AI-doomers, the ranks of whom are swelling, are finding a substantial platform as they profess how AI will increase inequalities, how these algorithms are racist, how people will lose their livelihoods, and how, ultimately, we’ll all die. Scary thoughts indeed. But nothing new. As Marc Andreessen eloquently discusses in his latest article, “Why AI Will Save the World,” there are very good reasons why these things won’t happen - primarily because of opportunities caused by AI itself and the fact that humanity is humanity.
AI is a new technology, something that will undoubtedly change how we do things. But so did lightbulbs. So did electricity. So did the internet. And guess what? They were all going to destroy humanity as well.
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From logo to product design to marketing strategy, Apple’s decisions rarely, if ever, follow social norms. 2023 is no different.
In stark contrast to other tech giants, Apple CEO Tim Cook didn’t say “AI” or “artificial intelligence” once in his WWDC keynote earlier this week (Google mentioned AI 143 times at I/O, their WWDC equivalent, and Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet and Amazon’s first-quarter earnings call in April heard AI mentioned 168 times).
That’s not to say Apple didn’t announce technology that falls under the AI umbrella. Voicemails and voice note transcription, noise-filtering AirPods, and improved autocorrect would all be called “AI services” by other companies - but Cook choose to use the more accurate term “machine learning” to refer to such tech. Creating their own crowd instead of following another has worked for Apple in the past - can’t see why they’d change now.
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Ask ChatGPT anything, and you’ll have contributed towards its ~10M daily queries. Guess what? Less than 1% of those come from users paying the $20-a-month premium subscription fee. What does this mean? That ChatGPT (and other chatbots like it) run at a heavy, heavy loss, with computational, processing, and cooling costs racking up to ~$700,000/day.
So why are tech giants still offering these services for free or so cheap? Simple - to win market share. Which secures future investment. Number of users and projected future earnings are what turn investors on, so striking while the AI-iron is hot is key to the future survival of these companies - even if it means bleeding a bit right now.
TL;DR Rundown 🐂
Summary of note-worthy trending articles
McKinsey: “Half of our employees” are using AI. (link)
AI chatbots are making banking customers angry, frustrated, and anxious. (link)
Instabase raises $45M in a funding round to help companies automate their document processing. (link)
Sextortionists are making AI nudes from your social media images to bribe you with. (link)
Nvidia is taking all the AI money. (link)
Black Mirror’s Charlie Brooker tried to use ChatGPT to write an episode for the show. (link)
EU Commissioner: AI content must be labeled. (link)
Glean launches Glean Chat, designed to unlock AI-driven workplace productivity. (link)
She was falsely accused of using AI, and she won’t be the last. (link)
Chegg, the education company, is trying to prove it can beat ChatGPT using its own in-house chatbot. (link)
One AI ETF is poised to outperform the market over the next five years. (link)
Cisco shows breakthrough innovation toward AI-first security cloud. (link)
Avatar gets an AI-redo with Bill Murray, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Adrien Brody. (link)
CNET’s new guidelines for AI journalism are met with union pushback. (link)
AI helps spread awareness of climate change by translating reports into more than 100 different languages. (link)
Tool of the Day ⚒️
AI tools we’ve used, loved, and highly recommend
Today’s tool is usechatgpt.ai.
A no-cost Chrome extension, you can write, rewrite, summarize, translate, explain, or reply to any text, on any website, in one click with usechatGPT. One of those tools that you didn’t know you needed until you use it, and then you can’t live without it.
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