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AI technology

Beautiful 'gallery of hope' and more positivity about technology

"It’s November 2025. My son’s graduation day. I’m so proud to be stood surrounded by all my brilliant children." Photo: Jillian Edelstein.

Let's start with positive news, because with the billions being thrown into AI, it's quickly becoming about corporate politics or the egos running the companies. Which often ignores the new applications that can affect our lives in a positive way.

Gallery of Hope and AI Consensus

That's why the Gallery of Hope, an exhibition in London of memories yet to be made, is very special. AI was used to offer sick people a glimpse into their future, from attending a child's wedding to taking a special holiday, moments they know they may not live to see. It is a valuable contribution of technology to breast cancer awareness and the fight against it.

There is more positive news about AI from the UK. Where social media have played a detrimental role with disinformation during elections, Polis is now being used, an AI-powered tool that allows groups with very different opinions to reach consensus through voting and discussion. Might be a good tool to start with in most parliaments! 

Interview tip: Hassabis instead of Altman

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was a guest on Lex Fridman's podcast for nearly two hours, in the week it was announced that Altman is making the rounds in Hollywood to promote Sora, the new service that can generate complete videos from text instructions. Altman remained very vague on the issue of who gets paid for OpenAI's use of other people's work as training data:

"We’ve tried some different models. But if I’m like an artist for example, A, I would like to be able to opt out of people generating art in my style. And B, if they do generate art in my style, I’d like to have some economic model associated with that."

- Sam Altman, CEO OpenAI

Sounds sweet, but Fridman didn't ask further about that sentence "we tried different models.What was tried and with whom? Which website, YouTuber or Instagrammer was paid for the fact that OpenAI probably, because that too was not discussed, copied their data and fed it into their system? The movie studios are eager to reduce actors' and crews' gages by using Sora, but how will they be compensated if their work is reused without the proper attribution and permission?

Supercar made by ... Sora? Or Bugatti after all?

Take a look at this beautiful video created with Sora that OpenAI shared on Instagram: would Bugatti and Audi have given their permission, let alone been compensated, for the obviously brand-inspired images?

A more interesting insight into the thoughts of a leading AI developer than the podcast with Altman is this portrait of Demis Hassabis, the AI project leader at Google. The intro alone is feature-worthy:

"Demis Hassabis stares intently through the screen when I ask him whether he can save Google. It’s early evening in his native U.K. and the DeepMind founder is working overtime. His Google-owned AI research house now leads the company’s entire AI research effort, after ingesting Google Brain last summer, and the task ahead is immense."

Google is still doing quite okay

It is true that OpenAI and other smart chatbots pose an existential threat to Google, but Gemini is certainly not hopeless. Especially since Gemini can be deployed for free while OpenAI has to charge a subscription fee to survive, as the company needs every billion. That Altman is not a cheap guy, but I'll come back to that. Looking at the numbers, the financial performance of Alphabet, Google's parent company, has not suffered from the rise of OpenAI: 

Quarter | revenue | net income
Q4 2022 | 76.05 | 13.62
Q4 2023 | 86.31 | 20.69                     

These are amounts in billions of dollars, pushing Alphabet's projected revenue toward three hundred and fifty billion dollars this year. That is comparable to the GDP of Colombia or Denmark, so Google's obituaries are somewhat premature.

Incidentally, am I the only one who thinks, upon reading that Hassabis has a Chinese-Singaporean mother and a Greek-Cypriot father, "so nice, how will they have met

Voice clone not public for a while yet, because of... voting?

Back to OpenAI, which announced it had created a voice clone application, but currently only for a select group of companies because of the dangers of misuse.

"We recognize that generating speech that resembles people’s voices has serious risks, which are especially top of mind in an election year" said OpenAI, which claims it can mimic someone's voice with just 15 seconds of recording a person talking.

An investigation is already underway into an incident in which thousands of voters received "robocalls" from President Biden during the Democratic primaries in New Hampshire - at least, that's what they thought, because it wasn't him. Although Biden could also have been mistaken, which apparently happens to him occasionally.

According to ChatGPT, this is what Stargate will look like. 

A hundred billion dollar data center

The phenomenal site The Information had another scoop: Microsoft and OpenAI are working on a whopping one hundred billion dollar data center for an AI supercomputer with the delightfully pretentious name of Stargate. This in an effort to reduce dependence on Nvidia.

