Elizabeth Lopatto

An AI future of sleek, streamlined, and totally empty relationships.

12 pts Mark Zuckerberg explains it all Recently, a man I was rock climbing with told me about how he'd used AI to make a motivational poster for himself, which he'd hung on his bedroom wall: a bear, walking a slackline over a canyon, holding a sign that said, "Do cool shit." I made what I hoped was a polite noise.…

A really excellent essay about how Philip K. Dick predicted our current day, “filled with deranged billionaires, machines that claim consciousness, hallucinated worlds and political breakdown. Musk and his brethren seem more like escapees from this universe than the Asimovian super-geniuses they imagine themselves to be.” [Link: Does Silicon Valley dream of Philip K Dick?

British medical journal The Lancet has a new set of estimates about how many people have died and will die as the result of dismantling USAID, a program that Musk boasted about “feeding… into the wood chipper.” The authors predict that by 2030, if Musk’s cuts are maintained, an excess 14 million deaths will occur, including 4.5 million among children under the age of five. [Link: Evaluating the impact of two decades of USAID interventions and projecting the effects of defunding on mortality up to 2030: a retrospective impact evaluation and forecasting analysis

The end of USAID, which Elon Musk fed “into the wood chipper”, will cause an extra 14 million deaths through 2030, including 4.5 million in children under

Jensen Huang wants you to think “ah, compute as an asset class” not “oh no more GPU-backed loans” April – 1805 Napoleon is master of Europe

7 pts “Compute is an asset class! Compute is an asset class!” I continue to insist as I slowly shrink down and turn into a corncob | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images April - 1805 Napoleon is master of Europe Only the British fleet stands before him Compute is now an asset class I see it is once…

If music be the food of love, Jeeves will play on

You may recall Apollo is majorly involved in AI infrastructure financing; it even is one of the “compute is an asset class” consortium. Sounds like the hackers stole a bunch of the usual things, like employees’ social security numbers. If they stole interesting things, like internal data on the AI deals Apollo has been making, that wasn’t disclosed in the breach notification. If you know anything about the hack, hit me up on Signal: lopatto.46. [Link: Private equity firm Apollo confirms data breach amid hacking wave targeting financial giants

Nvidia, which recently debuted “compute as an asset class” and definitely is not doing circular financing, is reportedly buying Hugging Face for almost $13 billion, according to The Information, which cites a single anonymous source. Almost an hour earlier, Business Insider reported that the two companies were in talks but had not yet reached a deal, also citing a single anonymous source. [Link: Nvidia Agrees to Buy Open Source Platform Hugging Face For $12.9 Billion