CareerGPT and Web Domain Drama

Hello, and happy Sunday! We’re hiring for two roles (a managing editor and a freelance news writer) on the editorial team at Every—scroll down for details. Otherwise, we’re off tomorrow for Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples' Day and will be back on Tuesday with a brand-new essay. In the meantime, read on for everything we published this week and our take on the latest tech news.—Kate Lee

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Knowledge base

"The Disappearance of an Internet Domain" by Gareth Edwards: A tiny island in the Indian Ocean could potentially shake up the tech world The UK's decision to transfer the Chagos Islands to Mauritius means the end of the .io domain, which has long been the home of gaming sites and Github. Read this for a look at how real-world politics can impact your startup.

"I Hired ChatGPT as My Career Coach" by Katie Parrott/Learning Curve:  After losing her job, Katie Parrott used ChatGPT as her personal career advisor, testing it for five qualities—originality, accountability, structure, empathy, and clarity—to see if she could finally figure out what she wants to do with her life. The results were mixed, but surprisingly useful. Read this for a practical guide on how to use AI for career guidance.

"A Guide to Lifelong Learning—With AI" by Rhea Purohit/AI and I: Two of the smartest people we know, podcaster Dwarkesh Patel and Shopify’s former director of production engineering Simon Eskildsen, are using AI to keep learning. They’re curating quality information, generating flashcards, using spaced repetition, and more with LLMs. Read this if you want practical tips on how to use AI to soak up knowledge. 

"Five New Thinking Styles for Working With AI" by Dan Shipper/Chain of Thought: As AI shifts us from thinking more like engineers than scientists, our entire intellectual framework is due for an upgrade. Dan Shipper outlines five new mental models for the AI age, from essences to sequences, rules to patterns, process to intuition, sculpting to gardening, and explanations to predictions. Read this if you want to prepare yourself for thinking differently in the future.

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Fine tuning

Tesla has a bridge to sell you. Tesla unveiled two new consumer products, the Cybercab and Robovan, in a flashy launch in Los Angeles. It was an event filled with spectacle, Art Deco design, and—in typical Elon Musk fashion—a monologue, mostly about parking lots. The robotaxi, a fully autonomous vehicle, should retail for less than $30,000 and will be in production “before 2027.” In addition to the new vehicles, the company showed off the Optimus Telsa Bot—a humanoid robot—promising a future where, for $20,000, it’ll do all your household chores. If these things were real, this would be the most important launch in the history of mankind. Unfortunately, the robots that were pouring drinks at the party were all teleoperated: A skinny engineer sat in a nearby warehouse, head crowned with a VR set, controlling them. As far as the vehicles are concerned, I cannot remember the last time Tesla launched a product on time and according to its specifications. The deep learning revolution, driven by LLMs, could help make these technologies a reality, but for now, this was nothing more than a “someday” event. And I hope that someday comes soon! But for now, temper your expectations. 

Apple gives breadcrumbs to the abandoned stepchild. The Vision Pro is finally getting exclusive content with the launch of the immersive short film Submerged. It is the first scripted film shot exclusively for the device, and it’s incredible. I love the Vision Pro—it’s the best way to consume content, bar none. This format only played to its strengths. More of this, please! 

Wimbledon fires the line judges. Tennis is the world’s greatest sport. The elegance of the spectacle paired with the ferociousness of a four-hour mental contest is unmatched. The world’s greatest tennis tournament is Wimbledon. When I went last year, I relished watching the line judges, bedecked in Ralph Lauren clothing, focused on staring at one line, trying to track a ball flying at 120 miles per hour. This week the tournament announced that those judges will be replaced by AI vision systems. I am sure the calls will be more accurate, and maybe the play will go faster, but it removes some of the beauty of the event (perhaps this is a metaphor). 

