Tencent Baidu and Sina investigated by Beijing for their content | CNBC – likely to keep things buttoned up during the forthcoming party congress. What’s more surprising is the amount of restraint China has shown with regards to antitrust regulations of these businesses. They affect everything from state media to state owned banks. Tencent Baidu and Sina, alongside Alibaba have business empires that span media, gaming, entertainment, e-commerce and financial services.
The Guardian reimagines media planning as a B2B bed-time story | The Drum – Attracting more media planners like Claire would be the ideal scenario for Guardian Media Group right now, as it looks to balance the books by 2019. It reported a 2% rise in revenue last month, largely due to a climb in the amount of paying members and a 15% boost in digital spend. Meanwhile the Guardian’s print newspaper sales declined by 7.4% year-on-year in June to a circulation of 159,007, while its Sunday paper the Observer declined by 5.9% to 192,889, according to the latest ABCs. This is presumably why Claire is seen cutting deals in virtual reality and mobile, rather than in print.
Google has finally left the Chinese market for search, so I thought I would try the alternative, hence an unscientific assessment of Baidu. My trial is unscientific in nature and not particularly rigorous. I did what most consumers would have done and searched for myself.
I was quite open-minded about this, on the one hand Google has been killing the search market in Europe, nothing can touch it in the EU and they have made moderately successful forays into other sectors as well. I also know that Google is not all conquering. In fact the wheels start to come off the Google search wagon when you venture into areas with non-Roman languages such as Russian, Korean, Japanese and Chinese.
On the other hand, Robin Li over at Baidu is no slouch. Baidu is famous for is huge index and its continued appetite to crawl content whenever and wherever it can find it.
Baidu like its Korean counterpart Naver has also managed a successful social search product running a question-and-answer service like a better version of Yahoo! Answers – largely free of spam and a more middle-class range of participants provide highly relevant quality content.
It is also blatantly obvious that Baidu doesn’t care whether it attracts a potential English-speaking audience as the entire site apart from investor relations is in Chinese.
I was expecting some divergence between Google and Baidu search engine results pages for a number of reasons. Google crawls an estimated 15 per cent of the total web, and Baidu is likely to crawl a slightly larger amount. That means that their search indexes are likely to be slightly different. Secondly, both will have started with slightly different algorithms and these will change over time with a experience of what users want. Finally, the results are usually ‘flavoured’ according to local market preferences such as language and local content.
I was a bit surprised at the level of divergence between Google and Baidu, which was great than I had seen between Google and Yahoo! in the past.
First of all flavouring. A comparison between the Japanese and Chinese versions of Baidu show a high degree of variance between the two versions of the Baidu search engine.
Part of the reason for the difference may be due to Chinese regulations around permitted services, for instance an educational video of me by Econsultancy on YouTube is the top result on the Japanese site and a couple of twitter related hits come in at six and seven. The Japanese site skews much more toward video services than the Chinese site which picked up profile services Plaxo and Naymz.
Interestingly, the Chinese site picked up the re-direct URI for my blog (renaissancechambara.com), whereas neither the Japanese or the Chinese versions picked up my proper domain (renaissancechambara.jp) at all. Even when I clicked a few pages down.
Plotting Baidu China against Google Hong Kong produced an interesting diversity of the results.
Their one point of correlation, my profile on Naymz. Again part of this may be because of my presence on services that don’t do business in China for instance YouTube and Twitter. Google rightly puts more weight and a consequently higher ranking on my Crunchbase and LinkedIn profiles than Plaxo which appears a couple of pages down on Google.
Baidu obviously puts much more emphasis on a historic redirect URI I have for my blog than the ‘real’ one and doesn’t seem to crawl the site in any great depth. I am guessing that this is because of its largely English language content.
In Japan, the Baidu | Google comparison told a similar story. The Google flavouring between Hong Kong and Japanese versions wasn’t that great only showing differences at position five and lower on the page. Baidu Japan managed to pick up my last.fm profile and twitter profile, but didn’t pick up my blog or any professional information on the first page.
