Ariana what are you doing here!
Gary Gensler takes aim at AI, impending doom, wiki love
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A brief interlude from Sam, your favorite AI newsletter writer.
When I’m not sharing my saucy takes on the tech world here, I’m building a company called Catalist—an AI Project Management assistant that automatically keeps projects on track and teams in sync. We just opened our waitlist, and I’d love to give priority access to you, dear reader. If you work on a team building software and want your projects to be faster, cheaper, and less chaotic, sign up on the website and reference this newsletter.
In other AI news, listen to NY Times journalist and best selling author Kashmir Hill on the Boys Club podcast talk about facial recognition software and the death of privacy. Not to be dramatic but it’s a big deal!
Love,
The Boys
We love a crossover episode. SEC chair and crypto frenemy Gary Gensler is taking aim at AI, warning of “nearly unavoidable” impending financial doom caused by the tech. In an interview, Gensler shared his opinion that our current financial systems and regulation are not designed to handle how fast AI tech has evolved. The risk stems from the big financial firms all using the same few underlying base models, meaning if one thing goes wrong with (eg with OpenAI), it would cause a chaos cascade across the entire financial industry. Gensler is a thinkboi when it comes to AI’s impact on the markets: in 2020 co-authored a paper outlining the risks and the need for new, modernized regulation to avoid a $hit $how.
Hey Siri, get it together. In the past year of Generative AI hype, one company has been seemingly asleep at the wheel. While Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft have all made money moves, Apple missed the memo. Bloomberg interviewed “people with knowledge” who shared Apple execs are scrambling to catch up. While the company rolled its own (yet-to-be-released) AI model earlier this year, teams are still working on figuring out how to integrate into their existing products. Let’s not forget that Apple has a giant software business, including Apple Music (AI playlists?), Pages/Keynote/Numbers (AI writing assistants?), Mail and iMessage (text my mom back for me?). With a surprise last-minute event scheduled for next week and the launch of the Vision Pro expected early next year, we’re hoping Apple finally brings some Tube Girl energy.
Guardians of the Internet. We all dated that guy in high school who would edit Wikipedia pages for fun (no? just me?). A company called Samaya AI has shown that this beloved hobby of internet dwellers may be due for a refresh, as AI can create more accurate citations for wiki pages. They’ve developed a neural network that evaluated the references linked to from Wikipedia pages to see if they are, in fact, good references. If not, it suggests better citations for editors to use. Now there’s no excuse to not bring receipts.
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