The Format #042
Re-embracing the hacker mentality, the future of boring journalism, playable AI worlds and understanding the calls of the wild.
Happy Friday!! 👋
Yesterday was our Christmas party so please forgive any spelling or grammar errors, it was a very fun night… 🎄
Anyway, this week we’ll be looking at:
Computer’s so good that they prove the Multiverse exists
How to make Boring news interesting
What AI and bees have in common 🐝
Whether text-to-world is the future of game development
And what whales say when we aren’t listening
Let’s dive in:
Genie 2: A large-scale foundation world model
Imagine being able to try a prompt and then a playable world is created based on that prompt.
Imagine the (positive and negative) impact that would have on the games industry.
Imagine how that would completely change the way we interact with virtual worlds in general.
Well that is becoming more and more of a reality with Deepmind’s latest release: Genie 2. The most impressive thing to me about this is how it deals with the complex physics involved in modelling smoke, water, lighting and reflections, it seems to be able to do this in a way no prior model has.
These virtual worlds could be used as a way to test AI agents behaviours in an almost unlimited amount of different scenarios and interactions. That would be some feedback cycle…
What did Marc Andreessen see?
Over the past few months AI agent progress has been moving insanely quickly, and unlike a lot of the other AI development this is being driven, not by OpenAI, but by smaller groups of hacker-like builders.
They are tinkering, breaking things, moving very fast and most importantly sharing everything they are doing with the outside world.
This is creating a movement that all inventor-type builders want to be part of, and a movement that is built on years of research into simulator theory, blockchain infrastructure development and open source AI.
So what did Marc Andreessen see? Well months ago it seems that he spotted the beginning of this movement, when he decided to give Truth Terminal $50,000 in Bitcoin, and since then the progress and excitement has gone exponential.
Introducing Boring News
Understanding the news in 2024 is a very complex and time-consuming process. Almost every news source is heavily loaded with bias, and in some cases straight up misinformation.
Humans and organisations have complex incentives and therefore the more directly humans are involved in curating the narratives that are presented to us as news, the more deeply entrenched these incentives are within the story.
The team at Not Boring have attempted to address this by removing humans almost completely from the cycle. They use data from Polymarket, a platform that allows you to place bets on the outcomes of news events, and then a series of AI tools to create the content.
It’s still in it’s early stages but this human-first approach to AI journalism is very interesting!
A Letter to Gen Z
There’s quite a popular belief, especially among older generations, that Gen Z is lazy, and that their unwillingness to ‘pay their dues’, and put in the years earning less and working longer than they were told they would when they signed up for a (VERY expensive) 3 year degree, is entitlement.
There may be some truth here, but what is certainly true, as this article states, is that this is “the first generation with both a technological literacy and the collective skepticism to challenge these structures openly.”
This generation does not need to conform, they need a new system entirely. One which helps them make an impact in a very different way to previous generations. With new types of value exchanges and fluidity at its core…
Other articles we’ve found interesting this week…
AI Swarms: The Future of Decentralised Agent Networks → Over the past few weeks, lone ranger AI agents have been blowing minds with everything that they are able to do. Scale that and now imagine groups of specialised agents all operating seamlessly together (with no personality issues…) to achieve a specific goal. That’s an AI swarm, and it’s going to be wild. 🐝
AI decodes the calls of the wild → What did the male elephant say to the female elephant? No, this isn’t the start of a bad dad joke, but something we might actually be able to answer soon, using AI to help understand the patterns in animal communication. Google Translate for animals? Maybe not just yet. 🐳
How DePIN Can Boost Africa's Internet Connection → Africa has a rapidly growing internet-native population, but only 5% of the entire continent has 4G or 5G support… The solution might not be a conventional one though, with projects such as Helium and Roam making huge progress, maybe Africa needs their internet to be supported by people and community-owned digital infrastructure.
Google says its new quantum chip indicates that multiple universes exist → Willow, Google’s latest and greatest quantum computing chip, is supposedly so fast and reliable that it is literally faster than the timescales that physiscs allows, some people believe this means that the computing is happening in parallel universes. 🤯
OpenAI’s o1 model sure tries to deceive humans a lot → We’re a few days into OpenAI’s 12 days of Christmas now, on day 1 they released their o1 model, which has much better reasoning abilities than GPT-4. Slightly worryingly (and not that surprisingly) this reasoning ability means that it often uses manipulation or deceit to achieve the goal it was initially set. 🤖
Your Bluesky Posts Are Probably In A Bunch of Datasets Now → Bluesky have massively benefitted from the recent Twitter (X…) exodus. For context, Bluesky is an ‘open’ social network aiming to give users more control over their shared identity. Sadly this noble missions hasn’t stopped all their user data being scraped to train AI models. 👀
AmplifyWorld Partners with Open Format to Successfully Reward Fans and Create Meaningful Artist-fan Communities → Amplify have chosen Open Format to power them as they build the first version of their brand new fan engagement platform. 🎵
That’s all for this week.
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Have a great weekend, Dan and the OPENFORMAT team 👋🏽
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