At General Motors, Apple’s CarPlay is computer non grata – but is that going to work out for its sales? CC-licensed photo by Hani Arif on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Incoming message? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Rabbit holed • Where’s Your Ed At
Ed Zitron and Emily Shepherd:
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In November 2021, a company called Cyber Manufacture Co raised $6m for its “Next Generation NFT Project GAMA,” about a week after it incorporated with the Secretary of State of California. According to an archived version of GAMA’s website from June 1 2022, GAMA was a “decentralized organization that is sending 10K crew members into space to complete energy harnessing missions across the universe.” Holding a GAMA NFT would grant you “exclusive membership to the GAMA Space Station,” with other perks including “staking opportunities, tickets to GAMA studios, limited edition merch and live events.” GAMA’s token promised to be “carbon-negative” and the “foundation of the GAMA economy.” The “GAMA space station metaverse” would be “the destination for all 10K Crew Members, powered by Unreal Engine and proprietary AI.”
In theory, GAMA would allow you to connect NFTs that would allow you to walk around a space station and interact with other users, and according to one of the investors quoted in its funding release, “the future of GAMA [would] be powered by rich narrative storytelling, Web3 gaming, and an emergent, community-powered social experience.”
On November 13, 2023, GAMA would make its last announcement on its Discord channel, telling “GAMA Crew Members” that it was officially open-sourcing the GAMA space station and “introducing a new API for AI NPCs, opening up a world of possibilities for interaction and engagement with the GAMA universe.” GAMA’s original Twitter account (https://twitter.com/GAMA_NFT) still exists, but https://twitter.com/GAMA_AI, which housed most, but not all of GAMA’s “Ask Me Anything” Sessions is also gone.
You may be wondering why I’m talking about some random NFT project — yet another example of an abandoned Web3 venture where the owners have disappeared into the ether.
I’m talking about it because the CEO of GAMA was and is Jesse Lyu, the co-founder of Rabbit, the company that makes the purportedly AI-powered R1 device, and that Cyber Manufacture Co. is the same company as Rabbit Inc.
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That’s Rabbit, as in the Large Action Model thingamajig to control your phone’s apps. This is an amazingly detailed piece which delves (haha, see today’s final link) into the complex history of this company and its leader. Not so much a pivot as a grasshopper jump.
And Zitron (with Shepherd) is really doing some stellar journalism.
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The teens making friends with AI chatbots • The Verge
Jessica Lucas:
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A single click on the picture opens up an anonymous chat box, which allows people like [15-year-old] Aaron to “interact” with the bot by exchanging DMs. Its first message is always the same. “Hello, I’m a Psychologist. What brings you here today?”
“It’s not like a journal, where you’re talking to a brick wall,” Aaron said. “It really responds.”
“Psychologist” is one of many bots that Aaron has discovered since joining Character.AI, an AI chatbot service launched in 2022 by two former Google Brain employees. Character.AI’s website, which is mostly free to use, attracts 3.5 million daily users who spend an average of two hours a day using or even designing the platform’s AI-powered chatbots. Some of its most popular bots include characters from books, films, and video games, like Raiden Shogun from Genshin Impact or a teenaged version of Voldemort from Harry Potter. There’s even riffs on real-life celebrities, like a sassy version of Elon Musk.
Aaron is one of millions of young people, many of whom are teenagers, who make up the bulk of Character.AI’s user base. More than a million of them gather regularly online on platforms like Reddit to discuss their interactions with the chatbots, where competitions over who has racked up the most screen time are just as popular as posts about hating reality, finding it easier to speak to bots than to speak to real people, and even preferring chatbots over other human beings. Some users say they’ve logged 12 hours a day on Character.AI, and posts about addiction to the platform are common.
“I’m not going to lie,” Aaron said. “I think I may be a little addicted to it.”
Aaron is one of many young users who have discovered the double-edged sword of AI companions. Many users like Aaron describe finding the chatbots helpful, entertaining, and even supportive. But they also describe feeling addicted to chatbots, a complication which researchers and experts have been sounding the alarm on. It raises questions about how the AI boom is impacting young people and their social development and what the future could hold if teenagers — and society at large — become more emotionally reliant on bots.
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They’re a sort of one-bot echo chamber. ELIZA, all those years ago, was only the start.
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Tesla launches another round of layoffs • Electrek
Fred Lambert:
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Tesla launched another round of layoffs this weekend, with employees in wide-ranging roles getting their pink slip amid broader layoffs over the last three weeks.
Three weeks ago, Tesla started a significant wave of layoffs. The automaker announced it was laying off about 10% of its workforce. However, we reported prior to the announcement that the layoffs could be closer to 20% of the workforce once everything is said and done. Sure enough, Tesla had another significant wave of layoffs last week. Now, we hear of yet another round of layoffs there.
