Getting over the AI policy board bottleneck

Also, people have suggested that have just two roles on the AI Center of Excellence Gatekeepers Guild is a good idea. Those two roles being security and legal. The theory is that the security people are used to this kind of thing and have processes in place. Also, that they are narrowly focused on a handful of things. You need the lawyers for all the whacky IP stuff. Hopefully they focus most on licenses. I think what you probably want to avoid in the AI policy board is focusing on endless hypotheticals about what can go wrong and ways of preventing them. But, who knows at this point?

Relative to your interests

• Unlocking content potential: a report on organising structures and capability - not sure about tue conclusions, but good for the archives.

• The art of Jean-Michel Nicollet - “French cover design can be unsympathetic to cover illustration, crowding the paintings with poor type choices and purposeless graphics.” // Great looking paperback covers. // That basic framing would be good for video thumbnails…?

• Manton predicts the AI oligopoly - “I’m increasingly thinking that we’ll have OpenAI and Google for the mainstream, Anthropic carving out an enterprise niche, Meta doing the ads thing, open source models… and the rest of the industry is going to fade away.”

• The new Lost Generation - What people without kids are up to. “Must be nice,” etc.

• How Target is rethinking search for generative AI - 🤖 To stay ahead, Target is training its AI agents to understand product context deeply and surface assortments that reflect how people shop in the real world. Bhosale gave an example of a “summer party” query that should generate not just tableware, but grills, décor, sunscreen, and more—a holistic, curated experience.

• 🤖 Shaping the Future of VMware Cloud Foundation: Broadcom’s Focused Strategy for VMware Cloud Service Providers - Broadcom outlines its plan to consolidate VMware Cloud partners, emphasizing quality, customer value, and strategic growth for its VCF 9.0 ecosystem.

• AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity - “We define workslop as AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.” And: “Each incidence of workslop carries real costs for companies. Employees reported spending an average of one hour and 56 minutes dealing with each instance of workslop.” Related: “It turns out having an always-available ‘marriage therapist’ with a sycophantic instinct to always take your side is catastrophic for relationships.” // Some additional shitting all over AI if you’re into that.

• I Blame the AI - “Accountability sinks are systems designed so that when things go wrong, no individual human can be held responsible for fixing them. He argues that ‘decisions are delegated to a complex rule book or set of standard procedures, making it impossible to identify the source of mistakes when they happen.’” So, therefore: “Redesigning roles and AI systems with human overrides will be essential to ensuring accountability. At least for now, every key decision still needs a person behind it & maybe that’s enough to rebook quickly enough to get home for dinner.”

• The intelligence is in the user - The robot is only as good as what you bring to it. Related:

• The Man Calling Bullshit on the AI Boom - “To what end? What happened there? Because we get all these stories about ‘Oh, they fed all the data into the LLM,’ and then what?”'// Plus, a list of previous big tech things that have been utter bullshit.

Logoff

Lots of time to catch-up on things this week. You know, the “important, but not urgent” quadrant.

For example, I setup my desk so that I can do the Larry King video style. You know, leaning on the desk. Dan often does this, so does Noah, and Whitney. People tell me this is better. And, as a viewer, I do like that look more.