AI causes Google shares to plummet...

Happy Friday friends! Got anything fun planned for the weekend?

Alphabet shares are stumbling - can AI rescue Google’s parent company?

Also - is AI slowly going to get worse?

And - Steal our prompts! We come in each Friday with the best prompts to boost your productivity.

Here is what you need to know about AI today.

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GOOGLE’S ALPHABET

Google’s Alphabet’s share stumble

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, saw a 7% dip in its stock after their latest quarterly report.

But there’s more to it than meets the eye - they beat all financial expectations this quarter.

So why the dip?

Well, Google said that they’re dropping a huge $11B in 2024 into ramping up their AI services.

This means a huge amount of capital expenditure, which will inevitably lower profits - in the short term at least.

Ruth Porat, CFO of Google, highlighted the commitment to AI investment across various segments like Google DeepMind, Google services, and Google Cloud.

At the whim of the advertisers

More than half of Alphabet’s revenues come strictly from ads contributing to over 50% of total revenue.

Although YouTube’s ad revenue saw a 16% YoY growth, advertisers are spending less overall, reigning in ad spend due to economic conditions.

Despite all that, Porat is pretty upbeat about AI doing well across Alphabet's services, especially with cloud computing turning a profit recently.

She believes AI can be the game-changer for everything Google – from the cloud to who-knows-what-else.

Plus, Google is set to unveil its most advanced generative AI model, Gemini Ultra, later this year.

Our View:

Google had a bad year last year, with Microsoft beating them on all fronts when it comes to AI. Is this the start of Google’s comeback?

Vote for live results and see results + opinions from yesterday at the bottom of the email.

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Prompt to Try Today

Every Friday we give you a powerful prompt to try over the weekend to get awesome results.

SEO Blog Template

Use this prompt to create a template for an SEO-optimised blog post and shoot up the search rankings:

"Create a blog post template optimised for SEO. The template should include a structure for incorporating primary and secondary keywords [INSERT KEYWORDS], suggestions for headers (H1, H2, H3), and placeholders for internal and external links."

Try it in ChatGPT →

CYBER SECURITY

Is AI becoming too basic?

Remember HG Well’s dream of a global brain that fosters unity?

Well folks, today’s reality, especially on platforms like Wikipedia, is more like a Tower of Babel - lots of noise and not much understanding.

What’s making it more chaotic?

The rise of AI, specifically large language models like ChatGPT.

While AI doomsayers worry about existential threats, there’s a more immediate concern: a potentially homogenous and boring world created by AI.

AI text generators are on an information battlefield, and the bad and the false are at risk of drowning out the truth.

The issue?

A feedback loop – AI's outputs shaping its knowledge.

Best-selling author, Nicholas Taleb, warns of a “self-licking lollipop” scenario, where AI only serves itself.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman predicts a future where all data is synthetic, generated by AIs, making the problem worse.

But how did we get here?

Today, large language models, like ChatGPT, can generate text, code, or art, but it's not real intelligence – just "applied statistics."

These models can be confident bluffers, spreading misinformation.

An economics professor claimed Francis Bacon was against the printing press, a claim likely generated by ChatGPT.

Even though it is at the end of the day, a machine, AI still can’t distinguish right from wrong.

When given a task, like generating code, it imitates what it has seen, even if it's flawed.

This leads to "Model Autophagy Disorder" (MAD), a situation where AI chokes on its output, creating a bland and homogenous world.

And there's a Wikipedia flaw – the information sources for AI are becoming homogenous, limiting diversity in knowledge.

Wikipedia's design flaw means that information doesn’t need to be true - only sourced. So false sources generated in AI can allow fake information to spread.

The solution? We don’t know - yet.

Our View:

AI trained on AI slowly devolves into madness - can we stop this from happening?

Mindstream Picks

Hulu tightens streaming access by revising its Terms of Service to ban password sharing beyond 'your primary personal residence.

Amazon's withdrawal from the iRobot acquisition deal over regulatory concerns is seen as a potential setback for the Roomba robot vacuum.

Y Combinator President Garry Tan's deleted tweet continues to have repercussions, as three San Francisco supervisors.

Elon Musk's $55 billion pay package from Tesla is in jeopardy as a Delaware Court of Chancery judge rules against it.

Startup Izote Biosciences tackles the challenges of precision fermentation with its proprietary method, raising an oversubscribed pre-seed of $2.6 million in October.

AI Art

Our Image of the Day

Daily Image Prompt

Get art inspiration by trying this prompt in your image generator of choice.

Happy with the result, or have some other artwork you’re proud of?
You can send in your artwork and we will feature it, with credit to you.

Submit your artwork to Mindstream →

We get a lot of submissions, but we do look at every single one! So please don’t hesitate to send us your art.

Yesterday’s Poll

 “Do you want an Apple Vision Pro?”

Yes! Worth every penny. - 29%
No, not worth it! - 71% ✅

Reader’s Opinions

“I may wait for the second version to let them fix some of the challenges in the first one, but ultimately, I think it will be worth the price.” - mark@riz

“Highly dystopian and creepy” - b.leystra

Submit your opinions in our daily poll for the chance to be featured!