Claude 3, AI and Ads, and Steve Jobs’s Greatest Rival

Happy Sunday! 

If you feel like watching millionaires preen over their own brilliance, feel free to head over to tech Twitter. If you feel like watching sexy millionaires preen over their own brilliance, enjoy the Oscars tonight at 7 p.m. ET. If you want to read something insightful written by completely average-looking folks, here are our stories and the news from the week.

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Our stories

“The Rise and Fall of Steve Jobs’s Greatest Rival” by Gareth Edwards/The Crazy Ones: Digital strategist, writer, and historian Gareth Edwards makes tech history come alive in a way we’ve never encountered before. In his new column for Every, The Crazy Ones, Gareth will tell the stories of the forgotten men and women who thought differently and helped build the businesses and technologies of the future. His latest piece demonstrates how the personal computing battles of the early 1980s—when Steve Jobs and a technologist named Adam Osborne battled for supremacy—echo to today. Read this to 1) bask in the incredible writing, 2) enjoy the fascinating story, and 3) learn how others’ mistakes can help solve your problems. 🎧 Listen to an audio version of this essay on Spotify.

“Claude 3 Is the Most Human AI Yet” by Evan Armstrong/Napkin Math: At this point, there are more AI models than there are Blue Bottles in San Francisco, so it’s easy to lose track of which AI announcement matters and which is just fluff. This week, there was one of the former: Claude 3, from Anthropic, a startup founded by some OpenAI defectors in 2021. Evan extensively tested the model and found that it was significantly, well, warmer. It felt human to talk to in a way we’ve haven’t encountered before. Eerie. Spooky. But also, exciting. Read this to learn about the latest in AI foundation models. 

“How to Be More Agentic” by Cate Hall: We enjoy highlighting the stories of people whose lives fill us with a pleasant buzz of self-loathing. Cate Hall is one of those people. She was a Supreme Court advocate, the number-one female poker player in the world, and a founder of art and perfume companies. What’s remarkable is that she did all of this in her thirties. It was only once she embraced becoming a high-agency individual that she was able to accomplish these things. This article talks about her approach of “finding real edges: things you are willing to do that others aren’t, often because they’re annoying, unpleasant, or obscured in a cloud of aversion.” Read this if you want to be fired up for the week to come. 

🔏 “ChatGPT Can Turn Anyone Into a Video Game Developer” by Rhea Purohit/Chain of Thought: We’ve argued for years that AI will drive creation costs to zero, making it easier for anyone to create a digital good. In this piece, Dan and Logan Kilpatrick, who served as OpenAI’s first developer relations advocate, used ChatGPT to make a text-based video game. Look, Dan and Logan are smart guys, but they aren’t exactly John Carmack and Doom-levels of video game design brilliance. Despite that, with ChatGPT, they made something fun to play in less than 60 minutes. Read this if you want practical tips on how to make great things faster with ChatGPT.

“Ads in the Age of AI” by Evan Armstrong/Napkin Math: Ads subsidize our entire information ecosystem, keeping content free and accessible for everyone. AI may change all that by reducing both the amount of ads being served and the amount of time that people spend browsing, a one-two punch that will be devastating for the revenue of internet-reliant businesses. The result will be an entirely new techno-economic paradigm for the internet. Read this if you want to see how the internet will work in 10 years. 🎧 Listen to an audio version of this essay on Spotify.