In conclusion, my unscientific assessment of Baidu has shown provides a great search experience for consumers. But I am uncertain how valuable it would be for people in a professional context, for instance researching foreigners with whom they may be doing business or finding foreign presentations. I can understand why Chinese scientific audiences would be concerned by the departure of Google.
I also suspect that optimising content to make it searchable on Baidu is different to the process that I would go through for Google or Yahoo!, but that would merit far more investigation before I could blog with any confidence about it. More Baidu related posts here.
A post on AI sovereignty came out of one of those times when a casual conversation suddenly has you seeing the theme in your news feeds. I was having one of them conversations with a friend over a paper cup of coffee, mentioned I’d been embedded at Google and they said ‘we can’t trust the Americans with AI, the way we did with social’.
That opens opportunities. Chinese open source models are working in Singapore government data centres, Korean cloud computing company Naver is looking beyond its own country for clients who want an alternative to US big technology. France has gone it alone with its own defence AI – as the ultimate expression of AI sovereignty.
The All-Star Chinese AI Conversation of 2026 | ChinaTalk – Interesting discussions on China based AI platforms on their successes and challenges. By their nature, the give China defacto AI sovereignty. Risk taking and GPUs or TPUs performance seem to be the main sources of concern. A good deal of focus on squeezing out the maximum intelligence per watt rather than scaling to infinity and beyond. Tonality wise it’s refreshing down to earth in comparison to Altman et al.
‘South Korea’s Google’ pitches AI alternative to US and China | FT – Korea has built up positive relations in the Middle East since the 1970s when they helped on major construction and engineering projects. They would be viewed positively and as a good hedge to both the US and China from a technology dependency point-of-view. Their offer is greater AI sovereignty for Middle Eastern countries in particular, you might also winning business in Central Asia as well.
It comes as a growing number of brands are moving into the children’s, teenage and young adult skincare market. In October, the first skincare brand developed for under-14s, Ever-eden, launched in the US. Superdrug has just created a range for those aged between 13 and 28.
A number of brands have surged in popularity among very young social-media users, creating a phenomenon known as “Sephora kids”. These children share videos showcasing beauty products from Drunk Elephant, Bubble, Sol de Janeiro and similar brands.
A Theory of Dumb: Why Are IQ Scores Suddenly Falling? | Intelligencer – a century ago, if you asked someone what dogs and rabbits have in common, they might answer “Dogs hunt rabbits,” not “They’re both mammals.”Maybe, then, all the noise and novelty wasn’t rotting our minds but upgrading them. (Studies suggest that better nutrition and reduced exposure to lead may have also helped.) In any case, the Flynn effect held steady for so long and through so many apparent threats that there was no reason to believe it wouldn’t last forever, even if, someday, somebody invented a chatbot that could do homework or Theo Von started podcasting.
Or so thought Elizabeth Dworak, now an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s medical school, when she chose the topic of her 2023 master’s thesis. She decided to analyze the results of 394,378 IQ tests taken in the U.S. between 2006 and 2018 to see if they exhibited the same climb. “I had all this cognitive data and thought, Hey, there’s probably a Flynn effect in there,” she says. But when she ran the numbers, “I felt like I was in Don’t Look Up,” the movie in which an astronomy grad student played by Jennifer Lawrence discovers a comet speeding toward Earth. “I spent weeks going back through all the code. I thought I’d messed something up and would have to delay submitting. But then I showed my adviser, and he said, ‘Nope, your math is right.’” The math showed declines in three important testing categories, including matrix reasoning (abstract visual puzzles), letter and number series (pattern recognition), and verbal reasoning (language-based problem-solving). The first two, in which losses were deepest, measure what psychologists call fluid intelligence, or the power to adapt to new situations and think on the fly. The drops showed up across age, gender, and education level but were most dramatic among 18-to-22-year-olds and those with the least amount of schooling.
