Weeknotes: Starting 2025 a little slow

AI’s next leap requires intimate access to your digital life I'm quoted in this Washington Post story by Gerrit De Vynck about "agents" - which in this case are defined as AI systems that operate a computer system like a human might, for example Anthropic's Computer Use demo. “The problem is that language models as a technology are inherently...

According to public financial documents from its parent company IAC and first reported by Adweek OpenAI is paying around $16 million per year to license content [from Dotdash Meredith]. That is no doubt welcome incremental revenue, and you could call it “lucrative” in the sense of having a fat margin, as OpenAI is almost certainly paying for...

I Live My Life a Quarter Century at a Time Delightful Steve Jobs era Apple story from James Thomson, who built the first working prototype of the macOS Dock. Via lobste.rs Tags: apple, history, steve-jobs

Claude is not a real guy. Claude is a character in the stories that an LLM has been programmed to write. Just to give it a distinct name, let's call the LLM "the Shoggoth". When you have a conversation with Claude, what's really happening is you're coauthoring a fictional conversation transcript with the Shoggoth wherein you are writing the lines...

O2 unveils Daisy, the AI granny wasting scammers’ time Bit of a surprising press release here from 14th November 2024: Virgin Media O2 (the UK companies merged in 2021) announced their entrance into the scambaiting game: Daisy combines various AI models which work together to listen and respond to fraudulent calls instantaneously and is so...