Weeknotes 2024.21
Injuries, Google stabs the Web in the back, OpenAI is questionable, Eleventy is punk-rock and a plea for sober AI.
An injury put restrictions on many physical activities, made it hard to focus and messed with my mental state big time. So apologies for any tardiness & disarray in this week’s post.
Luckily not much in tech world is worth mentioning and if it is, it’s mostly for the wrong reasons. The over-the-top, cheery, and lost-touch-with-reality OpenAI and Google events are best summed up by Drew Breunig’s post A Plea for Sober AI. It business and technology, not a fret party.
Google had its annual developer conference. The news is, at least what has reached me until now, mostly underwhelming. They look like a company in search of their purpose.
Beyond the Web
One of the biggest notions that came mostly out of the keynote, was Google’s willingness to throw the web under the bus. Goole will provide AI that is doing the googling for you. Unfortunately googling has quality issues creeping in and I’m not sure a thin veneer of AI can rectify that.
Further reading:
Gemini in Chrome Dev Tools
The news is less about AI capabilities in Dev Tools, but the documentation that explicitly warns of prompt injections.
Further reading:
Going Postgres
Firebase Cloud SQL is a new service from Google, which has PostgreSQL under the hood. I guess Google finally got the memo on the best database… in the world. Unfortunately for them, there are a few more competitive options.
Further reading:
Accidental Deletion
Probably not the news Google wanted to surface this week, but if you accidentally delete the whole account of a massive pension fund, it’s barely something you can hide under the rug. From what I read so far, it looks like a proper account purge that included deletion backups, which is curious. The customer had to resort to backups stored with another cloud vendor. Whatever combination of events caused this, you can be sure that Google will introduce countermeasures.
Further reading:
Open AI
Open AI showed a few new things, but didn’t really release them (yet).
OpenAI Announcements
The model is out and available, everything else isn’t. The demos were impressive, but the cheering was cringe. Now, let’s see when we can actually try it.
Further reading:
OpenAI Safety Researcher
The delayed departure of Ilya Sutskever was OpenAI’s dismantling of Jupiter missiles in Turkey. It almost definitely had nothing to do with the Sam Altman controversy earlier this year 😉
With Jan Leike following immediately after, the whole safe AI thing looks like a luxury they can’t or don’t want to afford.
Further reading:
- OpenAI researcher resigns, claiming safety has taken ‘a backseat to shiny products’
- What happened to OpenAI’s long-term AI risk team?
OpenAI’s Gag Order
If that wasn’t enough, those crucial departures also highlighted a pretty shady practices with regard to their parting process.
A perfect example of “if it’s not illegal, it’s fair game” that is played in many companies which will probably tell you what do-gooders they are in the same breath. Well, apparently OpenAI’s image took a hit, because Sam Altman himself published a statement.
Further reading:
Eleventy Event
Another event that I totally missed. Eleventy’s focus on static MPA sites, will keep it simple and probably the best solution for complex but mostly static content.
In recent months I came to appreciate the SvelteKit competition, because it’s hybrid approach and the both sides are right and wrong at the same time.
Then there is the “Swiss Army knife” Next.js which follows yet other trade-offs. All of them have their place.
Further reading:
That’s all for this week!