A Dictator and the Future is Here Now

🌅 Today’s Topics

Good Morning, today we’re delving into:

• The Killing of Putin’s Biggest Rival

• ChatGPT Now Has a Younger, Better Looking, Brother

• Chart: The San Francisco Police Don’t Care Anymore

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The Death of Navalny 

For those who don’t know who Alexei Navalny is, he’s a Russian activist, politician and a symbol of hope for what Russia could be for many. He was the most well-known opposition figure to Putin in Russia. 

For years he has been fighting against Putin’s tyranny and attempting to present a non-autocratic view of what Russia could look like. He stood for free and fair elections and a move away from the oligarch-centric view of Russia.

There is a documentary on the BBC that came out in 2022, which I cannot recommend enough. It tells the story of Navalny’s rise to prominence, and more specifically the lengths Putin will go to silence his critics.

But what has happened?

In early 2020 when the world was still coming to terms with the pandemic, Navalny boarded a plane heading to Moscow. Halfway through the flight, he fell dangerously ill, and it quickly became apparent that he had become poisoned, and it was pretty clear who was behind it….

There is a fantastic part of the above documentary where Navalny finds the phone number of the person who poisoned him on the plane and phones him personally.

He was flown to Germany to receive life-saving treatment - much to the displeasure of the Russian authorities. He made a miraculous recovery and decided he was going to return to Russia. 

Upon landing in Russia he was immediately arrested and has been in prison ever since. The charges brought against him: ‘embezzling’ money from a state-owned Lumbar company and ‘extremism’ (aka terrorism). All completely fabricated.

It was obvious Putin saw Navalny as an existential threat to his power - in numerous interviews he never mentioned him by name, often calling him “that character,” “that certain political force,” and “a poor excuse of a politician” - all very bizarre.

The news broke on Friday that Navalny died in prison, and while the real cause of death isn’t known and probably never will be, it’s likely it was a mix of malnutrition and being refused medical treatment - as often been the case for political prisoners in Russia.

If you’re interested in the continued miscarriage of justice in Russia and how political opponents to Putin are treated, I’d recommend reading Bill Browder’s books: Red Notice and Freezing Order.

Why does this matter?

While this is just one man, what it shows is that despite the eyes of the world being on him, nothing will stop Putin from getting what he wants: absolute, unequivocal, power.

Whether it’s killing Navalny, invading Ukraine or sending FSB agents to Salisbury to kill former spies, Putin is bold and seemingly unafraid of what the world thinks of him.

Despite the sanctions placed on Russian oligarchs, dozens of humanitarian court rulings against the Russian authorities and countless high-profile protests it appears nothing will dissuade Putin and his cronies from doing what they want, when they want.

And when someone, like Navalny is courageous enough to stand up to them, they do what dictators have done for centuries: silence them.

I hope Navalny is remembered, he was one of the good ones.

Sora

This week OpenAI announced their text-to-video generation model called Sora.

What happened?

OpenAI is the leading AI technology company in the world at the moment, behind the sensations of ChatGPT, Dalle, and now Sora. And ngl, Sora is f*cking incredible.

12 months ago the internet memed AI videos with Will Smith eating Spaghetti.

Only a year later, we have this (Watch the video!):

How does this work?

In our AI deep dive post, we explain how OpenAI’s text and image models like DALL-E work. In principle, the video model works in a very similar way; you have an AI diffusion model, that is trained on a lot of video data. The model understands your prompt and works to create that video by taking static noise and working to remove the noise over many steps.

Why does it matter?

It’s mostly hopeless for me to confidently tell you how the world will change after this but there are some interesting questions that we can ask that might make the picture a little less murky.

How do we know what is true?

Video has been the ultimate source of truthful information because the only way to capture it was on a camera. In a time gone passed, a video was unfakable.

This is no longer true and it is entirely possible to create a video of Joe Biden peeing himself and the world would not know it came from AI. The 2000s internet brought about an era of information abundance and perhaps now AI will bring information overload.

This raises harder questions for the companies building it. Should OpenAI restrict what it generates? Probably. It’s hard to disagree that it shouldn’t generate child porn. The follow-up question from that is where do you draw the line? And why should OpenAI be the arbiter of that line? Trump voters are likely in support of the peeing video but Democrats won’t be.

How does change the nature of creative work? 

Ironically, we thought manual labor jobs would be the first to be disrupted by our binary overlords. However, it is the creative and arts industries facing the most risk and the greatest irony of all is that some complex maths is generating these AI models.

Pixar spent the best part of a decade figuring out how to 3D render the behavior of water and air. It still takes animators hours, visual effects specialists, and software engineers years to create the kind of cinematics we enjoy today. Now I can do it from my Grandad’s sofa.

Thousands of creatives will be facing some hard questions about their futures. But this won’t happen overnight. The problem with these models is that they are not deterministic.

The logic is not hard coded into the system. This is mostly to say that editing is very hard because you tell Sora “Keep the video the same but this time make it less snowy” and it generates an entirely new, different-looking video as it has no concept of what “Same” means. There is no useful way of editing a video or animation you don’t think is perfect.

Where to now?

AI might be bigger than the internet, and if that is true, the next 10 years will be the site of some of the biggest changes of a generation. How we work, communicate, learn, heal, build, create and everything in between will change.

The rate of improvement here is not slowing down and to paraphrase what Peter Thiel once told Mark Zuckerberg, the most risky thing you can do in an ever-changing world, is to not take any risk.

Chart of the week: