Musk Buys Twitter - Tech Insiders News, October 2022
A curated collection of «signal over noise» links about interactive technologies, AI, web3, sense-making, entrepreneurship, and psychology.
Today’s image generated by Midjourney, prompt: «A french Elon Musk meditating in the metaverse» (Inspired by the links below.) Full image at the bottom of the article.
- You can’t miss it: Elon Musk has bought Twitter. I won’t add to the ton of information and speculation available online; but here is my take: Elon has great ambitions for Twitter, saying, I quote: «it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square.» I’m curious to see how that unfolds, as he might be, unwillingly, entering a multi-polar trap. I won’t go into details about this concept, but if you are curious, here is a simple definition; here is the best article on the topic, and if you’re more into videos, this is a great one. In a nutshell, he might believe he will be a better king than the previous kings, only to realize later what being the king means and stay stuck in the same bad loop. Let’s see!
- In addendum to last week’s newsletter, I spoke about how «finally» OpenAI’s image-generation tool DALL-E will be available as an API. I’m updating to be a bit more careful:
There are many concerns about AI safety, ranging from a highly disruptive technology affecting millions of jobs to… existential risk to humanity. Great.
In a podcast with Spencer Greenberg, OpenAI’s Ilya Sutskever explains how they are, on purpose, carefully and gradually releasing access to their tools to mitigate the risks. - The French government has sponsored a report on the Metaverse (in French, obviously). It’s long and excellent, in my opinion. Will the government read it? I’ll translate-summarize-quote one significant sentence: «The value provided by a Metaverse […] should go beyond mere entertainment or speculation by allowing a significant advance over what could be achieved without the use of such technological devices.» That is right on point!
- The fashion brands are already all-in in NFTs and Virtual Worlds. Minecraft and Burberry collaborate on a virtual world - it starts tomorrow, November 1st, 2022!
It’s fantastic to see how a game viewed as nerdy finally has its place next to luxury brands.
Indeed: the 18 years-old who played Minecraft in 2011 are soon in their thirties!
And today’s image, thanks to Midjourney: «A french Elon Musk meditating in the metaverse». Couldn’t resist! Turned out weird - I mean, pretty well.