Brian Merchant

@bcmerchant.bsky.social

113297 Followers 1647 Following

author of Blood in the Machine, tech writer, luddite newsletter: https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/ books: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/contributor/brian-merchant/ kofi link: https://ko-fi.com/brianmerchant

Title: BLOOD IN THE MACHINE Image: A hand gripping a hammer that has smashed through cords.
Still from First Reformed. "Well somebody has to do something"
Sliver says his OpenAI stake worth about 7 billion
NYT headline and graph showing Nvidia is worth $5 trillion.
Dr. Agarwal is among more than 20 researchers who have left their work at Meta, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and other big A.I. projects in recent weeks to join a new Silicon Valley start-up, Periodic Labs. Many of them have given up tens of millions of dollars — if not hundreds of millions — to make the move. As the A.I. labs chase amorphous goals like superintelligence and a similar concept called artificial general intelligence, Periodic is focused on building A.I technology that can accelerate new scientific discoveries in areas like physics and chemistry. “The main objective of A.I. is not to automate white-collar work,” said Liam Fedus, one of the start-up’s founders. “The main objective is to accelerate science.” Mr. Fedus was among the small team of OpenAI researchers who created the online chatbot ChatGPT in 2022. He left OpenAI in March to found Periodic Labs with Ekin Dogus Cubuk, who previously worked at Google DeepMind, the tech giant’s primary A.I. lab.
A collage of Facebook ads that assert AB 1064 will "limit innovation"
A day before going in for surgery, he recorded all the vocals for a new at the gates album
Explore the data sets explainer that shows BLOOD IN THE MACHINE and THE ONE DEVICE are included in the Library Genesis dataset.
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"Keith Edwards, a Democratic content creator who has skyrocketed to fame on YouTube since starting his channel last year, was not invited to be part of the program but believes that the way it was structured seemed “predatory.” He says that he would never agree to take part in a program that was run in secret or wouldn’t allow him to disclose funding. “What I don’t understand is, why wouldn’t you just donate to creators directly who have already built something and just need to put gasoline on the fire?” says Edwards. “Democrats at least understand that the internet exists now, so that’s good. But they still think influencers are just there to do a terrible direct-to-camera interview that no one watches rather than just treating us like another form of media.”
"AI Killed My Job: Translators is getting a lot of traffic Your post has received a lot of traffic over the last 24 hours"
It’s clear that AGI is a construct to be waved away by tech CEOs when convenient, to serve as a trojan horse for the growing droves of hooked users. It's clear that there is a cohort of boosters, influencers, and backers who will promote OpenAI’s products no matter the reality on the ground. It’s clearer than ever that, like so many well-capitalized tech ventures, OpenAI’s aim is simply to create a product that is either addictive to users to maximize engagement or to dully automate a set of work tasks, or both. It’s clear that it is succeeding, to some extent, in each endeavor. And it’s unclear if even a dramatically fumbled launch can turn the tide, even as we stand on the brink of what is almost surely an enormous bubble.