How Will You Interact with Artificial Intelligence?
Exploring the human condition and AI simultaneously
The issue that fascinates me the most today is how humans will interact with artificial intelligence.
Prediction: soon it will be crucial for economic survival, just as being able to operate a computer was necessary for numerous industries by the late 20th century.
This is why I am shifting the primary focus of this newsletter and my writing to human life and artificial intelligence (AI).
Telling stories that capture the human condition (we can’t lose sight of our humanity and what makes us unique);
Analyzing how we should structure laws to promote AI innovation while reasonably ensuring safety and soundness;
Promoting books, articles, and other content that helps make sense of AI and its technological advancements; and
Exploring how to use AI practically in everyday life, with lessons learned from my own experiences.
I am also fascinated with picking the right horse in the AI races. Who will be the best investment long-term?
If the history of the internet tells us anything, it’s unlikely to be any of the current major players (OpenAI/Microsoft and Google). The best AI investments will likely be a new market entrant as Amazon was at the dawn of the internet era circa 1994.
I’ve struggled to find a focus with this newsletter and my writing in general. I’m not fond of “niching down” because I’m too curious about too many things, and I enjoy writing about almost everything.
So long as there is a good story.
The key thing to remember with evolving artificial intelligence is the human story.
No matter how much artificial intelligence evolves, how many Go or Chessmasters it can beat, or how beautifully it can generate text and video, it will never have true human experience.
Artificial intelligence will never experience grief like we do.
It will never be awed by a new experience like us.
And therefore, it will never be able to tell a story like us.
This human element is what fascinates me the most with artificial intelligence. The growth of AI will force all of us to double down on what truly makes us human. What makes us unique. What makes us valuable to society.
So as much as I want to understand AI and advocate for good laws and ethical innovations, I also want to find ways where humans and AI can coexist.
This is why telling human stories alongside AI innovations is naturally symbiotic.
Each week we’ll focus on some of the big stories in artificial intelligence while also highlighting human stories. I hope this juxtaposition paints a comprehensive picture of us both: humans and AI.
If every week is anything like this past week, there will be too much to discuss, so I’ll just hit the big points.
I hope you’ll subscribe.
With the rise of artificial intelligence, what should we teach young people?
I think about this often as the father of a two-year-old. Yuval Noah Harari, the critically acclaimed author of Sapiens, thinks that this is the first time in history that nobody has any idea what to teach young people that will still be relevant in 20 years.
I disagree. Critical thinking and philosophy (i.e., morality, good judgment, value lessons, etc.) will never be obsolete.
What do you think? Watch the full interview below.
A reminder to make every moment count
Artificial intelligence could theoretically exist forever. Unless we pull the plug, of course.
We humans have a unique relationship with time, something AI will never truly fathom. Father Time, as we like to say, is undefeated.
Some of us may complain how we never have free time when parenting and raising children, but then the kids grow up and suddenly we long for time with them only to find out they’re busy.
I made this video to capture that sentiment.
Elon Musk vs OpenAI
You may have heard that Elon Musk sued OpenAI this past week, a non-profit company (now with a for-profit subsidiary) that he helped create. He has multiple claims - breach of the organization’s founding agreement, promissory estoppel, breach of fiduciary duty, etc.
I assessed his chances of winning in this article. The short answer: the odds are in OpenAI’s favor.
With that said, Musk’s lawsuit could bring greater scrutiny from an IRS perspective on startups and other companies that raise money as non-profits (enjoying tax benefits) only to pivot to for-profit later on. As I describe in the article, this can be perfectly legal when done right, and as of now, there’s nothing to suggest OpenAI acted inappropriately.
Isn’t this really about Musk trying to slow down the leader in the generative AI race?
Google AI espionage
The U.S. Department of Justice just charged an ex-Google engineer with stealing over 500 confidential files related to AI infrastructure, while secretly working for two Chinese AI startups.
This should give everyone pause. If this can happen at Google, it can happen anywhere (and probably already does to some degree).
It also shows how seriously the Chinese are taking artificial intelligence if they made efforts to develop an asset at one of the most important American technological firms.
The case is one of the biggest corporate espionage episodes I’ve read about in a while, and I plan to write about it in more detail this week. Stay tuned.
Anthropic surpasses ChatGPT and Gemini!
Do you see what I mean about how it’s likely a new market entrant that surprises and gains market share in the artificial intelligence race?
Anthropic, an American AI startup, reportedly just surpassed both OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini in multiple key benchmarks.
Their Claude 3 model family offers a range of products based on consumer and enterprise needs, with their highest performing model (Opus) beating its competitors in various challenges (math, coding, etc.).
Claude literally came out of nowhere, which is why AI is so incredibly exciting right now.
Midjourney vs Stability AI drama
In an instance of major irony Midjourney (a generative AI image company) is accusing Stability AI (a competitor) of scraping images from its website. As this article about the drama said, cue the world’s smallest violin.
Midjourney has been accused of similar behavior against others.
In MJ [Midjourney] office hours they just said someone at Stability AI was trying to grab all the prompt and image pairs in the middle of a night on Saturday and brought down their service. MJ is banning all of the stabilityAI employees from Midjourney immediately. This is breaking now. - Nick St. Pierre
This should only inspire more discussion about how we can best protect (and compensate) copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property owners in this new AI landscape.
Nobody should be able to steal other peoples’ creations, profit from them, and not be forced the compensate the original artist.
Open-source robotics
Roboticists are leaving entrenched players like Tesla for upstarts like open-source projects like Hugging Face. Wild times.
Previously, Remi Cadene worked on self-driving vehicle technology and humanoid robots at Tesla and Optimus (both Elon Musk-led companies).
It’s good evidence that the fields of artificial intelligence and robotics are both expanding and growing.
Time to hop on board.
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Website: https://polispandit.com
Medium: https://medium.com/@johnny-p