Reading the reports more closely, I'm especially interested in the rounding off method used by the journalists who reported the story: apparently, the project is estimated to cost "more than one hundred and fifteen billion dollars," but that doesn't look as good, so they rounded it off, downwards, to one hundred billion. For that fifteen billion after the decimal point, thirty juggernauts of data centers could normally be built. In AI, everything is bigger and more expensive; but a few hundred times more expensive?

Elon Musk and Amazon are still in it

Musk announced on X that his latest AI chatbot, Grok 1.5, will be available next week and will be better than all AI models, but he also said the same thing about the built quality of the Tesla Cybertruck before the window shattered seconds later. In short, we'll see.

Amazon announced it was investing nearly three billion dollars in OpenAI competitor Anthropic, maker of AI chatbot Claude. I enjoyed the way the Amazon man barely gave the journalist a chance to ask a question and regurgitated his entire press release, seemingly without breathing. You can see him trying to hold his laughter.

Open source AI model: Databricks

In the titanic battle between OpenAI/Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta, it is nice that startup Databricks has managed to develop a powerful open source AI model. Hopefully this will prove to be a serious option for startups and large companies to develop new AI applications without dependence on the Big Tech titans.

Last notable fact: among all the calls for software startups at leading startup incubator Y Combinator, Sam Altman's former employer, was a call to bring old-fashioned manufacturing back to the United States. Indeed, it is helpful if people can build something, especially when well over a hundred billion is being put into a new kind of data center. In this, Elon Musk is right: there is a lot of focus on design, but not enough on production. Microsoft and OpenAI are going to experience that when they actually start building a mega data center combined with a supercomputer. That's something very different from a big X-Box.

Spotlight 9: Cathie Wood guardian angel of Tesla

A dull stock market week, in which Tesla suddenly rises after a horror quarter

In what has been so far a dramatic year for Tesla, in which the company lost nearly 30 percent of its market capitalization, becoming the worst-performing stock in the S&P 500, TSLA shares suddenly rose more than five percent this week.

Cathie Wood's Ark Innovation ETF bought TSLA on Monday for twenty-eight million dollars, and as if that wasn't enough, Ark pocketed some more Tesla shares on Thursday for fourteen million dollars. Earlier this month Ark published a jubilant analysis of Tesla to which Musk responded briefly on X with: "wow.

Ark Invest has about as many haters as fans but at least it dares to come up with striking public reflections. Hopefully Ark will be proved right with this optimistic view of the near future:

"Techno-economic discontinuity is a process whereby technological breakthroughs create sudden and unprecedented transformations. Such discontinuities occurred during the second industrial revolution after introductions of the internal combustion engine, electrification, and telephony. We believe that a similar, unprecedented technological boom is now underway. ARK identifies five innovation platforms—Public Blockchains, Multiomic Sequencing, Energy Storage, Robotics, and Artificial Intelligence—as the areas of technological foment creating the most meaningful convergences today. They are the emerging “general purpose technologies”1 that we believe will transform and accelerate economic growth."

- Ark Invest

This is a very positive vision, but one strongly focused on economic progress. If this economic growth can be accompanied by the development of technology that enables large-scale removal of CO2 from the atmosphere, there is hope for the world.

I would love to hear your response and tips and comments are always very welcome.

Enjoy your Sunday, see you next week!

Categories
AI crypto technology

Harari: For the first time, no one knows what the world will look like in 20 years

Yuval Noah Harari was a guest at Stephen Colbert's late night talkshow, leading to an unexpectedly relevant conversation.

Harari: "I’m a historian. But I understand history not as the study of the past. Rather it is the study of change, of how things change, which makes it relevant to the present and future.”

Colbert: "Is it real that we are going through some sort of accelerating change?"

Harari: "Every generation thinks like that. But this time it’s real. It is the first time in history that no one has any idea what the world will look like in twenty years. The one thing to know about AI, the most important thing to know about AI, it is the first technology in history that can make decisions by itself and create new ideas by itself. People compare it to the printing press and to the atom bomb. But no, it is completely different."

Technology that makes its own decisions

Perhaps my fascination with the work of Harari, best known as the author of Sapiens, stems from the fact that I am a historian myself (history of communication), but have found that study to be most useful in assessing technological innovations. Harari confirms the idea that many of us have, that current technology involves a completely different, more pervasive and comprehensive innovation than anything the world has seen to date.

With his conclusion that AI is an entirely new technology, precisely because perhaps as early as the next generation AI will be able to make decisions on its own, Harari identifies the core challenge and does so in the very week that Amy Webb presented the new edition of the leading Tech Trends Report themed "Supercycle.( The report is availablehere and this is the video of Webb's presentation at SXSW).

