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A view of a Dollar Tree store in Washington, U.S., June 1, 2021.
Hard Numbers: Forest of Dollar Trees axed, Danes for drafts, Colombia reforms stall, Don Lemon X-communicated, Wilders won't be PM
1,000: Dollar Tree, a major discount food and variety chain, will close 1,000 stores across the United States. The chain’s stores are often the only source of food in low-income communities that would otherwise be “food deserts,” but the stores and others like them have faced strong criticism for driving out independent grocers and selling unhealthy products.
11: Denmark has proposed to expand military conscription, nearly tripling service time to 11 months and drafting women for the first time. The move comes as a number of European countries weigh reintroducing drafts (see Daily writer Alex Kliment’s recent column on that here). But look closely and the Danes want to expand the size of their conscription force by a mere … 300 people.
8: At least eight of the 14 Colombian senators on a key committee will vote to shelve President Gustavo Petro’s healthcare reform, in a major blow to the left-wing president’s plans to expand the state’s role in healthcare and pensions. Petro, a former Marxist guerilla and capital city mayor, was elected in 2022 on a wave of anti-establishment frustrations. Since then, his agenda has stalled and his poll numbers have fallen, raising fears that he may try to mobilize the streets to defend his agenda.
1: It took just one interview with Elon Musk for former CNN host Don Lemon’s new partnership deal with X to fall apart. Musk said Lemon “lacked authenticity” and accused him of being a mouthpiece for CNN head Jeff Zucker. Lemon says he had a deal with X and “expects to be paid.” Want to see it? Lemon plans to drop the interview on social media platforms on Monday.16: Far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders has abandoned his bid to become prime minister after 16 weeks of negotiations, saying that he recognized he could not gain the support of all coalition members. The Netherlands may now take an unusual path to a government, wherein the leaders of each party in the coalition do not take cabinet positions.
Elon Musk is seen displayed on a mobile device with the Twitter and X logos in the illustration.
Hard Numbers: xAI's Musk money, Investing in Replicate, Undressing AI, AFL-CIO-Google?, NVIDIA’s big gamble
$40 million: AI startup Replicate raised $40 million last week from investors such as Andreessen Horowitz. The company maintains an extensive library of 25,000 open-source models on its platform, all of which are available for developers to tinker with, including Meta’s large language model LLaMA and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion 2.0. These open models serve as a counter to proprietary — or closed-source — models like OpenAI’s GPT-4.
24 million: AI has been a major tool for computer-generated nonconsensual pornography — a problem that disproportionately affects women. In September alone, 24 million people visited websites that gave them the ability to “undress” — or “nudify” — people in photographs using machine-learning technology.
12.5 million: Google just announced a partnership with the AFL-CIO, one of the most influential US labor unions representing 12.5 million workers. The goal of the partnership is to start an “open dialogue” about how AI might impact the workforce. Microsoft also committed to providing AI training for AFL-CIO members and agreed to include AI-related language in a union contract covering hundreds of workers at ZeniMax, a video game studio it owns. The language dictates that Microsoft is meant to use AI only to “treat all people fairly.”
35: NVIDIA invested in 35 firms this year as the race for AI dominance heated up, making it the most active large-scale investor in the space. That coincided with a year of staggering growth for the US chipmaker, which saw its stock rise 225% and its market capitalization exceed $1 trillion.Tesla and SpaceX's CEO Elon Musk pauses during an in-conversation event with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in London, Britain, on Nov. 2, 2023.
OK, Doomer
British PM Rishi Sunak hosted several world leaders, including UN Secretary-General António Guterres and US Vice President Kamala Harris, at last week’s AI Summit. But the biggest celebrity draw was his sit-down interview with billionaire Elon Musk — among the world’s richest men and the controlling force behind Tesla, SpaceX, and X, formerly known as Twitter.
Musk has long played it both ways on AI — he frequently warns of its “civilizational risks” while investing in the technology himself. Musk’s new AI company, xAI, notably released its first model to a group of testers this past weekend. (We don’t know much about xAI’s Grok yet, but Musk boasts that it has access to Twitter data and will “answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.”)
Musk told Sunak he thinks AI will primarily be a “force for good” while at the same time warning that AI could be “the most destructive force in history.”
There’s a central tension in tech regulation ... between protecting against doomsday scenarios like the development of an all-powerful AI or one that causes nuclear destruction and the clear-and-present challenges confronting people now, such as algorithmic discrimination in hiring. Of course, regulators can try to solve both, but some critics have expressed consternation that too much time and energy is being spent catering to long-term threats while ignoring the dangers right in front of our faces.
In fact, one of the focal points of the Bletchley Declaration, last week’s agreement brokered by Sunak and signed by 28 countries including the US and China, is the potential for “catastrophic harm” caused by AI. Even US President Joe Biden — whose executive order did more to tackle the immediate challenges of AI than the UK-brokered declaration did — said he became much more concerned about AI after watching the latest “Mission Impossible” film, which features a murderous AI.
The thing is, the two sets of concerns – coming catastrophe vs. today’s problems – are not mutually exclusive. MIT professor Max Tegmark recently said that the people focused on looming catastrophe need to speed up their thinking a bit. “Those who are concerned about existential risks, loss of control, things like that, realize that to do something about it, they have to support those who are warning about immediate harms … to get them as allies to start putting safety standards in place.”
Elon Musk claims he's lifting weights to prepare to fight Mark Zuckerberg.
What We’re Ignoring: Revenge of the nerds
There’s growing evidence that the much-ballyhooed mixed martial arts battle between X-Man Elon Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg may actually take place.
Musk first posted that he would be up for a cage match against Zuckerberg in June. Since then, the two moguls have traded multiple barbs on the topic. Now Zuckerberg, who trains in jiu jitsu, has shared a screenshot of a conversation with his wife Priscilla Chan in which he crows about installing a training cage in their backyard. (Her response: “I have been working on that grass for two years.”)
Not to be outdone, Musk posted to X that he is preparing for the fight by “lifting weights throughout the day,” and that the "Zuck v Musk fight will be live-streamed on X. All proceeds will go to charity for veterans.”
Zuckerberg says he is "not holding his breath" because he offered a date of Aug. 26 but didn't hear back. No word yet on whether Threads will attempt a rival broadcast. Stay tuned. Or don’t.