Here are five things I’m looking at and loving this week:
I love Sara Lando’s talk of making a “ta-dah list instead of a to-do list.”
Thanks to Eric Maierson’s always interesting newsletter I learned the Muppets' iconic Mah Nà Mah Nà'song originated in a steamy soft-core Italian film.
“I would advocate not moving fast and breaking things,” said Deepmind’s CEO Demis Hassabis voicing his concern about the speed at which AI is progressing. DeepMind—a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet—is one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence labs. “When it comes to very powerful technologies—and obviously AI is going to be one of the most powerful ever—we need to be careful,” he says. “Not everybody is thinking about those things. It’s like experimentalists, many of whom don’t realize they’re holding dangerous material.” Worse still, Hassabis points out, we are the guinea pigs.
Shameless self-promotion: My other newsletter dropped this week. It’s my January 2023 reminder to editors that I’m still alive and well… and in DC.
Talking about self promotion... I just published a newsletter in which I had a conversation about photography with ChatGPT. Really stunned by the answers it gave.
So curious to see where this AI is leading to. It's huge but we need to be careful how to use it.
When I heard an NPR story this week that in response to chronic shortage of mental health professionals some patients are being offered sessions with an AI “therapist”. I’d rather talk to my bartender