Meta Meta Metadata
The vibe on Threads seems to be skewed towards individuals who truly engage with their audiences and grow organically.
Having a meta conversation about the meta conversation happening on Meta Threads provided the absolute perfection that is this issue’s title. 🧑🏽🍳💋
But before we get into that…
Thank you! Thank you to all who have subscribed to our fledgling newsletter. It was a slow start when I sent out the announcements first thing last week, as it just so happened the news of SCOTUS issuing their presidential immunity ruling dropped at the same time. Ouch.
But subscribership is picking up, and I'm feeling pretty pumped this is the first newsletter to go out to humans in real-time. 💪
Threads & Fedi & Big Creators & You
As alluded to, there's a meta conversation happening on Threads about if the platform is (or even should be) welcoming to "large" creators. There's a sense that it's not business-as-usual there. The vibe seems to be skewed towards individuals who truly engage with their audiences and grow organically. Joining the platform as a big name and simply broadcasting out your missives expecting (or worse, demanding!) high engagement isn't a slam dunk.
The concern I suppose is that this will inevitably drive the big accounts off Threads and back to X (and to a certain degree Instagram), leaving Threads as a perpetual distant 2nd to Elon Musk's still-alive-and-kicking network. (On that front, while recent reports indicate X is essentially no longer growing, it's also not shrinking either.)
I find it fascinating that, while the culture of Threads is certainly unique as compared to Mastodon and the indie wing of the Fediverse, there's still quite a bit of overlap. I follow many Threads accounts which have Fediverse sharing enabled from my Mastodon profile, and often I simply don't notice any difference between posts which happen to have a @threads.net domain and which come from elsewhere in Fedi.
There's a sense in all corners that social media needs a bit of a do-over…less emphasis on the media and more emphasis on the social. That used to be true in the early days of Twitter, but it became harder and harder to cut through all the noise and grifting and "Top 10 Ways" influencing going on. That simply won't fly in the Fedi world, and with luck the legit big creators which hope to take Threads seriously will realize they must earn their position and it's not to be taken for granted.
Good News! The AI Boom is Losing Its Luster.
But don't take my word for it. Take Sequoia Capital's David Bahn who recently wrote in AI's $600B Question:
Speculative frenzies are part of technology, and so they are not something to be afraid of. Those who remain level-headed through this moment have the chance to build extremely important companies. But we need to make sure not to believe in the delusion that has now spread from Silicon Valley to the rest of the country, and indeed the world. That delusion says that we’re all going to get rich quick, because AGI is coming tomorrow, and we all need to stockpile the only valuable resource, which is GPUs. In reality, the road ahead is going to be a long one.
While the article attempts an upbeat tone overall, a sort of "don't worry, we got this" framing…it's clear that VCs who don't have their heads up their asses (hard to find) are starting to sweat. The financials of generative AI services as we've seen them to date just don't make sense. While it certainly appears that corporate enterprise is falling all over itself to proclaim that AI is going to revolutionize their businesses and maximize efficiencies, it remains to be seen just how that translates to the broader technology market, or if "AI" is just another checkbox on some soup of Enterprise Cloud Services™…and most ordinary folk don't know or even care about it.
Goldman Sachs is likewise sounding the alarm:
Tech giants and beyond are set to spend over $1tn on AI capex in coming years, with so far little to show for it. So, will this large spend ever pay off? MIT’s Daron Acemoglu and GS’ Jim Covello are skeptical, with Acemoglu seeing only limited US economic upside from AI over the next decade and Covello arguing that the technology isn’t designed to solve the complex problems that would justify the costs, which may not decline as many expect. But GS’ Joseph Briggs, Kash Rangan, and Eric Sheridan remain more optimistic about AI’s economic potential and its ability to ultimately generate returns beyond the current “picks and shovels” phase, even if AI’s “killer application” has yet to emerge.
Note to the authors: I'm not so sure it's a good idea to place the terms artificial intelligence and killer next to each other. 😬
Jokes about killer applications aside, these sorts of critiques of the AI bubble focus largely on the financials and market dynamics rather than the extremely problematic ethical quandaries surrounding the technologies themselves. Thankfully, John Voorhees and Federico Viticci of MacStories have been full steam ahead on that front:
Technology has enabled millions of people like myself to realize their life’s dreams and make a living out of “creating content” in a digital age.
This is all changing with the advent of Artificial Intelligence products based on large language models. If left unchecked without regulation, we believe the change may be for the worse.
Over the past two years, we’ve witnessed the arrival of AI tools and services that often use human input without consent with the goal of faster and cheaper results. The fascination with maximization of profits above anything else isn’t a surprise in a capitalist industry, but it’s highly concerning nonetheless – especially since, this time around, the majority of these AI tools have been built on a foundation of non-consensual appropriation, also known as – quite simply – digital theft.
Hopefully this open letter which is being sent to members of Congress in the U.S. as well as members of the European Parliament will add fuel to the regulation fire (or at least bring wider awareness to the average tech consumer).
I'm tracking these and many other AI-related news stories, so make sure you subscribe to the newsletter to keep apprised of this evolving space.
ICYMI 👋
On The Internet Review this week:
- Horrifying news of the “zombie” Internet claiming a classic weblog from the early days of the second coming of Jobs’ Apple renaissance. Sadly the original blog shut down long ago, but it’s just been revived as a dystopian AI-fueled content farm featuring fake articles and authors (but real names!). Since the story broke around the tech web, they rolled back the real names and switched those to fake ones as well. Um, thanks? 🤪
- The New York Times is Tilting at Electoral Windmills, and Threads Isn’t Having It. Along the lines of what I talked about above, Threads users have been ratioing NYT content which has been extremely harsh (if not downright inaccurate) on President Biden. Politics aside, it's clear that simply showing up on Threads by no means will result in being "liked". There, and especially across the Fediverse at large, people are making their voices heard.
Some of my recent Mastodon toots:
- On programmers using LLMs: “We're not just arguing about tools. We're arguing about how to be artists.”
- Never wrestle in the mud with a pig. You'll both get dirty, and the pig likes it.
- “I think there's more than a 50/50 chance we pass the peak of the AI hype bubble before the end of the year…”
’Till Next Time…
Thanks for reading today's issue of Cycles Hyped No More!
Catch you on the next one,
Jared ✌️