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.
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.
Zynternet is a portmanteau made up of Zyn and internet. If you’re reading this internet is self-explanatory, the Zyn in question is tabacco-free Skoal bandit type nicotine pouches. Zyn comes in a tin and has various flavours.
According to journalist Max Read, the Zynternet is a kind of 90s to early 2000s sports obsessed ‘lad’ type culture; but in the 2020s. There are shades of ‘white van man’ in there as well.
a broad community of fratty, horndog, boorishly provocative 20- and sometimes (embarrassingly) 30-somethings–mostly but by no means entirely male–has emerged to form a newly prominent online subculture.
Despite Read’s definition defining it as a 20 to 30-something thing, the subculture seems to bleed into 40-something Dads and draws on creators like Barstool Sports. They’re less extreme than the Andrew Tate acolytes. They care more about sports and professional golf than they do about current affairs and politics. But they’ll be voting Republican. They like college sports, sports betting, light beers and Zyn nicotine pouches.
The culture has grown prominent on the laissez-faire Musk era Twitter.
Zynternet stretch
It would be very easy to point to the Zynternet audience and draw parallels to the ‘proles’ of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. And then go down a dystopian k-hole.
I’ll leave the last words to David Ogilvy for those despairing about the Zynternet:
You aren’t advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade. Three million consumers get married every year. The advertisement which sold a refrigerator to those who got married last year will probably be just as successful with those who’ll get married next year. An advertisement is just like a radar sweep, constantly hunting new prospects as they come into the market. Get a good radar and keep it sweeping.
David Ogilvy
TL;DR if you’re not reaching the zynternet, you’re probably not doing political marketing properly. More related content here.
Content or couture? Balenciaga’s 30-minute dress becomes the flashpoint of the season | Vogue Business – “It feels a little like a fast fashion iteration of haute couture,” says Victoria Moss, fashion director of The Standard, of the swirling mass of black nylon. “This feels at odds with what fashion at this level should be, which is exquisitely made pieces that somewhat justify their extreme pricing.” She adds that many invest in couture to have garments perfectly fitted to their bodies — and made to last for years.
“Is it beautiful? That’s debatable. Is it impressive? Not really. Is it brazen? Absolutely. Is it a meditation on the creative process? Maybe. Are we bored of these kinds of gimmicks at Balenciaga? Clearly not, as Demna’s work continues to be both a lightning rod and a conversation starter. “Call it ‘pret-a-polarize’,” says fashion journalist and ‘Newfash’ podcast host Mosha Lundström. “To my eye and understanding, I see this look as content rather than couture.”
Japan declares victory in effort to end government use of floppy disks | Reuters – yes stories like this are funny because ‘modern’ Japan with its flip phones, fax machines and floppy discs are an anachronism. But there’s a few other things to consider. There might be issues in terms of investment a la the NHS and critical systems that for whatever reason can’t be ported on to modern systems (like the problems had with security based on ActiveX).
Dumb systems also have security benefits, you can’t steal nearly as much data on even a compressed floppy disk as you can on a USB stick.
Interesting use cases for generative AI in China which sounds like a plot line from Ghost In The Shell.
Baidu – World No. 1? – Radio Free Mobile – is Baidu ERNIE really the number one generative AI service? It depends on if the numbers are true. 14 million developers, 950,000 models within the eco-system
China plays down importance of lithography tools in semiconductor challenges – Interesting report from Taiwan’s DigiTimes semiconductor trade magazine: China seems to be deliberately playing down the importance of lithography tools as it identifies the challenges for the development of its semiconductor industry in a recently published dossier.