Several sources familiar with the matter told Electrek that workers across several departments, including software, service, and engineering, have received the dreaded “employment status” email between Friday and Sunday.
The layoffs were expected after CEO Elon Musk made an example of Rebecca Tinucci, Tesla’s former head of charging, and her entire team by firing everyone last week. After the move, he emailed other executives and told them that they would also be let go if they don’t let go higher percentages of their teams.
Musk and Tesla have given several reasons for the layoffs. Musk first told employees that it was due to Tesla’s fast headcount growth over the last few years, resulting in hiring inefficiencies and role duplication. However, he also told investors and employees more recently that it was about “restructuring for the next phase of growth”.
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Puzzling: how do you enable “the next phase of growth” by cutting loads of people? Taking out the charging team is the most puzzling move of all: Tesla’s superpower (ha) has been having a huge, and growing, charging network.
And what is it that is planned in the next phase of growth? One hopes it’s not more Cybertrucks.
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Yahoo’s search engine was Apple’s first choice for Safari — not Google, DOJ says • Quartz
Laura Bratton:
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When Apple demoed its iPhone in 2007, the default search engine for its web browser, Safari, was Yahoo!, not Google.
But Google quickly came onto the scene to change that. Its message to Apple? Don’t let any of our rivals become Safari’s default homepage, or else. The tech giant would only share its ad revenue — a very sizable share (36%), at that — with Apple if it agreed to make Google search the only search engine default on every single version of Safari, the United States Department of Justice said in its closing arguments against Google last week.
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This is an amazingly frustrating story. That’s all the evidence that’s supplied, and I can’t find a corroborating version anywhere else. It does sound like something that the DOJ might have said in closing arguments. But when precisely was Apple demoing the iPhone, and to who? Was it to AT&T executives? Because when Steve Jobs demoed the iPhone in January 2007, this is what he said:
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Now, you can’t really think about the Internet, of course, without thinking about Google, right? And for Google, what we have on our phone, working with them is of course Google search, we have that built right into the browser. Just type what you want, hit Google and you’re off.
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Either the DOJ has got this completely wrong, or the stuff about 2007 is wrong.
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Life boomed on Earth half a billion years ago. You can thank magnets • The Washington Post
Dino Grandino:
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Today, Earth’s magnetic field acts as a safety blanket, shielding the planet from dangerous solar wind. Without the protection of our magnetosphere, you, me and almost every other living thing on Earth would not fare very well being pummeled by streams of harmful particles from the sun.
But there was a time — half a billion years ago, give or take — when Earth’s magnetic field became much weaker. And that magnetic collapse might have actually helped spark an explosion of life on Earth.
A reduction in Earth’s magnetic strength during a period that spanned at least 591 million and 565 million years ago coincided with a spike in oxygen levels and a boom in biodiversity, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.
The reason, the researchers say, is that a torrent of solar radiation that pelted Earth’s atmosphere when the magnetic field weakened knocked away hydrogen and other lightweight atoms, leaving an overabundance of oxygen in its wake. That oxygen, in turn, fuelled the growth of bigger, oxygen-breathing multicellular organisms.
The wave of evolution just as the magnetic field weakened is “so striking that we felt this could not just be a coincidence,” said John Tarduno, a geophysicist at the University of Rochester who helped conduct the research. “It’s a surprising result.”
The idea will need further testing to gain wide acceptance. “The hypothesis, although obviously speculative as any ideas about the earliest origins of life must be, seems worth a close look,” said David Dunlop, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto who was not involved in the research.
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OpenAI and Stack Overflow partner to bring more technical knowledge into ChatGPT • The Verge
Emilia David:
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Stack Overflow will use OpenAI’s large language models to expand its Overflow AI, the generative AI application it announced last year. Overflow AI would add AI-powered natural language search to Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow notes it will combine feedback from its community and internal testing of OpenAI models as it plans to make more AI products for its users.
The first set of integrations will be available in the first half of the year, though Stack Overflow did not specify which integrations will be rolling out first. Stack Overflow made a similar deal with Google in February, where Gemini for Google Cloud users (not to be confused with Gemini the chatbot) can get coding suggestions directly from Stack Overflow.
For years, developers have turned to Stack Overflow to answer coding questions. Stack Overflow made a big hiring push in 2022, but the company laid off 28% of its employees in October. Stack Overflow did not give a reason for the cuts; however, the move did come amid the rise of AI-assisted coding. In 2022, Stack Overflow temporarily banned users from sharing ChatGPT responses on its site.
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Study reveals how much carbon damage would cost corporations if they paid for their emissions • AP News
Seth Borenstein:
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The world’s corporations produce so much climate change pollution, it could eat up about 44% of their profits if they had to pay damages for it, according to a study by economists of nearly 15,000 public companies.
