Metadata
- Author: Benn Stancil
- Full Title:: The Ads Are Coming
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- URL:: https://benn.substack.com/p/the-ads-are-coming
- Read date:: 2025-05-26
Highlights
As we find new applications for unstructured conversations, or phone calls, or video data, companies will find new ways to record them, and we’ll find new reasons to give it to them. (View Highlight)
A few weeks ago, a team of researchers from the University of Zurich found that AI-generated posts on Reddit could be three to six times more persuasive than posts written by humans, and that the bots performed particularly well when they were given personalized information about the people that they were responding to. (View Highlight)
One of the potential objections to industrializing software development is that software is expensive to design but not expensive to manufacture. Once you design the interfaces and write the code and create the scripts that run on servers somewhere, software companies can create millions of copies in an instant. There’s no reason to use AI to manufacture software at industrial scale because we can already manufacture software at industrial scale. And there’s no reason to design software at industrial scale because people don’t want to use a thousand to-do apps, or a million messaging tools. We have car factories because cars are expensive to manufacture by hand; we have shirt factories because people want a million shirts. Neither of those is true for software. (View Highlight)
Earlier this week, Google launched Gemini Diffusion, which uses a new model that, rather than predicting text one word at a time, generates entire outputs all at once. One benefit of that is that it is fast—shockingly, alarmingly, unsettlingly fast. It goes so fast that, in most videos of people using it, it takes them longer to say what they want than it does for Gemini to build it.5 In the link above, someone generated an entire to-do app in 1.3 seconds. (View Highlight)