ZD 25.46: Marble World Models
Who needs a LLM when you can have spatial intelligence?
AI is starting to think in 3d; Bury might not have the depreciation story right; Microsoft’s AI strategy; holiday party hangover hints and is vibe coding dead?
The Distilled Spirit
All the Marbles
Dr. Fei-Fei Li, the Godmother of AI, launched her world model, Marble. It is a new kind of intelligence.
🌍 From Words to Worlds ()
AI today understands words. It largely sees in tokenized text. Dr. Li is exploring how to make AI truly understand space and the physical world. She sees vision and spatial intelligence as the core loop to enabling AI to understand much more of the world and become ever more useful.
Spatial Intelligence is also foundational to our imagination and creativity. Storytellers create uniquely rich worlds in their minds and leverage many forms of visual media to bring them to others, from ancient cave painting to modern cinema to immersive video games.
👀 Marble: A Multimodal World Model (World Labs)
World Labs, Dr. Li’s company, has launched Marble to the pubic. You can explore creations and even build your own fully explorable world on their platform today. It is amazing to behold.
AI Economics
Is AI a bubble? What is happening to the job market?
📉 Why Michael Burry is Wrong About AI Depreciation ( )
Michael Burry made me, and many others, wonder just how fast GPUs depreciate. This is a really good explanation of the subject. The headline is that six years is actually a reasonable approximation of useful life. There are many layers to inference in the AI economy.
Think of it less like smartphones (which become e-waste the moment software support ends) and more like a logistics company’s truck fleet. The newest, most fuel-efficient rigs handle the long-haul routes. But when a better model arrives, the old trucks aren’t junked—they’re reassigned to regional routes, then local delivery, then parts runs.
🪟 Microsoft’s AI Strategy ()
SemiAnalysis is back on substack! They are back strong with a breakdown of Microsoft’s updated AI strategy.
The firm is actively looking for near-term capacity and pulling the trigger on everything it can get its hands on. Self-build, leasing, Neocloud, middle-of-nowhere locations – everything is on the table to accelerate near-term capacity growth . . .
🫧 The Benefits of Bubbles (Stratechery)
Bubbles can be a necessary part of the creative-destructive process of technological advance. Stagnation is the alternative.
💰 How To Survive a Market Crash ()
If we are at the peak of this business cycle, things will go down. Overreaction is the sign of a n overbought market. Understand your portfolio to survive the downturn.
About AGI
What about AGI? When and how do we get there and how will it feel along the way?
🌩️ When Will We Make God? ()
A visual exploration of the rapid progress of AI and some assessment of the approach to AGI.
Once you automate AI researchers, you can speed up AI research, which will make AI better much faster, accelerating our path to superintelligence, and automating many other disciplines along the way. This is why hyperscalers believe there’s a straight shot from AGI to superintelligence.
🤝 AI 2027 Aligns with AI as Normal Technology ()
AI 2027 posits a rapid advance into superhuman automation launching us into AGI; AI as Normal Technology sees it as another wave of good and orderly human progress. Asterisk explores how these visions align.
The internet fundamentally altered the way the world works. Want to book a flight? You don’t call a travel agent, you go to the airline’s website. Want to access your bank? Go to the bank’s website. Video calls to someone halfway around the world? Stream your favorite TV show on demand? Social media? Newspapers? Encyclopedias? Shopping? All built on the internet. We all believe that AI could be at least as transformative.
Bad Vibes
AI is great at getting things mostly right, including that app you just vibe during lunch.
☠️ Is Vibe Coding Dead? (Lumberjack)
Vibe coding created so many problems it forced one practitioner to become an engineer to compensate.
Every failed workflow taught me something about state management. Every Lovable prototype that broke in production taught me about authentication and edge cases. Every hour debugging taught me to recognize code smells.
🔨 The Vibes of Wack-a-Mole ()
Vibe coding gets a lot harder when you have users you care about. Claude Code can help a ton.
The Vibe Coding vibes quickly disappeared when I was faced with the reality of having users.
Getting the Most out of Your AI
AI works best when it understands what you want. Also NotebookLM is getting much better.
👍 It Starts With Your Workflow (Lead With AI)
You need to understand your own workflow to get the most out of your AI. Focusing on smart delegation is the avenue for success.
The results were clear. When people used AI for support, helping with a specific step, they got their work done 24.3% faster. . . . But when they tried to automate the whole process, performance actually dropped. Tasks took 17.7% longer.
📓 NotebookLM Learning System ()
NotebookLM keeps getting better and better. Explore how one author customizes it to work as his own custom learning system for any topic. Asking about failure modes is genius.
Self-Improvement
Things you can do to improve yourself and the people around you.
🕵️ Generalists Win in the AI Age ()
Being adaptable, with high agency is how one wins in the age of AI.
Specialists are attached to a skill. Skills evolve and get replaced as technology advances. We don’t see it this way now, but Photoshop disrupted the art and design industry. AI is doing the same, and those who are experts at skills rather than true artists are going to be pissed off, as you can already see. Generalists, on the other hand, focus on the goal and do what’s necessary (including changing that goal) so that they can thrive in anything they do.
🚣♀️ Building the First Ironclad ()
Deploying the first ironclad warship required a heretic, an enabler and a bureaucrat working together to deliver the project.
🍴 The Lunch Break is Dead ()
Office lunch just is not what it used to be. These days, it is too often eaten at desks if not entirely skipped. Shared lunches built camaraderie and mentorship networks. Get out and eat with your co-workers.
A New Steam Machine
Valve dropped a new console and standalone VR headset. Unlike the last generation, this looks a winner even before you account for the much stronger ecosystem.
🏆 Winning the Console Generation (Xe)
The steam machine is a console — and a full-blown PC for your living room. It is upgradable and very powerful. It is poised to win the console wars. The Frame — a standalone VR headset — is good enough on it’s own and easy to connect to your PC.
The new boxes look interesting — but how much will they cost? Valve looks better than Xbox as a gaming platform in any case.
Fun Things
💵 Capital Dream ()
The over-the-top aesthetic signatures of 1980s Manhattan are back.
🍁 Seattle, Canada? ()
The British liked deep water ports, Puget Sound was no exception but American facts on the ground won the day.
🍸 Holiday Party Hangover Tips ()
Holiday party hangover tips to get you through the season. Cheers!
The Look
Windows Task Manager turns 30 today. Learn the back story from the guy who wrote it.
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