Netcompany Snippets #11

The AI avalanche does not rest?

ChatGPT can now see, hear, and speak, Deepmind releases RT-2, a potential transformer moment for robotics, and Microsoft launches AI Co-Pilot. AI hardware consolidates as Meta releases Ray Ban smart glasses with integrated AI, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Jony Ive, designer of the Iphone, are working on a new AI device. Lastly, in the shadow of an answer to a thread on Mustafa Suleyman’s new AI book, The Coming Wave, Michael Nielsen asks: given an omniscient oracle advisor, what do you think is the minimal cost $n where a smart, determined teenager with $n and 6 months work could kill everyone on Earth?, sparking an interesting debate.?

How did innovation come about??

Rohit Krishnan takes a data-based look at how innovations came about throughout human history. TL;DR: humans get ideas, but thanks to the Matthew effect of accumulated advantage, the per-capita number of innovations are rising as the population grows. Around the industrial revolution, a cumulative population threshold was reached. To counter the Matthew effect, maximum innovation complexity is also rising, giving rise to a double-edged sword: with more people we managed to unleash the Matthew Effect, but increasing complexity makes this harder to sustain. Could this partly explain the great stagnation??

How many times do you need to fold a paper for it to be as thick as the observable universe??

103 times.?

The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Must Know About Unicode in 2023?

Read a string on the internet and ask, “what encoding is this?”. With 98 % probability, it’s UTF-8. Nikita Prokopov gives you the minimum knowledge he thinks every software developer needs to know and asks that you “send this to your fellow programmers so they can learn about it, too “.?

Tech goes nuclear?

On september 25th, Microsoft quietly put up a job ad for Principal Program Manager in Nuclear Technology. Microsoft plans to use micro nuclear reactors to power its data centers. On X, Mark Nelson thinks that “a world is coming where only the tech companies willing to become nuclear power developers may get to keep expanding their cloud businesses, and only countries open to new reactors get to host this expansion”.?