Hey there, I’m Alberto! Each week, I publish long-form AI analysis covering culture, philosophy, and business for The Algorithmic Bridge.
Free essays weekly. Paid subscribers get Monday news commentary and Friday how-to guides (new section!). You can support my work by sharing and subscribing.
Hey guys! My weekly section of news review + commentary is back!
I stopped doing reviews last year around summer because I wanted to dedicate more time to two things: 1. learn to write better, and 2. write about what I want. I’ve done plenty of both, and so I think it’s time to get back to business as usual.
There’s one important change to the “Weekly Top Picks” section compared to what I used to do, which was a mishmash of news, funny things, tweets, random curiosities, etc. I loved doing it chaotically, but I’ve matured now, and so it’s time that I let order impose itself. From now on, WTP will be divided into 7 fixed categories (open to suggestions):
Power & Money
Geopolitics
Rules & Disputes
Work & Workers
Products & Capabilities
Trust & Safety
Culture & Society
I will classify what I read into these seven categories, and transform otherwise standalone news into coherent stories for each section. These are important and urgent areas that I rarely cover in my essays, which tend to be more philosophical or even literary. This section complements my other work, which I will not stop doing.
This theme-based order, rather than the item-based disorder I used to follow, allows me not to filter out as much information. This structure might entail more work, but it keeps you (and me) better informed, which is my goal with this section: that you know what’s going on and also how each piece of news relates to everything else.
On top of this, I’m still thinking about whether to add a quick surprise/misc/curiosity category because adding a bit of serendipity to a lot of structure is a good thing. This week, I’ve also added a section of “best of” for essays and notes I read this week.
I’m open to suggestions (is there a category of those above you really, really don’t care about? Something I’m missing from those 7 that I shouldn’t?) and will experiment with these other ideas in future issues as well, until I settle on a fixed structure.
Anyway, no more ado. This week’s picks are all coming from Davos, Switzerland, on the occasion of the World Economic Forum annual meeting, under this premise: When the people who build AI and the people who run everything else spend a week in the same Swiss town, do they fix the world or do they go skiing?
The week in AI at a glance
Money & Power: The new global commodity is tokens, rather than oil. And the countries that can’t afford to power them are already falling behind.
Geopolitics: Anthropic’s CEO called selling chips to China “like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea.”
Rules & Regulations: JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon would welcome the government telling him he can’t fire people.
Work & Workers: The IMF says a “tsunami” is hitting the labor market, but the data suggest a slower pace of replacement.
Products & Capabilities: OpenAI confirmed its first device is coming. Musk says robotaxis will be everywhere by year’s end. Take both with a grain of salt.
Trust & Safety: “This year, AI models became suicide coaches,” says Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.
Culture & Society: Yuval Noah Harari thinks AI, which he calls a “new kind of immigration,” will take over anything made of words.
The Week in The Algorithmic Bridge
(FREE) Why I Deleted ChatGPT After Three Years: OpenAI’s pivot to ads is an admission that frontier AI’s economics are fundamentally broken; the bill is being passed to users who can’t afford to opt out. I choose Anthropic and Google.
(PAID) How the Businessmen Lost the AI Race: The AI race is being won by scientists who built companies reluctantly to do research, not entrepreneurs who adopted research to build companies. That is, Anthropic and Google DeepMind.
Money & Power
The new commodity is cognition and the price is electricity