Supercycle

Webb: ""

- Amy Webb, CEO Future Today Institute

Webb, like Harari, believes that technology will affect all of our lives more strongly than ever.

The face OpenAI CTO Mira Murati made after the simple question, "Have you used YouTube videos to train the system?

OpenAI CTO said 'dunno'

If Harari and Webb are right, it is all the more shocking what Mira Murati, the acclaimed Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT and others, blurted out during an interview with the Wall Street Journal. The question was simply whether OpenAI used footage from YouTube in training Sora, OpenAI's new text-to-video service.

Now OpenAI is under pressure on this issue, because the New York Times has launched a lawsuit against the alleged illegal use of its information in training ChatGPT. So getting this question wrong could possibly provoke a new lawsuit from the owner of YouTube, and that is Google, OpenAI's major competitor, of all people.

Murati obviously should have expected this question and could have given a much better answer than the twisted face she now pulled, combined with regurgitating some lame lines that can be summed up as "don't call me, I'll call you. It's of a sad level at a time just after OpenAI already experienced a true king drama surrounding CEO Sam Altman.

These people are developing technology that can make its own decisions and are undoubtedly technically and intellectually of an extraordinary level, but as human beings they lack the life experience and judgment to realize what impact their technology can have on society.

Your car works for your insurance company?

It is downright miraculous that Zuckerberg can still sleep after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which is a consequence of peddling our privacy for financial gain. It is now not just the big tech companies that are guilty of this revenue model, even car manufacturers have joined the guild of privacy-devouring crooks.

LexisNexis, which builds profiles of consumers for insurers, turns out buyers of General Motors cars had every trip taken, including when they drove too fast, braked too hard or accelerated too fast. The result: higher insurance premiums. As if you needed another reason never to buy a car from this manufacturer of unimaginative, identity-less vehicles.

Google Gemini does not do elections

Partly because of stock price pressures, tech companies are forced to release moderately tested applications as quickly as possible. Think of Google with Gemini, which wanted to be so politically correct that it even depicted Nazis of Asian descent. Sweetly intended to be inclusive, but totally pointless.

This fiasco caused such a stir that Google announced Tuesday that Gemini is not providing information about all the elections taking place this year worldwide. Indeed, even to the innocent question "What countries are holding elections this year?" Gemini now replies, "I am still learning how to answer this question." I beg your parrrrdon?

Google Gemini does know all about Super Mario

Use Google's search engine and you come right to a Time article that begins with the sentence, '2024 is not just any election year. It may be *the* election year.' According to ChatGPT, elections will take place this year in the US, Taiwan, Russia, the European Union, India and South Africa; a total of 49% of the world's population will be able to go to the polls this year.

So when providing meaningful information about the future of the planet, Google Gemini is not the place to be. Fortunately, I do get a delightfully politically correct answer to my question: 'Did Princess Peach really need to be rescued by a white man? Wasn't Super Mario just being a male chauvinist?' Reading the answer, I get the feeling that Google Gemini has been fed a totally absurd worldview by well-intentioned people. The correct answer would have been, "Super Mario is a computer game. It's not real. Go worry about something else, you idiot.'

Anti-monarchists claim that this photo has been doctored. I deny everything.

Speaking of princesses, there is one who claims that, like us mere mortals, she sometimes edits photos herself. At least, so says the X account on behalf of Princess Catherine and Prince William. The whole fiasco not only draws attention to the issues surrounding the authenticity of photos, but also demonstrates the need for digital authentication when sending digital messages. It would be helpful if it were conclusively established that the princess herself sent the message that was signed with the letter C.

Where do we go from here?

Globally, people are wrestling with how to deal with and potentially regulate the latest generation of technology, which is also a source of geopolitical tension. See how China is reacting to the news that ASML is considering moving out of the Netherlands.

The possible ban on TikTok, or a forced sale of the U.S. branch of TikTok by owner ByteDance, will not happen as quickly as last week's news coverage might suggest. By the way, it is interesting what happened in India when TikTok was banned there in 2020: TikTok's 200 million Indian users mostly moved on to Instagram and YouTube.

India announced this week that a proposed law requiring approval for the launch of AI models will be repealed. Critics say the law would slow innovation and could worsen India's competitiveness; the economic argument almost always wins.