How Hustle Culture Got America Addicted to Work – Business Insider – in America, the long, steady march toward a more leisurely future came to an abrupt halt. Today, according to the international economic database Penn World Table, the German work year is an astonishing 380 hours shorter than ours — which means that Germans work almost 10 weeks less than we do every year.
Even stranger, Americans began to glamorize their lack of free time. As the boomer generation reshaped society in its own image, it brought its ’60s, countercultural ethos to the workplace — transforming the staid, conformist office into a vessel of self-expression. Work became the central means by which you undertook to live your best life, follow your passion, and change the world. As Goldman bankers and Google idealists alike began to toil through the nights and weekends that previous generations had fought so hard to secure for them, mental-health professionals bemoaned the rise of what became known as “hustle culture.” Working long hours was suddenly the ultimate status symbol, a peculiarly American form of humblebrag. In 2017, a clever marketing study found that if you told an American you worked long hours, they assumed you were rich. If you told an Italian the same thing, they assumed you were poor.
Waymo Has Come for the Kids in Los Angeles – The New York Times – “Here, it is not unusual for families to have multiple children attending different schools far from home. School buses, if you are deemed eligible, are limited to dropping off and picking up children at locations and times that are often unhelpful. The city bus, if there is somehow a direct route to school, comes with its own set of risks that can make parents uneasy.
Ms. Rivera, a psychiatric social worker, is stuck at work until 6 p.m. most days, while her husband, who installs and repairs glass, comes home even later.
The couple struggles to coordinate their jobs and their three children. They tried Uber, and Lyft, but found that those drivers tended to cancel after discovering their riders were minors. They turned to HopSkipDrive, a service geared toward students, but the drivers had to be scheduled in advance, and would leave if children were late.
Then, a few months ago, Ms. Rivera and Alexis did a test run with Waymo.
“It was the only option where I was like, ‘Oh my God, she can order a car, nobody’s in there, she can unlock it with her phone,’” Ms. Rivera, 42, said. “I know she’s going to be safe and she’s going to get home.” – interesting use case
Chinese luxury goes local | WARC – High-end Chinese brands are stealing a march on their Western rivals with homegrown labels that appeal to more discerning local consumers who are looking for luxury items that feel tailored to them. China’s $49bn luxury market is “changing fast”: ecommerce sales at jeweller Lapou Gold, for instance, have surged more than 1000% in the first three quarters of this year compared with two years ago. Songmont, a Chinese brand that claims to have ‘experiential’ designer bags, has grown its online sales 90% while Gucci online bag sales in China have fallen 50%, according to the Business Times. – This was inevitable when you had so many talented (and a number of mediocre) Chinese people being brought through the likes of Central St Martins.
Coca-Cola CMO Manolo Arroyo on WPP, AI and a new era for media | The Drum – Coca-Cola’s marketing ecosystem was sprawling and complex. The business was working with approximately 6,000 agency partners globally, while the majority of its multi-billion-dollar media budget was allocated to traditional channels. Arroyo wanted fewer partners, deeper integration and a shift towards digital-first execution at scale.
That ambition led to the consolidation of Coca-Cola’s global advertising account into WPP and the creation of Open X, a bespoke unit designed to manage the brand across markets and disciplines. Nine studios were established in key regions, housing a mix of Coca-Cola employees, WPP staff and specialist partners.
“It’s a marketing factory,” says Arroyo. “There are more than 2,000 employees of Coca-Cola and more than 2,000 employees of WPP […] and ultimately it’s enabled us to move from a company that in 2019 was investing close to 75% of our paid media on traditional TV, to a company that’s going to end up this year putting 70% of all our paid media on digital, particularly social and influencer led, marketing. For us, it’s our new TV.”
Outcry after French army chief’s ‘prepared to lose children’ warning | Le Monde – “We have all the knowledge, all the economic and demographic strength to deter the Moscow regime from trying its luck by going further,” said Mandon. “What we lack, and this is where you have a major role to play, is the strength of spirit to accept suffering in order to protect who we are.”
