The two wildest stories today in tech
Shifting goal posts and new efforts at redefining the narrative
You can’t make this stuff up, and, no, I am not pulling an April Fool’s prank.
First, Microsoft’s Mustafa Suleyman just tried to redefine superintelligence down from AI that is smarter than the smartest humans to something a lot more mundane: AI “models capable of delivering product value for millions of enterprises”.
If I am not mistaken, I guess makes cell phones and Microsoft Word … “superintelligent”.
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Meanwhile, OpenAI, the company that just killed Sora and postponed “erotica” so that they could focus more, bought an eighteen-month-old podcast network called TBPN for $250 million.
A bunch of employees actually thought it was an April Fool’s:
If it’s not an April Fool’s what is it? I have only one guess:
A quarter-billion dollar desperation move: an effort to control the narrative, to distract away from the billion or so dollars they are losing each month this year, and rumors that their stock is losing favor on the secondary market.
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At some level the fact that these two stories broke on the same day is not coincidence. With actual AGI nowhere in sight, redefinition and spin may be all that’s left.
We're one news cycle away from AGI being defined as figuring out how to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
Any bank that has loaned a single cent to any of these AI companies in the last year deserves to lose it all and then some.