Specific vs. General Artificial Intelligence

The most recent episode of the Ezra Klein podcast includes an interview with Google’s head of DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, whose AlphaFold project was able to use artificial intelligence to predict the shape of proteins essential for addressing numerous genetic diseases, drug development, and vaccines.

Before the AlphaFold project, human scientists, after decades of work, had solved around 150,000 proteins. Once AlphaFold got rolling, it solved 200 million protein shapes, nearly all proteins known, in about a year.

I enjoyed the interview because it focused on Artificial Intelligence to solve specific problems (like protein folds) instead of one all-knowing AI that can do anything. At some point in the future, a more generic AI will be useful, but for now, these smaller specific AI projects seem the best path. They can help us solve complex problems while at the same time being constrained to just those problems while we humans figure out the big-picture implications of artificial intelligence.

Mac Power Users 701: The Safari Extension Roundup

On this week’s Mac Power Users, Stephen and I grab our lassos and gather up some of the best Safari extensions out on the free, open range of the App Store.

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Evernote and Getting Too Big for Your Britches

This week we got the news that Evernote has laid off most of its US and Chile-based employees. The Italy-based parent company, Bending Spoons, is folding whatever it got from buying Evernote into its Italian operations.

What an ignominious end.

For many people, Evernote was that crossing point where they discovered the cloud could be a source of truth for their data. Evernote went off the rails when they tried to expand their product offerings and took the eye off the ball on what they were really good at. They went from a lightweight, nimble, and reliable cloud notes service to something big, bloated, and broken. (I also still think their data model that locked users in—I used to call it a Roach Motel—also played a role.) Even though I never particularly liked or used the service, I am a little sad about Evernote’s demise.

One story I see repeatedly in tech is a company that has a good idea and gets big in its space but then fumbles when it tries to leverage that success to something much bigger in an entirely different (and usually much larger) space. I get the idea of wanting exponential growth, but would the green elephant still be alive today if Evernote had just focused on what they were good at and ignored the idea of exponential growth?