What happened in the last weeks?
So, these last few weeks have felt hectic and unproductive. Why? News: some bad, some great, starting with the bad.
1. US tech-political events and upcoming German elections.
I had to request the removal of my artwork from an online community that recently invited Peter Thiel for an event. Oof.
Trying to understand DeepSeek and what happened there. An article from 404 Media highlights how this new development could be beneficial.
Even if scaling laws really have hit the ceiling and giant training clusters don’t need to be that giant, there’s no reason I can see why other companies can’t be competitive under this new paradigm. We should also probably hope that this is the case since it could lower the environmental impact of AI.
It reminded me of the paper titled Hype, Sustainability, and the Price of the Bigger-is-Better Paradigm in AI from last year by Gaël Varoquaux, Alexandra Sasha Luccioni, and Meredith Whittaker, where they conclude that “AI research has acquired an unhealthy taste for scale. This comes with dire consequences–economic inequalities and environmental (un)sustainability, datasets that erode privacy and emphasize corrosive social elements, a narrowing of the field, and a structural exclusion of small actors such as most academic labs and many startups” and clarify in the abstract that “it exacerbates a concentration of power, which centralizes decision-making in the hands of a few actors while threatening to disempower others.”
There’s a cheap joke lurking around this topic about masculine energy and size obsession, but I’ll leave that to your imagination.
My old university in Budapest is building one of the most successful resistance movements against the Hungarian autocratic government’s takeover of academia. The students have so far unseated an illegitimate rector and his aides by being an absolute menace of nonviolent resistance. This means 1 out of 4 demands are met, and 3 more to go!
Here is a short explanation, their demands, and a link to donate.
The last diary comics (for now)
It was a nice experiment! I drew 17 of these, and now I feel more at ease about also making mundane little drawings, and watch them grow into something bigger instead of planning only big projects.
February’s experiment is trying to add watercolour to my drawings. It’s not going well enough to already publish the results, but I keep trying.
Take care,
Julia