Look at me, I’m a physicist now. The Nobel Prizes in chemistry and physics both went to AI practitioners (including, notably, the head of Google’s AI division). This is the vision of AI that is most exciting to me. Accelerating science should be the core goal of these labs, not making B2B SaaS applications. Congratulations to the winners.—Evan Armstrong 

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Data mining 

ChatGPT running away from the field. Web visits for ChatGPT surged 20 percent month over month in September:

While ChatGPT experienced a big bump, Bing and (more importantly) Google’s Gemini stayed mostly flat. ChatGPT saw more traffic likely because of the release of o1, its most recent model. Bigger picture, though, is that if OpenAI was winning the traffic wars before, it’s way out ahead now—and Google is running a distant third. For a supposedly insurmountable monopoly, Google seems awfully hard-pressed by the competition (that isn’t supposed to exist). —Moses Sternstein 

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Keyword extraction

Gareth Edwards, who wrote about the disappearance of the .io domain, shares one good watch:

🖇 "Gita Jackson, Aftermath—XOXO Festival 2024": "Digital publishing is at a tipping point—games and technology journalism even more so. Gita Jackson is a self-described survivor of Kotaku and Vice and a founder of Aftermath, a worker-owned and subscriber-funded games and culture publication. Aftermath has been carving a successful new path for in-depth digital journalism. Gita's gloriously honest and open talk is a must-watch for anyone interested in where journalism goes next."

Alignment 

Math gets weird and wild. Terrence Tao, the University of California, Los Angeles professor who is widely considered the greatest living mathematician, explained how he plans to use AI to discover math that doesn’t exist yet. Gone are the days of mathematicians being "locked away in the attic for seven years just banging away at it," as Tao puts it. Instead, he wants to use an AI copilot to examine thousands of equations and their interconnections—which would be like shifting from a lone explorer mapping a single mountain to using an army of drones to survey an entire mountain range at once. Every major breakthrough in history, from the wheel to quantum computing, started with a mathematical insight. We could be on the brink of turbo-boosting those flashes of genius. Tao has made me believe that the future isn’t just coming, it’s accelerating.—Ashwin Sharma 

Sentiment analysis

“I think the Western perspective on intelligence has buried itself deep in the psyche of the modern maching learning research meta—people want to build high-IQ systems, not high-empathy, nor beauty-seeking, nor tasteful systems, which are other kinds of intelligence. But those metas are not profitable research agendas because they are not prestigious. Why are they not prestigious? Somewhere in the idea lineage between Socrates and Sam Altman, researchers working on intelligence lost the plot and fixated on rationalism.”—An AI researcher in response to Dan’s piece about AI enabling new ways of thinking

“I loved this post, and enthusiastically endorse it inasmuch as it's about making yourself and your relationship better. That said, I have three kids, and I tell every expectant parent that there is a whole ecosystem of sophisticated parties whose behavior toward expectant and new parents ranges from enthusiastic marketing to predation. You almost surely don't need a bottle warmer, a portable playpen, a robot cradle to rock the child, etc. You don't need to read a ton of books on how to raise a baby the French or Chinese or Cherokee way. Humans have been having kids for a long time with incomparably less information and resources than we have. You got this!”—A principal engineer at Reddit in response to Evan's piece about "dad mode"

Want to chat? DM Dan or Evan on X.

Collaborative filtering

Work with us at Every! We’re hiring for two roles on the editorial team:

A managing editor to oversee the editorial operations of Every and maintain high standards for what we publish. You’ll edit our full-time writers, regular columnists, and guest writers—both developmentally and at the level of the line. You’ll also develop new editorial franchises; collaborate with our creative lead to make our pieces visually compelling; curate the homepage; and prepare pieces for publication. You’re an accomplished editor who straddles the worlds of tech and journalism, deeply knowledgeable about technology, detail-oriented, and comfortable with ambiguity.

A freelance news writer to support our Sunday newsletter, Context Window (that’s this one!), and other short-form content initiatives. You’ll gather and annotate links for a comprehensive weekly news roundup and dream up snackable items for other parts of the newsletter. You are obsessed with tech news and can analyze it for the most interesting and important nuggets. You’re also detail-oriented, comfortable with ambiguity, and adept at using AI tools. 

If you’re interested in either role, email Kate Lee at [email protected] with your resume/LinkedIn profile, a few links to your work, and why you’d like to join Every.

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Hallucination

What if restaurants let you order and pay instantly from your table?

That’s all for this week! Be sure to follow Every on X at @every and on LinkedIn.