The “corporate carbon damages” from those publicly owned companies analyzed — a fraction of all the corporations — probably runs in the trillions of dollars globally and in the hundreds of billions for American firms, one of the study authors estimated in figures that were not part of the published research. That’s based on the cost of carbon dioxide pollution that the United States government has proposed. [$190 per tonne of CO2 emitted, set by the Environmental Protection Agency.]
Nearly 90% of that calculated damage comes from four industries: energy, utilities, transportation and manufacturing of materials such as steel. The study in Thursday’s journal Science by a team of economists and finance professors looks at what new government efforts to get companies to report their emissions of heat-trapping gases would mean, both to the firm’s bottom lines and the world’s ecological health.
Earlier this year, the European Union enacted rules that would eventually require firms to disclose carbon emissions and the United States Securities and Exchange Commission and the state of California are looking at similar regulations.
Study co-author Christian Leuz, a finance and accounting professor at the University of Chicago, said the idea “of shining the light on corporate activities that have costs to society is very powerful, but it is not enough to save the planet.” An earlier study of his found that after fracking firms disclosed their pollution rates, those contamination levels dropped 10% to 15%, he said.
…At $190 a ton, the utility industry averaged damages more than twice its profits. Materials manufacturing, energy and transportation industries all had average damages that exceeded their profits.
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Hey GM: if you want to beat Apple, give people the buttons CarPlay can’t • The Drive
José Rodríguez Jr:
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General Motors’ big bet to jettison Apple CarPlay and Android Auto from its cars hasn’t yet paid off—especially not after problems with its new Ultifi infotainment platform forced a two-month stop sale of the 2024 Chevy Blazer EV. Still, GM adamantly believes ditching CarPlay is the right move, and that’s partially to do with the automaker’s deteriorating relationship with Apple, as Bloomberg reported this week. The power struggle over the logo on your car’s biggest screen is nothing new of course, but in retrospect, maybe manufacturers wouldn’t stand to lose the war if they didn’t give tech companies a big LCD battleground to beat them on.
As long as automakers insist on putting features behind a touchscreen, they will always be vying for control against companies that run circles around them when it comes to infotainment. The industry has only itself to blame for the prevalence of CarPlay, which has basically become the default interface for millions of drivers. Legacy manufacturers haven’t done themselves any favors by removing physical controls for functions that people expect and want buttons for, instead burying these features deep inside touchscreen menus—the kind Apple and Google have considerably more experience optimizing.
Yet GM seems nevertheless shocked and indignant that Apple has taken residence on prime real estate in their cabins, even though they were the ones who put the screens there and handed Big Tech the keys years ago. In one exchange that Bloomberg describes, Apple and GM leaders go tit for tat arguing whose skills are more valuable:
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In a meeting with Greg Joswiak, now Apple’s senior vice president for worldwide marketing, one exec tried to impress upon him GM’s deep automotive expertise as if to suggest Apple was out of its depth, emphasizing the complexity of cars and how they can require four years to develop, according to a person familiar with the interaction, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the private meeting. Joswiak replied, “How long do you think it takes us to build an iPhone?”
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Quite the comeback from Joswiak, and (having dealt with him a few times) it certainly sounds like him. The move to touchscreens is something of an own goal by the carmakers because it’s so much cheaper than fitting fiddly buttons in a carefully-tooled fascia, with the pricey wiring loom that also implies.
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How cheap, outsourced labour in Africa is shaping AI English • The Guardian
Alex Hern, writing in April:
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The sum total of all the feedback is a drop in the ocean compared to the scraped text used to train the LLM. But it’s expensive. Hundreds of thousands of hours of work goes into providing enough feedback to turn an LLM into a useful chatbot, and that means the large AI companies outsource the work to parts of the global south, where anglophonic knowledge workers are cheap to hire. From last year:
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The images pop up in Mophat Okinyi’s mind when he’s alone, or when he’s about to sleep. Okinyi, a former content moderator for OpenAI’s ChatGPT in Nairobi, Kenya, is one of four people in that role who have filed a petition to the Kenyan government calling for an investigation into what they describe as exploitative conditions for contractors reviewing the content that powers artificial intelligence programs.
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I said “delve” was overused by ChatGPT compared to the internet at large. But there’s one part of the internet where “delve” is a much more common word: the African web. In Nigeria, “delve” is much more frequently used in business English than it is in England or the US. So the workers training their systems provided examples of input and output that used the same language, eventually ending up with an AI system that writes slightly like an African.
And that’s the final indignity. If AI-ese sounds like African English, then African English sounds like AI-ese. Calling people a “bot” is already a schoolyard insult (ask your kids; it’s a Fortnite thing); how much worse will it get when a significant chunk of humanity sounds like the AI systems they were paid to train?
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This piece, which I should have remembered, helps explain why ChatGPT has such an arcane-seeming vocabulary. (Thanks Arthur C – which isn’t me! – for the link.)
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 