Paying tribute to French forces deployed worldwide, he added: “If our country falters because it is not prepared to accept – let’s be honest – to lose its children, to suffer economically because defense production will take precedence, then we are at risk.” – I don’t think that the west is ready or able to face Russia or China because of this. The war is lost before its fought
SOF, AI, and Changing Western Conceptions of War | Small Wars Journal by Arizona State University – Each generational shift in technology impacts military operations. Consequently, a shift in military training, command, and promotion structure should follow. Much of the conversation surrounding AI makes it seem like an unprecedented esoteric concept. While this is partly true, the same was said about steam engines during the Industrial Revolution. Simply put, AI is the next technological breakthrough and there will be more after it. As Clausewitz stated, the character of war changes, not the nature of war. A willingness to adapt while following strategic tenets will enable us to weather the storm and thrive in AI generation warfare. Failure to do so will only bring obsolescence while America’s adversaries gain global hegemonic status. Proper implementation of AI will result in faster decision making, more accurate intelligence, improved resource allocation, better spatial awareness, more effective messaging, and more impactful strategies. The key to reaching this level of success is SOF. SOF is uniquely equipped and trained to implement AI quickly and effectively, delivering results that can be scaled to the rest of the military.
A New Anonymous Phone Carrier Lets You Sign Up With Nothing but a Zip Code | WIRED – Phreeli, the phone carrier startup is designed to be the most privacy-focused cellular provider available to Americans. Phreeli, as in, “speak freely,” aims to give its user a different sort of privacy from the kind that can be had with end-to-end encrypted texting and calling tools like Signal or WhatsApp. Those apps hide the content of conversations, or even, in Signal’s case, metadata like the identities of who is talking to whom. Phreeli instead wants to offer actual anonymity. It can’t help government agencies or data brokers obtain users’ identifying information because it has almost none to share. The only piece of information the company records about its users when they sign up for a Phreeli phone number is, in fact, a mere ZIP code. That’s the minimum personal data Merrill has determined his company is legally required to keep about its customers for tax purposes.
Waking the Sleeping European Giant – by Matthew C. Klein | The Overshoot – “Europe” as a geopolitical entity does not exist. Instead of a strong and independent continent capable of securing the lives and freedoms of its citizens, Europe is divided into dozens of countries, all of which are too small individually to stand up to external threats. The problem is compounded by the mismatch between where the military resources can be found and where they are most needed. There is relatively little overlap between the places with the balance sheet capacity (mostly in the north), the places with the productive capacity (mostly in the center), the places with the largest populations of otherwise unoccupied fighting-age men (more in the south), and Europe’s front lines (largely, although not exclusively, in the east).
Bending Spoons raids the digital graveyard for paranormal returns | FT – businesses in the Bending Spoons stable: AOL, the dial-up internet service that had been most recently attached to Yahoo, and Evernote, the virtual scratch pad. – alongside Vimeo and Brightcove with Eventbrite due to join them
China has had a number of ‘lone wolf’ attacks on the public all of which had a common theme of ‘revenge on society’. It might be that the perpetrator had economic setbacks or a sense of being wronged by a government decision that set them on this direction.
The profiles of the attackers are often middle-aged men. The revenge on society attacks all seem to be driven by people who feel that they have little to lose. While attacks that meet the revenge on society profile have been documented at least as far back as 2004. There seems to have been an acceleration in the occurrence of revenge on society attacks in 2024. Unlike Uighur related incidents of 2013 and 2014, there isn’t a particular group that China can suppress to reduce the incidents easily. Revenge on society attacks are more likely to be dealt with using mass-population surveillance and reporting a la Minority Report’s preventative crime approach and raised security.
Raising security against revenge on society attacks requires a mix of infrastructure investment like bollards
A Suzhou school bus was attacked by a knife-wielding attacker looking to kill and maim Japanese children. He killed the school bus attendant who defended the children from his attack.
