Tuesday, February 04, 2025
DeepSeek R1: A major update to Perplexity
Tuesday, January 14, 2025
AI in 2025
A nice example of that is Google's Gemini with Deep Research (accessible to everyone who subscribes to Gemini), which is really a specialized research agent. I gave it a topic like "research a comparison of ways of funding startup companies, from the perspective of founders, for high growth ventures." And the agentic system came up with a plan, read through 173(!) websites and compiled a report for me with the answer a few minutes later.
The result was a 17 page paper with 118 references! But is it any good? I have taught the introductory entrepreneurship class at Wharton for over a decade, published on the topic, started companies myself, and even wrote a book on entrepreneurship, and I think this is pretty solid. I didn't spot any obvious errors, but you can read it yourself if you would like here. The biggest issue is not accuracy, but that the agent is limited to public non-paywalled websites, and not scholarly or premium publications. It also is a bit shallow and does not make strong arguments in the face of conflicting evidence. So not as good as the best humans, but better than a lot of reports that I see.
Still, this is a genuinely disruptive example of an agent with real value. Researching and report writing is a major task of many jobs.
Friday, January 10, 2025
How to disable Microsoft365 payments for AI but continue paying for Windows.
Sunday, January 05, 2025
Is Apple ready to deprecate Music.app?
- As mentioned above, the Music.app no longer syncs your own imported songs.
- Since a few iOS versions back now, the playlists that you make on one iDevice no longer sync with the other iDevices. More specifically I see all my playlists on my Mac, most of my playlists on my iPhone, none of my playlists on my iPad and most of my playlists on my iWatch (I assume the iWatch sees what the iPhone sees?).
- To make matters worse, 1/4 off all the UX real estate in the iPhone Music.app is now dedicated to advertisements to push you to the subscription model.
- And, just today, I found out that a song I once "bought" is no longer playing on my devices. The song in question is "Diamond Heart - Single" by Alan Walker and Sophia Somajo. I don't know if is simply a strange bug or that these artists have received their royalty payments from Apple years ago and now have found a way to deprecate music that I payed for from my devices?