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Should we give up copyright to beat China in the race for AI?

In conversation with Radio New Zealand’s Nine To Noon host Kathryn Ryan: Christie’s held its first auction of AI-generated art, earning a million dollars. Those AI artworks had been ‘trained’ from countless images, owned by other people. Is that legal? OpenAI and Google claim that unless they have free right to use – well, basically everything everywhere ever created by humanity – to train their AI models, the Chinese will win the AI race. Meanwhile, Hollywood’s A-listers called for protection of artists and their works against what they see as copyright theft. Plus: A Clockwork Orange comes to life for prisoners in solitary confinement – and is your chatbot flattering you?

Author mpescePosted on No comment The Next Billion Cars – “Gradually. Then Suddenly”

The Next Billion Cars – “Gradually. Then Suddenly”

“How did you go bankrupt?” begins the oft-quoted line from Hemingway. “Two ways. Gradually – then suddenly.” That’s how the automotive sector feels at the end of 2024, with Nissan maybe preparing for bankruptcy and Stellantis firing its CEO and VW struggling with strikes and low sales and GM shuttering Cruise and on and on and on. Sally Dominguez and Drew Smith join Mark Pesce in studio to explore what’s really happening – and what it all means for THE NEXT BILLION CARS.

We mentioned a few things during our conversation – here are the links:

1) Want to design the car of the Future? Here are 8,000 designs to get you started. (MIT Technology Review)

2) Chinese Carmakers Are Taking Mexico by Storm While Eyeing U.S. (New York Times)

3) And you really should watch Margin Call, a spellbinding drama about the 2008 financial crisis (Wikipedia).

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Series 2024 – Episode 7: “The War over Plant-Based foods with Nick Hazell”

In 2018, Nick Hazell founded v2food – an amazing startup making plant-based substitutes for meat that got extensive coverage on THE NEXT BILLION SECONDS. Six years later, it’s getting difficult to find their product on supermarket shelves – and there’s been a broader roll-back from plant-based alternatives. What’s happened? Nick Hazel doesn’t have all the answers – but he asks some of the right questions…

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Series 2024 – Episode 6: A climate ‘Moonshot’ with Nick Hazell’s Algenie

The impacts of global heating have become persistent and profound, so we need to do as much as we can to lesson those impacts, as quickly as we can. The best paths forward lean into existing, natural processes – and this is exactly where Nick Hazell has arrived with Algenie. Can algae restore balance to our ecosystem? Is it the moonshot we need to transform our future?

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The Next Billion Cars – 2024 in review (part 1)

Whenever Mark, Sal and Drew get together, sparks will fly. So much has happened since our visit to CES 2024, we reckoned it time to draw all the year’s threads together: Are we pulling back from EVs? Will China dominate manufacturing? And what about all that data vehicles are collecting? It’s been full on – enough to require a bit of a ‘group hug’. Part one of two.

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The Next Billion Cars: Neo-Malaise

What does it mean to walk away from the dream of a lifetime? For series co-host Drew Smith, this is exactly what he’s doing. For over 20 years, he’d dedicated himself to driving positive change in an industry that has resisted it at almost every turn, and he’s done. In this episode of The Next Billion Cars, he explores how the automotive industry has become its own worst enemy, and what might happen next.

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The Next Billion Cars – LIVE at SxSW Sydney with ZEEKR’s Gustaf Gunér: How does a new brand survive?

ZEEKR launched their EV brand in Australia at SxSW Sydney. Drew Smith – who worked for predecessor of ZEEKR – scored The Next Billion Cars a live interview with head of brand Gustaf Gunér. What does it mean to launch a new car brand? And how does a brand establish itself within a market for EVs where everything is… very much the same? A deep conversation about design, brand, and the future of the car industry.

Mark Pesce and Drew Smith interview ZEEKR’s Head of Bran Gustaf Gunér
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Series 2024 – Halloween Special: Ghosts in the Machine

Google’s new NotebookLM digests documents to create AI summaries, and provides an incredible new way to search a vast set of information. One little throwaway feature became a viral hit – “Audio Overview”, which creates a ‘podcast’ featuring two clever, chipper – and entirely synthetic – personas, engaging in a ‘deep dive’ on the content within NotebookLM. In the spirit of Halloween, we uploaded the scripts for the first four episodes of Series 2024 – and NotebookLM rose to the occasion. Is this the future of podcasting? And — HAVE I JUST BEEN PUT OUT OF A JOB?

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Series 2024 – Episode 3: CHIPS AND CHAINS

The semiconductor sector has seen more upheaval over the last 3 years than in the previous 30, fueled by the rise of AI. Nvidia now rivals Microsoft for most valuable company on the planet, while Intel – which started the Microprocessor revolution over 50 years ago – seems to be losing ground, in a downward spiral into complete collapse. What does this mean for our devices – and for the geopolitical balance between the US and China?

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Series 2024 – Episode TWO: THE FOUR DAY WEEK IS ALREADY HERE

The pandemic permanently broke the link between work and place. In the aftermath we’ve rejiggered everything connected to work-life balance – in favour of life. This means we’ve stumbled into a new reality: the ‘four-day week’ is a reality for most office workers – even if no one wants to name it. How did this happen? Have a listen and find out.

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