September 18th saw a 10-year old Japanese child was stabbed to death by a 44 year-old man. Anti-Japanese sentiment is fanned by Chinese government rhetoric and a constant barrage of content on Chinese media. The attack happened in Shenzhen, across the border from Hong Kong.
On September 31th, 3 were killed and 15 injured by a revenge on society attacker in a Shanghai branch of Walmart. He had been arrested by police who said that he was angry due to a personal financial dispute.
The following day on October 1st, while most were celebrating China’s national day holiday – Chinese man conducted a revenge on society attack in Zurich, Switzerland. He attacked and injured three children near a daycare centre. He was a postgraduate student who publicly expressed extremist nationalist views.
A 60-year old man convicted of previous attacks stabbed two students and one woman outside a primary school in Guangzhou on October 8th.
On October 28th, a 50 year old man attacked and injured three children and two adults in Beijing in an attack that had all the hallmarks of revenge on society.
A revenge on society attack on November 11th killed 35 people and injured 43 more because the 62-year old attacker was unhappy with his divorce settlement. The Chinese government attempted a news blackout of the incident. The incident happened in Zhuhai, a city just across the border from Macau.
On November 16th, a Wuxi third level education college was the site of an revenge on society incident that killed eight people with a knife attack and 17 others injured. A 21 year old male was detained.
On November 19th, the 39 year-old perpetrator drove into students arriving at a primary school in Changde. He was eventually stopped and beaten by a crowd until being taken into custody by the police.
How many toys is too many? | Vox – One reader told Vox recently that her family was “absolutely drowning in toys.” And while adults have been complaining about kids’ junk for generations (please see my father’s fruitless search for my brother’s one-inch-long toy wrench in Los Angeles International Airport circa 1992), many millennial and Gen X parents have the sense that something is different now — that kids have more toys than in past decades, and that they seem to arrive in ways Randall describes as “unintentional” and Parents Are Stressed About Playtime. Their Anxiety Is a Goldmine. – WSJ – same as it ever was
Putin’s «Deathonomics» – Riddle Russia – the Kremlin seriously expects a positive economic outcome from the creation of a high-salaried contract army. If we assume that the number of mobilised and contract-based soldiers ranges from 400,000 to 450,000, then their minimum total allowance will amount to approx. 1 trillion roubles a year. The government will have to allocate about the same amount for compensations in case of killed or wounded soldiers, even if there are 50,000 or 100,000 such people in a year. These sums represent nearly 10% of pre-war federal spending, and some people are already predicting the emergence of a social group of «the young rich» and even making plans for how this money will contribute to long-term investment programmes. – Deathonomics is allowing the Russian government to shape its population pyramid to reduce the burden of the aging population on the economy.
How These Men Left the Manosphere — and Why Some May Never | Teen Vogue – “The more you shame people for what they’re espousing, the more they’re driven underground deeper into online communities who welcome them with open arms and say, ‘this is where you belong. If those people don’t understand you, they’re just a bunch of triggered snowflakes or whatever,’” Miller-Idriss says. Another tactic, she says, is to point out the commercialization of the manosphere in which everything is for sale including courses, supplements, and crypto-currencies. Pointing out the profit motive of these influencers can be effective, Miller-Idriss says.
That’s part of what got Tom out of the manosphere, which he says he fell into when he was 27, after leaving the Army and finding himself “stuck trying to look for work consistently, having basically no social support, having no options other than to just work, pay bills, work, pay bills, in an increasingly difficult world to do that.” He was lonely, he says, and the influencers he followed had some pretty good talking points, he thought: men were more affected by things like incarceration rates, workplace death and injury rates, and mental health and no one was taking it seriously.
