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Start reading the AI Snake Oil book online

AI Snake Oil Arvind Narayanan 10 September 2024, 20:55

The AI Snake Oil book by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor has made its first chapter available online to promote the full book release. The opening chapter spans 30 pages and outlines the authors' arguments about identifying misleading AI applications versus legitimate uses across predictive AI, generative AI, and content moderation. The book was selected for Nature's 10 best books of 2024 and the authors are now starting a new project called AI as Normal Technology to examine long-term AI impacts.

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The book was published September 2024

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TLDRocket 21 July 2026

The open-weight AI model market hit an inflection point today as Alibaba and Kimi released trillion-parameter competitors that challenge the closed-model orthodoxy—just as Washington moved to restrict them. Alibaba's Qwen 3.8 Max (2.4 trillion parameters) and Kimi K3 (2.8T) are going open-weight, with K3 ranking first on Frontend Web App Arena and fourth on agentic benchmarks, signaling that scale and transparency can coexist. The timing matters: while U.S. policymakers weigh layered restrictions on Chinese open models, technical experts are pushing back hard, arguing that closed gardens actually hurt security and competition more than they help. The real fragmentation risk isn't technical—it's regulatory.

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Start reading the AI Snake Oil book online

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