markjgsmith

2023/11/03 #

• Peter Kafka's latest Land Of the Giants episode, What we all got wrong about Twitter, is really good. High quality production, has a documentary feel to it but it remains light, with very listenable audio clips. Doesn't get all caught up in the weeds, paints a very compeling picture of why Twitter was so popular in the early days. Worth the time to listen.

  One thing that I find a bit parculiar was what happened to Vine. By all accounts Twitter bought them after failing to acquire Instagram. Instagram later got bought by Facebook for a cool billion dollars. Twitter then struggled to integrate Vine, eventually closing it down.

  But why did they close it down? Maybe it didn't fit well with Twitter but it was still quite a cool product. Why didn't they sell it on to someone else? #

• Level playing field in AI - There's a theory going around that the big players in the AI race are scaremongering on the dangers that AI poses so that regulators impose regulations that would help the giants keep their dominant market position. While that now looks likely, I'm wondering what the alternative would be.

  Surely if they are nefarious enough to prompt regulatory capture, then it seems likely that if that plan doesn't work, aren't they then likely to use their newly minted and most powerful AIs in the world to cripple the competition in some way? Basically either way it seems likely to be impossibly difficult for AI startups.

  How do we prevent AI infiniti wars in favour of AI renaisences? #