“The more you shame people for what they’re espousing, the more they’re driven underground deeper into online communities who welcome them with open arms.” Pasha Dashtgard, an assistant professor at the Polarization & Extremism Research and Innovation Lab, says this is a common entry point. “They start their conversations with, ‘men are in crisis and no one’s talking about it. It’s like, that’s true, men are in crisis and we should be talking about it… [but] that opens up, ideologically, the door for them to be like ‘and now, here are the solutions’ and it’s this horrible, toxic nonsense.” But after after a couple months in the manosphere, Tom realized that, while men’s health is a serious subject, he wouldn’t find the answers he was looking for in the manosphere, which was overrun by what he calls “grifters, frauds, or sort of religious zealots.” Now, Tom says he doesn’t actively use the label ‘feminist’ but “considers it part of my worldview.”
Is there a future for personalisation? | WARC – Right person, right place, right time: for over a decade this idea has been an ideal in advertising. But an alternative point of view is that personalisation is self-defeating because advertisers chase a moving target when they are unable to prove return on investment.
Patagonia’s Restructuring Has Led to Employee Fallout – Business Insider – Patagonia’s historic worker commitment is less well known than it’s sustainability credentials which probably explains why recent moves haven’t led to the kind of brand dissonance amongst consumers that the likes of Bud Light or Nike experienced.
Jaguar rebrand
Jaguar’s teaser campaign for its rebrand and new vehicle model prompted immediate feedback. I am not clear on what the ask was by the marketing team, so have kept an open mind. Here offered without comment are some of the related commentary:
The AI state of the union H1 2024 post came about as we had a number of trends starting to come into view. To paraphrase Charles Dickens the AI state of the union H1 2024 represented both the best of times and the worst of times in generative AI.
Astro Boy | George Oates
Is the current state of AI analogous to the dot com boom?
In this respect, discussions around a dot com type boom around generative AI are less helpful. The dot com boom didn’t have the same naysayers at the time, aside from what would be now called edge lords worried about money. Like with all economic cycles they would eventually be proved right, but not until we had broadband and shopped at Amazon.
Culturally, we are in a very different, darker place and aren’t riding an economic boom. I have tried to lay out some of the nuances in the themes currently driving AI discussions.
I have broken this down into three themes and a focus on Japan.
Vendor knife fight
Trough of disillusionment
Synthetic data
Japan focus
Right let’s get into The AI state of the union H1 2024.
Vendor knife fight
The AI state of the union H1 2024 sees generative AI being added to products and business plans, in a similar way to being web-enabled in the late 1990s. Spring Apps estimated that there almost 58,000 AI companies.
Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta increased their investment in generative AI to $106 billion during the first six months of the year. In addition, Meta is looking to leverage the open source model of software development to drive progress in its Llama model. This echoes, how the open source model and software like Linux, MySQL and PHP were used during the dot com boom and the move to web 2.0 to provide greater efficiencies and possibilities.
Some applications such as Adobe Creative Suite has become much more powerful thanks to adding generative AI. Alphabet has finally had generative AI companies parked on its front lawn. Open AI joined Perplexity in providing a search product.
Apple came up with Apple Intelligence that provides a platform and front end for a mix of generative AI models. Microsoft has Co-Pilot that it has been selling to enterprises.
Financial institutions have led the charge to try and get productivity gains such as JPMorgan’s IndexGPT and the continued automation of back office processes.
Meanwhile in China, Baidu’s ERNIE has attracted almost a million developers looking to use the generative AI platform in their projects.
Trough of disillusionment
The enthusiasm for generative AI hasn’t managed to drown out dissonant voices. The number of objections are diverse.
Business issues
Morgan Stanley in a research report quoted a large pharmaceutical company CTO who abandoned the use of Microsoft Copilot in their organisation. The crux of the argument was that they weren’t seeing the value. Presentation creation was described as middle school level. Pharma companies tend to use PowerPoint as a publishing platform rather than a ‘presentation tool’ with data rich busy slides, so I can understand why Copilot became unstuck.
It isn’t only ‘high-end’ knowledge work conducted by large corporates that is underwhelming. McDonald’s is withdrawing generative AI systems deployed at its drive-thru restaurants due it not working as planned. A Gartner survey of IT leaders indicated that McDonald’s wouldn’t be alone with nearly one in three generative AI projects to be scrapped in 2024.
