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February 09, 2018

From The New Yorker:
What sustains us in any competition are the moments of interiority when the competition vanishes; what sustains us in any struggle are the moments when we forget the struggle.

From The New Yorker:
Accomplishment, the feeling of absorption in the flow, of mastery for its own sake, of knowing how to do this thing, is what keeps all of us doing what we do, if we like what we do at all. The prizes are inevitably disappointing, even when we get them (as the life of Bob Dylan, prize-getter and grump extraordinaire, suggests). It is, perhaps, necessary only that we like the process as we seek the prize.

From The Economist:
If companies can lure the right people in AI, the effect is to extend their workforces exponentially. AI is “like having a million interns” at one’s disposal, says Benedict Evans of Andreessen Horowitz. That computational power is then integrated into firms’ existing businesses.

From The Economist:
The advantages of AI are most visible in firms’ predictions of what users want. Automated recommendations and suggestions are responsible for around three-quarters of what people watch on Netflix, for example, and more than a third of what people buy on Amazon. Facebook, which owns the popular app Instagram, uses machine learning to recognise the content of posts, photos and videos and display relevant ones to users, as well as filter out spam. In the past it ranked posts chronologically, but serving up posts and ads by relevance keeps users more engaged.

From The Economist:
Companies that did not use AI in search, or were late to do so, struggled, as in the case of Yahoo and its search engine, and also Microsoft’s Bing.
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