Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 30

AI Subscriptions Based on Usage Are Coming Sooner Than You Think

This past week, ChatGPT went down for all users. According to Gizmodo, “OpenAI’s outages have become somewhat common, which makes it difficult for people to rely on ChatGPT in their workdays.” Now that OpenAI estimates that the free version of ChatGPT has about 100 million weekly active users and there are a growing number of reports revealing just how much energy is already being used to power AI tools.

In the near future, it is likely that the cost of using AI tools may soon be tied to...

Share One Word to Get Featured on the Back Cover of My New Book!

On September 10th, my new book will hit bookstores (preorder link) but right now, we are launching our one-word book review program and chance to get a free exclusive digital copy of the book. Here’s how to participate:

Visit this page to read the book excerpt >> Share your one-word review of the book with us.Receive your link to the FULL digital copy of the book.Earn a chance for your review to be featured on the back cover! *

For those of you who know my decade-long Non-...

Why People Become Gamers … And How It’s Changing

Fandom recently released the latest edition of their annual Inside Gaming Report where they survey 5,000 “entertainment and gaming fans globally.” The data this year found that the top reason that people play games continues to be to unwind or relieve stress, followed closely by a more surprising motivation: self-expression.

Nearly 50% of the gamers surveyed suggested that “creation, imagination, and self-expression” were their main motivations for gaming, a rise of 10% since 2023. While some...

The Remarkable History of Acid Blotters

LSD is significantly more potent than most other drugs, lacks taste, color or odor and is too strong to consume “raw.” All these facts mean it has usually been mixed with something before it’s distributed. From injecting it into sugar cubes to creating digestible tablets, “carrier mediums” have always been a critical part of LSD distribution for decades. Perhaps the most unique medium was blotter paper, a historical quirk that offers the inspiration for a new book titled Blotters: The Untold Sto...

Marques Brownlee and Walt Mossberg on Trustworthy Tech Reviews

How useful will tech reviews (or any other kind of online review) be in a future where they can increasingly be AI generated? This was a topic tech journalist Kara Swisher focused on in an interview with tech reviewers Walt Mossberg and Marques Brownlee. They are an interesting duo to discuss the topic side by side. Mossberg essentially invented the category of tech reviews as the long-time reviewer at the Wall Street Journal. Brownlee is a wildly popular YouTube reviewer with hundreds of millio...

The Pronatalists Want Everyone to Have More Kids. Are They Right?

Malcolm and Simone Collins believe it’s their duty to have as many kids as possible. They think you should, too. Over the past few years, they have become the unofficial spokespeople for pronatalism, the idea that the only way to fight population decline is to encourage the world to have more kids. Lots more kids. Their methods are controversial, as are some of the people they sometimes share stages with. Their movement is fairly criticized for its lack of diversity and how it can sometimes attr...

Soundproof Silk May Transform How We Manage Noise at Home and Work

Early in the pandemic I decided to make a home studio and looked into installing sound panels. Unfortunately, they were generally expensive, bulky and needed professional installation. Researchers from MIT may have developed a solution for this and many other problems with a new noise cancelling silk fabric about the width of a human hair that uses vibrating fabric to “generate sound waves that interfere with an unwanted noise to cancel it out, similar to noise-canceling headphones.”

If i...

Why I Love Ridiculous Art

One of the group conversations I had last weekend required each participant to share something that we think is bullsh*t. My choice was political advertising, which David Ogilvy famously suggested ought to be stopped because “it’s the only really dishonest kind of advertising that’s left.” Someone else in our group nominated modern art … and referenced the banana duct taped to a wall saga as proof.

Feel free to disagree with my perspective (I look forward to your comments!), but in that conve...

India Is Ground Zero for the Irresistible Appeal of Sanctioned Deepfakes

The biggest AI story this week was the showdown between Open AI and actress Scarlett Johansson over the use of a voice concerningly similar to hers after she had refused to collaborate with Open AI. This is quickly becoming a recurring typical deepfake story: someone steals the likeness of a famous person, and that person fights back.

Photo by Taylor Hill / WireImage

The less popular but perhaps more concerning story is the growth of sanctioned deepfakes. This week, WIRED detailed how ...

Truecaller Offers Perfectly Useless Feature to Let AI Respond to Calls in Your Voice

This week’s example of unnecessary AI innovation comes from the caller ID platform Truecaller which is using Microsoft’s Personal Voice technology to power a new tool that can “replicate users’ voices in order to greet and respond to callers.” Here’s a breakdown of each “feature” it promises, along with a list of how I currently accomplish these things myself:

“Answer phone calls for you” – I can answer them myself, if I want.“Screen unknown calls” – I don’t answer.“Take messages” – ...