That might not be such a bad thing as businesses are currently in a process of experimentation, so long as the lessons learned are captured and internalised.
Goldman Sachs have pivoted over a matter of months from being bullish about generative AI, to being concerned that the return on investment for generative AI may take far too long.
Societal impact
What if speed isn’t the goal? The process of reading isn’t only about the ability to parse information quickly but also affects other aspects of human thinking and behaviour. There are clear benefits for certain groups of people including neurodivergent and second-language learners. But it also poses a risk to close reading skills which impacts developing or improving existing skills. Secondly, the generative AI can miss key facts from a document, given up as speed is prioritised over nuance and accuracy.
Knowledge collapse – By mediating access through AI tools moving forwards, due to the model’s focus on the centre of of the distribution of its data set. Restricting access to the edges is likely to cause harm to future innovation, human understanding and cultural development outlined in Peterson’s paper AI and the Problem of Knowledge Collapse.
Technology-specific issues
Environmental impact – like web 3.0 and the crypto economy, generative AI requires a lot of energy to run high performance data centres. This means that Open AI is losing money hand-over-fist paying for computing capacity from Microsoft at a significant discount.
Model collapse – the relative lack of human-made data and the rise of synthetic data used in training generative AI systems is likely to lead to a rapid degradation in those models, indicating a ceiling on amount of progress that generative AI based on LLMs is likely to make.
Synthetic data
Synthetic data is probably one of the most difficult subjects to write for AI state of the union H1 2024. On one hand, you have Mark Ritson’s endorsement of synthetic data based on what we saw from B2B marketing generative AI startup Expenza AI. Ipsos have also got some credible interesting offerings that seem to be based on the provision of synthetic data.
Is it any good? A lot depends on how the LLM is trained and the way it’s being used in terms of what you want to achieve. As with any tool, it can be useful for the right jobs. The MRS Delphi Group gave a range of feedback on the way it should be used, some of which seemed to contradict each other. We don’t know how accurate a picture the LLM is creating, what is being called algorithmic fidelity.
Until concerns about algorithmic fidelity is addressed sufficiently well; marketers would be wise to exercise a degree of caution.
Japan focus
I have included Japan in my AI state of the union H1 2024 post for a few reasons.
Prior to the current exuberance about generative AI; Japan was doing really interesting things using different parts of AI including fuzzy logic and software agents. The Panasonic rice cooker that cooks rice that’s perfect for your preference. Error correction for video and audio playback, from CDs to Blu-Rays. Complex camera programme algorithms including image stabilisation. Sophisticated non-playable character behaviour in computer games. There has even been synthetic singers like Hatsune Miku and virtual influencers.
If Star Trek influenced the flip phone, the smartphone ( think the tri-corder, especially when used with the likes of Oxford Nanopore‘s products) and tablets (on Star Trek’s next generation), then cyberpunk and Japanese anime have influenced AI in a similar manner. Elon Musk and Sam Altman would fit right in as villains in the Ghost In The Shell series.
Finally, even though Japan influenced cyberpunk based on William Gibson’s experience meeting Japanese students, it has a paradoxical relationship with technology. For instance, the Japanese government recently stopped using 3.5″ floppy disks. Ancient crafts are still highly prized and Japanese brands like The Real McCoy’s and Grand Seiko who provide premium manufactured goods to artisanal standards.
Matt Alt has put together a good overview of the policy and cultural context for generative AI in Japan. It’s less of a clear cut issue than the Japanese body politic seems to believe. The Japanese government believes that its population is likely to view AI positively because of anime plot lines. While Atom Boy is a positive example there are lots of negative examples in the Ghost In The Shell franchise alone. There is also a tension between government aspirations for international exports of increased amounts of media content.
There are also concerns about existing AI relationships in Japan exasperating existing societal problems, like virtual girlfriends or boyfriends.
