My main newsletter, Complex Machinery, includes a section called "In Other News..." It's where I list one-liners about interesting articles that didn't fit into any segments.

You can think of this list as a version of In Other News, but with a wider remit than Complex Machinery's "risk, AI, and related topics."

Above the fold

1. Machine-as-competitor often becomes machine-as-teacher, which changes the game for everyone. Consider how automation rewired how humans behave in trading, poker, and chess. And now, the same holds for the game of Go. Bonus: AI-based Go training has increased women's participation. (MIT Technology Review)
2. Prediction markets and war make for dangerous bedfellows. Besides the moral concerns, there's the potential for insider trading to make people rich from violence. And more subtly, because prediction markets can be conflated for factual news, there's the ability for groups to sway public opinion by stacking money on bets that are far from the truth. (The Atlantic)
3. The plan to assassinate Iranian leader Ali Khamenei involved a mix of modern-day cyber intrusions and old-school intelligence work. (FT)
4. This article about turbulence doubles as a class on risk management: treating every incident as a learning opportunity, thoughtfully exploring "How did this happen? If we want this to (not) happen again, what do we do?" As a bonus, the article includes what is now my favorite quote about predicting the future: “Forecasts are forecasts. Most of the time, they don’t even get them right the day after.” (The New Yorker)
5. Scouting out datacenter land deals is big business. Imagine "finance industry analysis" meets "land exploration" with a splash of "general contractor" for handling permits. (New York Times)
6. If you look back over the past few years, restaurants have been quietly embracing new technology. Including genAI. And their focus is on supporting, not replacing, employees. (Business Insider)
7. I am biased to like this post by Guy Freeman because it echoes statements I have made about data science versus statistics (and later about each flavor of the data field being a rebranding of the previous incarnation). But yes, a lot of popular technologies are simply more-marketable repackagings or analogs of older methods. (Guy Freeman)

The rest of the best

• Thanks to AI, China tops the US in terms of billionaire headcount. (Le Monde 🇫🇷)
• Anthropic didn't want its tools used for war. It happened anyway. (Washington Post)
• That recent AWS outage had its roots in a genAI agent. And their engineering team has been discussing it. (FT)
• Meta's "AI superintelligence" talk finally gets an AI engineering team. Because, apparently, they've just realized that AI involves more than models and algorithms? (WSJ)
• Ring's CEO is still dealing with the blowback from that Super Bowl ad. And his interview tour is not going well. (TechCrunch)
• AI is making waves in warfare. (Les Echos 🇫🇷)
• The growing interest to enhance (or replace) focus groups with genAI. (WSJ)
• For reasons I cannot fathom, people are turning to genAI bots for tax guidance. (New York Times, WSJ, CNBC)
• With Grammarly's "Expert Review" feature, genAI bots trained on the work of real-world writers critique student papers. (The Verge)
• OpenAI pauses its efforts to enable adult content on ChatGPT. (My hunch: that sweet sweet DoD money played a role in the decision. Swapping naughty pics for drone strikes, I suppose…) (Sherwood News)
• At Mobile World Congress, Deutsche Telekom unveils an AI assistant which, they claim, will include real-time translation. (Der Spiegel 🇩🇪, Wired)
• Moss snitches on grave-robbers. No, seriously. (Popular Science)
• I've long noted that criminals are early, eager adopters of technology. And for them, genAI has proven quite useful. (FT)
• British bank Monzo catches heat for its snarky, humorous year-end summaries of customers' spending habits. (As I've noted elsewhere: creating a useful data summary is far from easy.) (The Guardian)

Did I miss anything?

Have something I should read? Send the link my way.