My take on the news
Uber starts deliveries with Waymo
As you perhaps remember, around 2016, Google had legal litigation against Uber because this one hired Google’s self-driving division star engineer Anthony Levandowski, taking with him a trove of proprietary information from his job at Google. But now time has healed the wounds, and Waymo (formerly Google’s self-driving division) is going to help Uber deliver orders in the Phoenix metropolitan area. It’s not only that the two companies are leaving their contentious past to rest; it’s also proof of two interesting things: one is that Uber is no longer pursuing self-driving goals in the short term, and the other is that self-driving is not dead after all, as many have thought after many related enterprise projects were shut down. Whether or not Waymo will be successful in the short term is left to be seen; I won’t venture any prediction yet.Claude 3 surpasses GPT-4
Well, this is what some headlines are saying these days. But in reality, it’s only that the new Anthropic chatbot Claude 3 got higher user support on Hugging Face’s Chatbot Arena, a crowdsourced chatbot leaderboard. Additionally, Claude 3 got better results in some benchmarks, but this doesn’t show definitive superiority. What experts have noticed recently is that the most powerful LLMs are strangely similar in their performance, leading to think that perhaps it’s getting harder and harder to substantially improve.Vinyl Records Outsold CDs for the Second Year
Vinyl records are not a new technology—quite the opposite. But as CD sales vanished due to streaming’s popularity and convenience, vinyl sales soared. We are all aware that vinyls aren’t more convenient than streaming, but perhaps not everybody is aware that they don’t sound better either. Why are they so enticing, then? First of all, with vinyl, you own an object; with streaming, you don’t. Then, said object is better for showcasing the cover art and can delve much better into a graphic design associated with the music vibe. Oh, and there is the nostalgia also–getting back to the good old times! That’s priceless for some…Amazon gives up on no-checkout shopping
Do you remember the innovative no-checkout Amazon stores? It was the future of shopping! Or was it? Now Amazon is about to shut down the service, because of low interest and high costs. But actual stores are not shutting down: a new, “gradual checkout” will be their new proposal: as the client shops while roaming through the aisles, she or he can check an item out by approaching it to a checking machine. This seems to me like a more reasonable proposition than filling the store with automated cameras that peek into your slightest move.
This week’s quote
“The evidence that climate change is a serious problem that we must contend with now is overwhelming on its own. There is no need to overstate the evidence, particularly when it feeds a paralyzing narrative of doom and hopelessness.”
– Penn State University meteorology professor Michael Mann
The quote is intended to avoid strident outcries like “We are all going to die soon!” Dr. Mann says that the doom discourse leads to inaction (as we are all going to die anyway). He proposes instead raising awareness of how big the climate-changing problem is.
This week’s link
I recommend an enlightening article about how internet search relates to AI chatbots, looking beyond the “AI is about to kill Google” narrative. The article is:
Here’s why AI search engines really can’t kill Google
The blog piece highlights
This time my Medium article is about how AI services will change the way we enjoy watching sports on TV:
I propose 3 AI-based services that don’t exist just yet.
The first one is to have “flexible highlights.”
Flexible highlights would offer personalized excerpts of a whole match.
They would be generated on demand according to some preferences
How this would be implemented is discussed.
The second service is “spoiler protection.”
When you’re using flexible highlights you don’t want to receive news items with a spoiler.
Your cell phone (or other devices) would protect you against spoilers using AI.
The third service is about image enhancements.
The way image enhancements align with virtualization trends is discussed in the article.
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