Two conferences in two European cities. Two attempted bans (though only one successful). Two different responses from politicians and the media. All of which tells us something about the state of free speech today.
Bnny – One Million Love Songs
Bnny first appeared on the Moon back on Top Rock n’ Roll 2021 thanks to featuring in The VPME, The AV Club and NPR Music, and then again on Uneasy Listening 2023 with the excellent standalone single Breaking Up. The first Bnny release was an EP back in 2017 but it was then the solo project of Jessica Viscius, and only one track, Let Me Be Your Dog, is available on Spotify. Bnny reappeared in 2021 as a band that includes her twin sister Alexa. The debut album had a few great tracks but it did not quite float my boat as a whole. This new LP has a fuller more band like rock n’ roll sound and is more consistent. As with the debut, the songs don’t overstay their welcome and the 11 tracks clock in at under 27 minutes, but you can extend it by adding the aforementioned Breaking Up and the other 2022 single I’m Just Fine.
John Naughton: The big tech firms want an AI monopoly – but the UK watchdog can bring them to heel | John Naughton
Microsoft, Meta and Google are snapping up small players in the burgeoning industry – but the Competition and Markets Authority is demanding fair play
“Monopoly,” said Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley’s answer to Darth Vader, “is the condition of every successful business.” This aspiration is widely shared by Gamman, the new acronynm for the Valley’s giants – Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Nvidia. And the arrival of AI has sharpened the appetite of each for attaining that blessed state before the others get there.
One symptom of their anxiety is the way they have been throwing unconscionable amounts of money at the 70-odd generative AI startups that have mushroomed since it became clear that AI was going to be the new new thing. Microsoft reportedly put $13bn (about £10.4bn) into OpenAI, for example, but it was also the lead investor in a $1.3bn funding round for Inflection, Deepmind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman’s startup. Amazon put $4bn into Anthropic, the startup founded by refugees from OpenAI. Google invested $500m in the same outfit, with a promise of $1.5bn more, and unspecified sums in A121 Labs and Hugging Face. (Yeah, I know the names make no sense.) Microsoft has also invested in Mistral, the French AI startup. And so on. In 2023, of the $27bn that was invested in AI startups, only $9bn came from venture capitalist firms – which until recently had been by far the biggest funders of new tech enterprises in Silicon Valley.
Elephant Stone – Back Into The Dream
This is the 6th LP from this Canadian group and comes 4 years after they first appeared on Moonblogs courtesy of GIITTV. It is more top notch psychedelic rock n’ roll.
The Anatomy and Reasons for UK relative Economic and Political decline over the last decade and a half
Nothing works anymore, the country is in a mess, worker’s living standards have remained stagnant, public services are at breaking point. Such statements are now commonplace, and are increasingly brought together in articles like this one by Sam Knight in the New Yorker.
John Naughton: From boom to burst, the AI bubble is only heading in one direction | John Naughton
No one should be surprised that artificial intelligence is following a well-worn and entirely predictable financial arc
“Are we really in an AI bubble,” asked a reader of last month’s column about the apparently unstoppable rise of Nvidia, “and how would we know?” Good question, so I asked an AI about it and was pointed to Investopedia, which is written by humans who know about this stuff. It told me that a bubble goes through five stages – rather as Elisabeth Kübler-Ross said people do with grief. For investment bubbles, the five stages are displacement, boom, euphoria, profit-taking and panic. So let’s see how this maps on to our experience so far with AI.
First, displacement. That’s easy: it was ChatGPT wot dunnit. When it appeared on 30 November 2022, the world went, well, apeshit. So, everybody realised, this was what all the muttering surrounding AI was about! And people were bewitched by the discovery that you could converse with a machine and it would talk (well, write) back to you in coherent sentences. It was like the moment in the spring of 1993 when people saw Mosaic, the first proper web browser, and suddenly the penny dropped: so this was what that “internet” thingy was for. And then Netscape had its initial public offering in August 1995, when the stock went stratospheric and the first internet bubble started to inflate.
Weekend podcast: what’s it like to be a sociopath?; Gen Z’s lust for Sex and the City; and Marina Hyde on President The Rock
Marina Hyde with her take on Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson’s surreal US presidential bid (1m23s); Emine Saner meets the sociopath who learned to behave – and found happiness (8m05s); why Gen Z has fallen in love with Sex and the City (24m45s); and do our political opponents really hate us? (29m54s).
John Naughton: One engineer’s curiosity may have saved us from a devastating cyber-attack | John Naughton
In discovering malicious code that endangered global networks in open-source software, Andres Freund exposed our reliance on insecure, volunteer-maintained tech
On Good Friday, a Microsoft engineer named Andres Freund noticed something peculiar. He was using a software tool called SSH for securely logging into remote computers on the internet, but the interactions with the distant machines were significantly slower than usual. So he did some digging and found malicious code embedded in a software package called XZ Utils that was running on his machine. This is a critical utility for compressing (and decompressing) data running on the Linux operating system, the OS that powers the vast majority of publicly accessible internet servers across the world. Which means that every such machine is running XZ Utils.
Freund’s digging revealed that the malicious code had arrived in his machine via two recent updates to XZ Utils, and he alerted the Open Source Security list to reveal that those updates were the result of someone intentionally planting a backdoor in the compression software. It was what is called a “supply-chain attack” (like the catastrophic SolarWinds one of 2020) – where malicious software is not directly injected into targeted machines, but distributed by infecting the regular software updates to which all computer users are wearily accustomed. If you want to get malware out there, infecting the supply chain is the smart way to do it.
An MP who gives out colleagues’ numbers to blackmailers. Isn’t William Wragg just right for this Tory party? | Marina Hyde
The ‘senior Tory’ has issued a self-flagellating apology, but he still has the whip – and Sunak’s low bar sinks lower
John Naughton: How did a small developer of graphics cards for gamers suddenly become the third most valuable firm on the planet? | John Naughton
By turning his computer chip-making company Nvidia into a vital component in the AI arms race, Jensen Huang has placed himself at the forefront of the biggest gold rush in tech history
A funny thing happened on our way to the future. It took place recently in a huge sports arena in San Jose, California, and was described by some wag as “AI Woodstock”. But whereas that original music festival had attendees who were mainly stoned on conventional narcotics, the 11,000 or so in San Jose were high on the Kool-Aid so lavishly provided by the tech industry.
They were gathered to hear a keynote address at a technology conference given by Jensen Huang, the founder of computer chip-maker Nvidia, who is now the Taylor Swift of Silicon Valley. Dressed in his customary leather jacket and white-soled trainers, he delivered a bravura 50-minute performance that recalled Steve Jobs in his heyday, though with slightly less slick delivery. The audience, likewise, recalled the fanboys who used to queue for hours to be allowed into Jobs’s reality distortion field, except that the Huang fans were not as attentive to the cues he gave them to applaud.
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