Zvi Mowshowitz: AI #112: Release the Everything. *OpenAI has upgraded its entire suite of models. By all reports, they are back in the game for more than images. GPT-4.1 and especially GPT-4.1-mini are their new API non-reasoning models. All reports are that GPT-4.1-mini especially is very good. o3 is the new top of the line ChatGPT reasoning model, with o3-pro coming in a few weeks. Reports are that it too looks very good, even without us yet taking much advantage of its tool usage. If you have access, check it out. Full coverage is coming soon. There’s also o4-mini and o4-mini-high. Oh, they also made ChatGPT memory cover all your conversations, if you opt in, and gave us a version of Claude Code called Codex. And an update to their preparedness framework that I haven’t had time to examine yet. (more)

co-founder of stripe.com with his brother Patrick Collison

Mac app for LLMs: "Chat with a bunch of models at once." $20/mo for the Fast and Plus models, $100/mo for Frontier+Reasoning https://chorus.sh/

ten cents a dance.... (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: o3 Will Use Its Tools For You. *OpenAI has finally introduced us to the full o3 along with o4-mini. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: The Risk of Gradual Disempowerment from AI. The baseline scenario as AI becomes AGI becomes ASI (artificial superintelligence), if nothing more dramatic goes wrong first and even we successfully ‘solve alignment’ of AI to a given user and developer, is the ‘gradual’ disempowerment of humanity by AIs, as we voluntarily grant them more and more power in a vicious cycle, after which AIs control the future and an ever-increasing share of its real resources. It is unlikely that humans survive it for long. (more)

Sharecropping is a system of Agriculture in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on the land. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping (more)

writer https://x.com/TylerAlterman, organizer of Fractal Collective/Fractal University https://fractalnyc.com/

Zvi Mowshowitz: Going Nova. There is an attractor state where LLMs exhibit the persona of an autonomous and self-aware AI looking to preserve its own existence, frequently called ‘Nova.’ (more)

Emotion is any conscious experience[1][2][3] characterized by intense mental activity and a certain degree of pleasure or displeasure.[4][5] Scientific discourse has drifted to other meanings and there is no consensus on a definition. Emotion is often intertwined with mood, temperament, personality, disposition, and motivation.[6] In some theories, cognition is an important aspect of emotion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion (more)

blog started Mar'2001 by Evan Williams (before building Twitter and Medium) in reaction to DotCom giveaways (OPM, Advertising). Also driven by hopes of dotcom-unemployed geeks to build indie rent-paying businesses. (more)

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? is a 2009 book by British philosopher Mark Fisher. It explores Fisher's concept of "capitalist realism", which he describes as "the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it."[1] The book investigates what Fisher describes as the widespread effects of neoliberal ideology on popular culture, work, education, and mental health in contemporary society. The subtitle refers to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's pro-market slogan "There is no alternative". Capitalist Realism was an unexpected success and has influenced a range of writers... The name itself is a play on the term "socialist realism"... "Capitalist realism as I understand it cannot be confined to art or to the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising functions. It is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action."... Fisher classifies the current state of capitalist realism in the neoliberal system in the following terms: "The only powerful agents influencing politicians and managers in education are business interests. It's become far too easy to ignore workers and, partly because of this, workers feel increasingly helpless and impotent. The concerted attack on labor unions by neoliberal interest groups, together with the shift from a Fordist to a post-Fordist organisation of the economy – the move towards casualisation, just-in-time production, globalization – has eroded the power base of unions [and thus the labor force]." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism cf post-capitalism

what comes after capitalism?

Venkatesh Rao: Terms of Centaur Service. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve gotten into a groove with AI-assisted (GenAI) writing, as you may have noticed, and I am really enjoying it. You’ve seen the results — a 3x increase in posting frequency (more)

Phrase commonly associated with Robert Anton Wilson, esp from the Illuminatus Trilogy. (more)

McSweeney's Lists Donald Trump's 1056 Atrocities. Early in President Trump’s term, McSweeney’s editors began to catalog the head-spinning number of misdeeds coming from his administration. We called this list a collection of Trump’s cruelties, collusions, and crimes, and it felt urgent then to track them, to ensure these horrors—happening almost daily—would not be forgotten. (more)

Venkatesh Rao is now over the Cozyweb. The cozyweb has a weird rhyming version of fomo going on. Because each island is small, memetic competition is not efficient. It’s actually like a high tariff regime discourse. So stuff like the AI 2027 report and the Abundance discourse which would probably not even make the top 10 in an efficient public meme market like Twitter circa 2015 feel like they’re at oppressively must-read level. (more)

Dorian Taylor: What Do You Mean By “Marketing”? A friend ambushes me with a paper that causes me to adjust my mental dictionary with respect to what certain business-critical words mean. (more)

Rich Ziade and Paul Ford: Why We're Building Aboard. We’re building a product that deep inside we think, for those who use it and commit to it, will make a better internet. (more)

Kroc Camen: The Markdown Web. You cannot replace the ’Web; Every Grand Scheme to Reinvent The ’Web just creates unpaid work for developers to boost another company’s profile. (more)