Saturday's digest #10

Hello everyone,
let’s jump right into the selected articles for this week.

#1 - Dave Gray from School of the Possible - Monday Memo #29

While I try not to include any articles with a paywall in this newsletter, I will make an exception here as we only need to read the first part.

Data teams, like all teams, can be stuck in limiting self-beliefs and tend to be a little too comfortable with self-helplessness. To be exact, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t hold this type of belief.

In this article, challenge one of your beliefs with an as-if exercise.

#2 - Suzi Travis from When life give you a brain - Functionalism: The Mind is What the Brain Does. [Part 1]

AI as a field love to draws comparisons with the human brain. At the same time, AI research does overlook insights from neurscience even if there is a growing interdisciplinary collaboration.

Don’t be a sucker and start your travel to the magical land of consciousness with a primer on functionalism.

#3 - Michael Spencer from AI Supremacy - Goldman Sachs and Economists are Backtracking on Generative AI's Value

The GenAI craze is really uncomfortable for me. The narrative around GenAI is clearly driven by what Michael calls “BigTech,” and I am quite skeptical of the value added by economists' predictions in general.

It's a good read if you need to tone down the hype.

#4 - Sayash Kappor and Arvind Narayanan from AI Snake Oil - New paper: AI agents that matter

I am a big fan of Arvind Narayanan. This article highlights how early we are, as even terms like "AI agent" or "agentic" have no formal definition nor a proper evaluation framework.

As someone working in the applied part of AI, I think the idea of agents/agentic has the most potential in the future, but as stressed in this article, the reliability is currently way too low.

#5 - Yue Zhao from The Uncommon Executive - How to Escalate Well

As data and AI become central in businesses, you will have to deal with more and more organizational and cultural issues/debt around AI.

If you are a humble IC or a first-line manager, some problems are better escalated as you don’t have the power to influence or resolve them. Learn how to escalate effectively with this article.

See you next week!