#48: Polanyi's paradox, cookie banners, wine, Bitcoin, AI compute power, wandering satellite, rotting brains, and more!
Hi everyone!
I frequently use ChatGPT and Claude to help me in my day-to-day work, but I have one annoyance with them. Despite its power, AI often misses critical nuances in specific business contexts. Why? It lacks what Michael Polanyi called "tacit knowledge". It's knowledge that exists in the intuitive understanding of employees. Knowledge that's being talked about during meetings but not written down.
We know more than we can tell.
Jeremy Kahn's recent essay sheds light on this "Polanyi's paradox". The paradox explains why large language models struggle with company-specific insights. But here's the exciting part: AI might be on the verge of cracking the paradox.
How? By learning from unstructured data:
One of the strengths of AI (...) is its ability to find patterns in unstructured data. In other words, AI can potentially capture tacit knowledge. It can learn effective sales techniques not from a set of rules about how to sell, but from simply looking for patterns in transcripts of calls from top-performing sales reps.
But this raises intriguing questions. How will this impact the workforce? How can companies balance this competitive advantage of AI with potential backlash from employees? And if everyone becomes an expert, how do we define seniority?
As Kahn notes:
The organizations that are able to move most rapidly and effectively to break Polanyi's Paradox will realize a significant competitive advantage over those that cannot.
Interesting times ahead!
I'd love to get your take on this. How is your organization handling tacit knowledge?
Enjoy the rest of the newsletter!
Xavier
🤓 Cool Stuff I Found on the Internet
575 million hours wasted on cookie banners
Cookie banners, mandated by EU regulations, are costing Europeans over 575 million hours annually, equivalent to €14.375 billion in lost productivity! That's 0.1% of GPD. Despite being intended to protect user privacy, many are now questioning the effectiveness of those banners.
Walking trees
A fascinating phenomenon occurs in Ecuador: palm trees that can "walk" up to 20meters per year. The trees are looking for spots with more sunlight or better soil.
French wine is actually... American!
Want to piss off a Frenchman? Just tell him that French wine is actually American. About 150 years ago, French vintners unknowingly imported phylloxera, a bug that devastated French vineyards. The solution? Grafting French vines onto American rootstocks resistant to phylloxera.
Meta's Password Storage Disaster
Meta was fined $101 million for inadequately protecting hundreds of millions of user passwords. The best way to store passwords is by using a hash function. Hashing passwords is a one-way street: you can verify that a user entered his password correctly by comparing it to the hash, but you can never take a hash and turn that back into the user's password.
MicroStrategy bought $4.6 billion Bitcoin
MicroStrategy, led by Michael Saylor, has purchased an additional 51,780 Bitcoin for $4.6 billion, bringing their total holdings to 331,200 Bitcoin. This aggressive acquisition strategy comes amid Bitcoin's recent price surge (partially attributed to Donald Trump's pro-crypto stance). Saylor remains very bullish, predicting Bitcoin could reach $13 million per coin in the next 21 years.
⏳ On this day...
1954 - A meteorite hits Ann Elizabeth Fowler Hodges while she’s napping. It’s the only documented (and verified) case of a human being hit by a rock from space.
1999 - Exxon and Mobil sign a US$73.7 billion agreement to merge, thus creating ExxonMobil, the world's largest company.
2022 - OpenAI launches ChatGPT (crazy to think this was only 2 years ago).
🧠🤖 Artificial intelligence
Claude gets a new superpower
Anthropic has introduced the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open-source standard allowing to developers to connect AI chatbots to external datasources. Anthropic has already shared connectors for GitHub, Google Drive, Google Maps, Slack, and more. It'll be interesting to see if competitors like OpenAI will adopt MCP or develop their own solutions.
Coca Cola's AI ads
Coca-Cola's recent AI-generated Christmas ads have stirred controversy on social media. Created using advanced AI models, the ads attempt to recreate the iconic 1995 "Holidays Are Coming" campaign. However, the results highlight the current limitations of AI in video generation, with distorted imagery and unnatural movements.
Who has the most compute power?
This graph shows how much compute power the leading AI companies have. Google leads the pack thanks to their custom TPU chips. This concentration of computing power gives a handful of companies a major advantage. It also shows how much money and effort it takes to be at the forefront of AI development today. Very few companies can compete when so much compute power is required!
🤨 Questions nobody asked
When a plane is in the trouble, the pilot will use "mayday mayday mayday" as a distress call. It's internationally recognized, but where does it come from?
Frederick Stanley Mockford was officer-in-charge of radio at Croydon Airport, England. He was asked to come up with a distress call that would be easily understood by polots and ground staff.
He proposed "mayday", the phonetic equivalent of "m'aidez", which is French for "help me".
It was officially adopted in 1927 as a distress call besides SOS via Morse code.
👽 Space
Who moved UK's oldest satellite?
Skynet-1A, the UK’s oldest satellite launched in 1969, has mysteriously moved from its original position above Africa to a new location above the Americas. There’s no record of who authorized this repositioning or why. The satellite now poses a potential risk to other space traffic, and highlighting the importance of responsible satellite disposal.
Did we find and kill life on Mars?
In newsletter 30, I shared an article about how NASA's Viking 1 mission to Mars might have found and killed Martian life by conducting water-based experiments. This article argues that life on Mars would become highly sensitive to liquid water, similar to microbes in the Atacama Desert. To find it, we should shift from the "follow the water" strategy to "follow the salts" approach.
Starlink directly to your phone
The FCC approved Starlink’s direct-to-cell service. This allows unmodified cell phones to receive service directly from satellites without requiring specialized equipment. At launch, SpaceX will only provide SMS messaging and emergency alerts, but the company wants to expand to voice and data in the future. This won’t just eliminate cellular dead zones, it’ll also be important during emergencies. Starlink already proved to be highly effective during hurricanes Helene and Milton.
🩺 Health
Ozempic shrinks more than your waistline
A University of Alberta study reveals that popular weight-loss drugs like Ozempic may cause unintended muscle loss, including in the heart. The research found that both obese and lean mice experienced decreased heart muscle mass when given these medications.
Screen time rots your brain
A study found that excessive screen time causes thinning of the cerebral cortex, which reduces cognitive function. Another study found that adults who watch 5 hours of TV per day had an increased risk of developing dementia, stroke or Parkinson's. And a third study found that smartphone addiction leads to less gray matter. Yikes!
⚡️ Energy & Environment
Cargo bikes to the rescue
Last year, the use of cargo bikes in London increased by 73%. It's estimated that 17% of all kilometers driven in central London could be replaced by cargo bikes, which would reduce CO2 emissions by 30,000 tons annually.
Jet engines stabilize the grid
A few weeks ago, I learned Belgium has 8 jet engines on standby to stabilize the electricity grid, and apparently, other countries have similar setups! Last year, Ireland installed 6 such turbines. The goal? Quickly spin up when there’s an electricity shortage that threatens the grid’s stability. Not friendly to the environment, but hopefully a temporarily solution until more energy storage projects come online.