The European Union is beating its chest that the law for AI regulation has been approved, but it will be years before it takes effect. It is unclear how the law will protect consumers and businesses from abuse. Shelley McKinley, the chief legal officer of GitHub, part of Microsoft, compared the U.S. and European approaches as follows:

"I would say the EU AI Act is a ‘fundamental rights base,’ as you would expect in Europe,” McKinley said. “And the U.S. side is very cybersecurity, deep-fakes — that kind of lens. But in many ways, they come together to focus on what are risky scenarios — and I think taking a risk-based approach is something that we are in favour of — it’s the right way to think about it.”

Aviation as an example

Lawmakers often tend to create a new regulator in response to an incident, think of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security after 9/11. The EU is now doing the same with the new European AI Office, for which qualified personnel is being recruited.

It shows a far too narrow view of digital reality. As the aforementioned Tech Trends Report correctly shows, it's not just about AI: the "tech super cycle" is created by an almost simultaneous breakthrough of various technologies, such as, in addition to AI, bioengineering (submissions for a good Dutch translation are most welcome!), web 3, metaverse and robotics, to name just a few.

It would therefore be better to set up a digital technology regulator similar to the European Medicines Agency EMA or the U.S. aviation authority FAA. Not that things are flawless at the FAA right now, far from it, but the FAA has spent decades ensuring that aviation is the safest form of transportation.

It is precisely having oversight relaxed, coupled with the greed of Boeing management, that has created dire situations such as Boeing personnel saying they never wanted to fly on the 787 themselves. It is exactly the situation that should be avoided in digital technology, where already many former personnel are coming forward about abuses and mismanagement with major social consequences.

Spotlight 9: Bad week for AI, but what will next week bring?

It was a week of correction for AI stocks, but what happens when Monday Nvidia announces the latest AI chip...

It was a week of hefty corrections after an extremely enthusiastic start to the year in tech stocks and in crypto. Bitcoin lost 5% and Ethereum lost as much as 10%. My completely made-up AI Spotlight 9, or nine stocks that I think will benefit from developments in AI, also received hefty ticks.

On crypto, I like to quote Yuval Noah Harari again, this time on the Daily Show: "Money is the greatest story ever told. It is the only story everybody believes. When you look at it, it has no value in itself. The value comes only from the stories we tell about it, as every cryptocurrency-guru or Bitcoin-enthusiast knows. It is all about the story. There is nothing else. It is just the story."

Media critic Jeff Jarvis believes nothing of the doom-and-gloom talk about rapidly advancing technology and even scolded people like investor Peter Thiel and entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Sam Altman. It was striking to encounter Jarvis in one of my favorite sports podcasts. Jarvis apparently does not realize that just his appearance on this sports show to talk about AI underscores the impact of technology on everyday life. He is not invited to talk about the role of parchment, troubadours or the pony express.

Million, billion, trillion

Where startups once started in someone's garage, AI in particular is the playing field for billionaires. The normally media shy top investor Vinod Khosla (Sun, Juniper, Square, Instacart, Stripe etc) publicly opened fire on Elon Musk after he filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, not entirely coincidentally a Khosla investment.

OpenAI top man Sam Altman appears to still be in talks for his $7 trillion chip project with Abu Dhabi's new $100 billion sovereign wealth fund MGX, which is trying to become a frontrunner in AI with a giant leap. Apparently, Altman has also been talking with Temasek, a leading sovereign wealth fund of Singapore. These talks involve tens of billions.

From the perspective of Harari, let's look at Nvidia's story. That is offering developers a preview of its new AI chip this week. How long can Nvidia and CEO Jensen Huang wear the crown as the dominant supplier of AI chips in the technology world? Tomorrow, Huang will walk onto the stage at a hockey arena in Silicon Valley to unveil his latest products. His presentation will have a big impact on my AI Spotlight 9 stock prices in the coming weeks and maybe even months.

The shelf life of a giant

Payment processor Stripe, also a Khosla investment, reported in its annual reader's letter that the average length of time a company is included in the S&P 500 index has shrunk sharply in recent decades: it was 61 years in 1958 and it is now 18 years. Companies that cannot compete in the digital world are struggling. With the huge sums currently being invested in technology, that trend will only accelerate.

In conclusion

In that context, it is particularly fun and interesting to see that in Cleveland good old mushrooms are eating up entire houses and cleaning up pollution, even PFAS. Perhaps not an example of Amy Webb's bioengineering, rather bio-remediation, but certainly a hopeful example of how smart people are able to solve complex problems in concert with nature.

Have a great Sunday, see you next week!