I love your emphasis on coercion, and your consistent emphasis on it across your AI essays. It's exactly my experience at my institution in PA: we're being shoved, bit by bit, into the new Instructure/OpenAI frameworks, the Gemini frameworks, the goddamn never-ending Copilot workflows...in the core humanities. I think the authoritarianism and surveillance piece is key here.
not directly related to this, but these guys are also investing on media ecosystems that can be used to leverage AI in the future. a16z now has a new media team ("including an A24 producer"), musk has x, bezos has the washington post and looking to buy vogue, oracle with tiktok and so on
Minor correction: Marc Andreessen was never part of PayPal. He made his original fortune from selling Netscape to AOL (in 1999) and used the money he made from that to found the massive VC firm Andreessen Horowitz (aka a16z). He's definitely part of the social circle with the PayPal Mafia, but he isn't actually a member.
Another one who is part of the same circle (and has been around for a similar length of time) is Paul Graham, co-founder of YCombinator, the other VC firm that everyone in Silicon Valley has heard of.
Even though they aren't formally part of the PPM, they're friends with them, share most of their attitudes, work in similar businesses, and are generally easily confused. Certainly, it's the same sociological group.
Andreessen was never officially a part of PayPal, but he advised its founders from very early on (in part because of their shared associations with UIUC), has long relationships & even partnerships with many PayPal alums, & has frequently been grouped with the PayPal Mafia by financial press. He was also on eBay’s board when it spun off PayPal & was very vocal in defense of the brand.
Regarding the articles main point, it makes me genuinely curious to understand how the 'forced adoption of AI' is actually meant to manifest, given the stark contrast with all the critical, real-world problems you so insightfully descibed.
Also "diffusion" as in "Stable Diffusion" was completely missed by the post.
The humans with which Nadella interacted before he used CoPilot may be some anonymous data people who made a dashboard so he does not have to negotiate with these anonymous data people about "what is important to the business"
Yes to all . . . and we now have OpenAI entering into educational contracts with countries! https://openai.com/index/edu-for-countries/
omg Marc. I hadn’t seen that yet. Thanks.
I love your emphasis on coercion, and your consistent emphasis on it across your AI essays. It's exactly my experience at my institution in PA: we're being shoved, bit by bit, into the new Instructure/OpenAI frameworks, the Gemini frameworks, the goddamn never-ending Copilot workflows...in the core humanities. I think the authoritarianism and surveillance piece is key here.
not directly related to this, but these guys are also investing on media ecosystems that can be used to leverage AI in the future. a16z now has a new media team ("including an A24 producer"), musk has x, bezos has the washington post and looking to buy vogue, oracle with tiktok and so on
Yep. https://theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/the-ellisons-are-beta-testing-big
Great report, insight and analysis. Thanks for this work
Minor correction: Marc Andreessen was never part of PayPal. He made his original fortune from selling Netscape to AOL (in 1999) and used the money he made from that to found the massive VC firm Andreessen Horowitz (aka a16z). He's definitely part of the social circle with the PayPal Mafia, but he isn't actually a member.
Another one who is part of the same circle (and has been around for a similar length of time) is Paul Graham, co-founder of YCombinator, the other VC firm that everyone in Silicon Valley has heard of.
Even though they aren't formally part of the PPM, they're friends with them, share most of their attitudes, work in similar businesses, and are generally easily confused. Certainly, it's the same sociological group.
Andreessen was never officially a part of PayPal, but he advised its founders from very early on (in part because of their shared associations with UIUC), has long relationships & even partnerships with many PayPal alums, & has frequently been grouped with the PayPal Mafia by financial press. He was also on eBay’s board when it spun off PayPal & was very vocal in defense of the brand.
Regarding the articles main point, it makes me genuinely curious to understand how the 'forced adoption of AI' is actually meant to manifest, given the stark contrast with all the critical, real-world problems you so insightfully descibed.
Also "diffusion" as in "Stable Diffusion" was completely missed by the post.
The humans with which Nadella interacted before he used CoPilot may be some anonymous data people who made a dashboard so he does not have to negotiate with these anonymous data people about "what is important to the business"
Stable Diffusion is branded after the machine-learning process which is described earlier in the post.
(I just now see an email from Team Vizuara in which I can learn to "build a diffusion model from scratch" for 20,000 rupees)
Diffusion should be the first in a collection of AI scents - we can co-create them
Thank you for reading & responding. It’s always good to hear from tech workers.