🎵 AI music and AI layoffs 🙇♂️
New Look, Same Great Taste
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The Good
APPLE'S AI IS PROBABLY GONNA BE DOPE
Apple did something very uncharacteristically Apple last week and released an open-source language model called, appropriately, OpenELM. This is a smaller language model than the LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT, but it's designed to run on-device without calling to the cloud.
Apple is still in talks with OpenAI and Google, the former of which apparently has intesified lately, but that may be a stop-gap measure to buy time until Apple can get its on-device AIs up to snuff with the big players in the cloud computing space.
This on-device ELM is big, good news for one reason: privacy. I've always personally been a fan of Apple's privacy protections. No big tech company is perfect, but Apple collects a lot less data than Google, doesn't sell it, and you can opt out of most of it. Plus, their end-to-end encryption makes sure your data isn't intercepted.
If these policies are mashed together with on-device AI, we're talking about personal AI assistants that keep your data and requests as private as they can be. And in any case, Apple releasing their on-device language model open source is good for innovation and for the next generation of AI-powered devices.
Stay tuned because Apple is doing an iPad-related event on May 7, and some rumors suggest we'll see the first Apple AI features there!
The Bad
IS AI WORSE BECAUSE OF CAPITALISM?
Many a Twidiot will gleefully tell you that major AI developments would never be possible without market economics. That's certainly true as most of the funding for AI companies of late has come from speculative investment, which obviously expects some return. But fears are growing over job replacement, with 30% of workers fearing technology will soon replace their jobs. Even as over 80% of office workers think AI makes them more efficient, over 80% of digital marketers think content writers will lose their jobs to AI and 14% of workers already believe they've lost a job to a robot. AI innovation is driving layoffs left and right (and Bloomberg reports it's driving more layoffs than companies want to admit).
Meanwhile, there's a groundshift happening right now on Wall Street, and most of us are missing it. Over the 40 years prior to the COVID recession, corporate profits represented 11% of inflation growth. In the four years since then, corporate profits have represented 53% of inflation growth. So your bills have recently gone up mostly to pad the pockets of the investor class rather than because of skyrocketing material or labor costs.
Put these two situations together, and you see the sad reality: Wall Street is focused on bottom-line growth at any cost. Famously, you may have heard a few years back that Citi analyst Kevin Crissey complained about American Airlines pay increases, saying, “This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first again. Shareholders get leftovers.” Well, Kevin's getting his way and AI is leading the charge in "cost savings exercises," aka layoffs in favor of shareholder profits.
This is a freight train headed toward a collapsed bridge. At some point, we will hit a tipping point where we've laid off too many of the consumers we need to keep the economy running. We're in for some bad times unless we pivot toward job protections, job re-training programs, new skilled labor initiatives, and eventually something resembling a universal basic income for those who cannot find work when the robots are doing most of it. This may be bad news, but there is still an opportunity to create an environment where AI works alongside humans rather than instead of them, we just need to all be part of finding it.
The AI
I've become obsessed with the Arc Browser and the AI features inside. Try it out and tell me what you think.
Could speaking out against AI on social media cause the algorithms to bury your content? Jessie Cortes thinks it's possible.
Generative music is here. This is a bedroom pop song I made called "Echoes of the Past (Gone, my love)." Serious Olivia Rodrigo/T-Swift vibes. Tell me if it's good.
Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, sat down for an interview with an AI trained on all of his own writing. It was a little surreal but interesting to watch.
Cassidy is a cool AI tool we've been using at my work that can consume anything you've written and a style guide to then write more content in your voice (not an ad, just cool)
The 30 best AI movies of all time. I could quibble with some exclusions, but this is a good list if you're looking for something to watch this weekend
Until next time,
Kyle