https://www.garbageday.email/p/rinse-wash-like-and-subscribe-repeat
"Last week, Google, who has, to put it politely, had their shit rocked by the
emergence of consumer-level generative-A.I., published a blog post titled,
“Google Research, 2022 & Beyond: Language, Vision and Generative Models”.
It’s an interesting — and very dense — look at how Google is thinking about
A.I. and, after skimming it, it seems like it’s largely meant to explain
exactly where Google’s A.I. investment has been going. And the answer is, well,
mostly in the background. And I’d file it under the same category as these
recent comments from Yann LeCun, the chief A.I. scientist at Meta, who, last
week, said that ChatGPT was “not particularly innovative.” Which is to say I
think we’re going to be seeing a lot more academics emerge from behind the
curtain to basically ask, “why are you normies so impressed with a web app that
can’t draw fingers?”
And I imagine the ones pushing these somewhat defensive academics out into the
spotlight are a lot of very angry executives at large tech companies who are
asking why their A.I. development teams have been spending so much time and
energy “researching” ways to make A.I. “better,” when they could have just
shipped a chat bot that you can pay to talk like John Wilkes Booth.
But it’s hard to overstate how existentially threatening OpenAI is to companies
like Google and Meta (and, soon enough, every other platform on the web).
Platforms, whether we’re talking about Facebook, Amazon, or Netflix, all
monetize the same feedback loop. Some make money from ad revenue, some from
selling physical products, and others from subscriptions, but the loop is the
same: You log in, you see content created by others, you engage with it,
depending on how the particular platform works, you might create your own
content for others to engage with, rinse, wash, like and subscribe, repeat.
And, over time, these marketplaces have invested in different ways to tighten
this loop. Well-known blogger Cory Doctorow, in a great piece this week,
described this process as “enshittification,” using Amazon as an example. The
platform operated at a loss, made itself, first, an attractive marketplace for
everything under the sun, and, then, a place that sellers had to be because
that’s where all the users were. After that, it started making sellers pay for
better placement on the site, all while undercutting them with their own
Amazon-made goods. According to Doctorow, this “enshittification” is ultimately
self-destructive for a platform: “Facebook is terminally enshitted, a terrible
place to be whether you're a user, a media company, or an advertiser.” Well,
OpenAI has arrived pre-enshitted."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
