US says drones spotted near its military bases in England
This story seems to be about:
This story seems to be about:
Search:
This story seems to be about:
www.theatlantic.com › culture › archive › 2024 › 11 › kendrick-lamar-gnx-new-album-review › 680806
This story seems to be about:
Mid is a perfect bit of new slang for a culture in which quantity is crushing quality, in which you can stream endlessly and feel nothing. What’s also fitting is that the word has become a favorite diss in the rap world, the musical genre that has helped pioneer what mediocrity means today. To be clear: Hip-hop is our era’s most dynamic art form. But it’s also a content template, an expressive mode, that invites anyone with a mic and some talent to spam the internet with raw thoughts set to beats. According to some accounts, the term mid jumped from weed slang to the mainstream in 2021, in reaction to one of the many overlong and underdeveloped albums that Drake—the Spotify era’s defining rapper—has released like so many tadpoles into a lake.
Kendrick Lamar has long styled himself as an enemy of midness. The 37-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner makes statement albums thick with meaning and detail. He tells cohesive stories by unpredictably varying his flow, voice, and production ideas; he challenges audiences with noise-jazz interludes and intricate wordplay. This musical ambition matches his persona: that of a disciplined justice seeker taking on the wickedness within himself and in the world around him. When he missteps—as he did in parts of 2022’s sprawling Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers—it’s from caring too much, trying too hard, and losing the listener while chasing difficult truths.
The expectations he’s set for himself make his new, sixth album a bit surprising. Released without any warning on Friday, the 12-track GNX is terse, punchy, and, to an almost disconcerting degree, easy to digest. It polishes familiar Lamarisms and West Coast hip-hop touchstones—wheezing keyboards, drawling flows, the brittle bounce of Bay Area hyphy. The results come off as populism with a point: Lamar slightly compromising his standards in an attempt to raise everyone else’s.
The album can’t be understood without revisiting his battle with Drake, which unfolded earlier this year. The two rappers volleyed unverifiable allegations of pedophilia and domestic abuse in scathing diss tracks, but beneath that was a war about aesthetics. Lamar portrayed Drake as a vapid, exploitative pop star. Drake labeled Lamar as an egghead: “You better have a motherfuckin’ quintuple entendre on that shit,” he taunted. Lamar answered with “Not Like Us,” a witty and wild takedown that became a radio smash and arguably the song of the summer. Its killer ingredient was its catchiness, proving Lamar’s skills not just as an egghead but also as an entertainer.
GNX’s opening track, “Wacced Out Murals,” surveys the aftermath of that episode in a tone of despair, accompanied by baleful mariachi singing and strings. Lamar was widely celebrated as the victor over Drake, but he feels that the compliments he received were “back-handed,” and that the lessons of his victory—basically, be better, morally and artistically—went unheeded. “All of y’all is on trial,” he says, clocking hip-hop’s present surplus of artists with private-life skeletons and “old-ass flows.” The most surprising line: “Fuck a double entendre, I want y’all to feel this shit.” Clearly, he doesn’t want his message to be lost this time.
[Read: It’s not a rap beef. It’s a cultural reckoning.]
To that end, he styles himself as a sage, “writin’ words, tryna elevate these children”—meaning both his fading peers and the younger generation who might build on his legacy. The chorus of “Murals” preaches hard work and self-determination to an imagined striver who wants to achieve Lamar’s success. Later on the album, he advises listeners to turn Madden off, not get lost to social media, and handle disagreements in private. The final song, “Gloria,” scans as a love song about a relationship’s ups and downs—but he’s actually rapping about his own romance with his pen. At a time when literacy rates are falling and mumble-rap reigns, Lamar wants to make writing sexy again.
The album’s straightforward sound serves that mission. Adopting an amusing variety of delivery techniques—rasping staccato on “Peekaboo,” Snoop-like butteriness on “Man at the Garden”—Lamar blasts through verses and hooks that will sound great at the Super Bowl halftime show next year. He alternates among jittery bangers, swaying R&B anthems, and big-important-message songs with cinematic orchestration. On “Squabble Up,” the beat bubbles like a witch’s cauldron as Lamar reworks a classic call-and-response refrain. “Heart Pt. 6” glides through Lamar’s early-career memories over a shimmering neo-soul sample. In the instant classic “TV Off,” Lamar shouts out Mustard in the manner of a soccer announcer bellowing “gooooaaaal.”
Some of the music, however, comes off like a diet version of Lamar’s best work. Many of the beats have a pillowy, thudding quality that might be attributed to the involvement of pop’s vibes mastermind, Jack Antonoff. Certain lines rely on overly clunky allusions, half-baked metaphors, or both. “I put a square on his back like I’m Jack Dorsey,” he raps, a lyric that wouldn’t be out of place on one of those Drake albums that Lamar disdains.
The tensions of the album’s approach are exemplified by “Reincarnated,” on which Lamar imagines himself having lived a series of past lives as brilliant but doomed musicians. As Lamar raps in furious counterpoint with a sizzling Tupac sample, the music telegraphs big drama ahead. But ultimately, the track feels minor in the larger context of his career. The concept he’s using—staging an intense inner dialogue about the state of his soul—has previously pushed him to heights of extreme emotion and thematic knottiness. Here, the payoff is oddly tidy: “I rewrote the Devil’s story,” Lamar concludes, summarizing what he just said for anyone who didn’t get it.
Still, if the album’s goal is to fortify Lamar’s standing and evangelize his values, then it’s mostly a success. He’s still an agile, characterful rapper who’s able to dart among styles and land punch lines. Most hearteningly, some of the album’s best moments belong to relatively obscure L.A. rappers given a moment to flex. Each of them has a distinctive sound—Peysoh murmurs murderously; YoungThreat whispers off the beat—and delivers bars that hit as hard as any of Lamar’s. Their presence makes the case that his ethos can be passed on, and that we are not doomed to a future of pure mid.
This story seems to be about:
www.bbc.com › news › articles › cg7gxg3npxlo
This story seems to be about:
qz.com › airlines-seat-fees-worth-billions-1851708289
This story seems to be about:
If you’ve been annoyed over the last few years that you had to pay to get an assigned seat on a flight, so is the government. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in one of its last acts before a more business-friendly Republican majority takes over next year, has issued a report criticizing the…
This story seems to be about:
www.bbc.com › news › articles › c0k808xdp18o
This story seems to be about:
This story seems to be about:
www.theatlantic.com › technology › archive › 2024 › 11 › google-antitrust-generative-ai › 680803
This story seems to be about:
For almost two years now, the world’s biggest tech companies have been at war over generative AI. Meta may be known for social media, Google for search, and Amazon for online shopping, but since the release of ChatGPT, each has made tremendous investments in an attempt to dominate in this new era. Along with start-ups such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity, their spending on data centers and chatbots is on track to eclipse the costs of sending the first astronauts to the moon.
To be successful, these companies will have to do more than build the most “intelligent” software: They will need people to use, and return to, their products. Everyone wants to be Facebook, and nobody wants to be Friendster. To that end, the best strategy in tech hasn’t changed: build an ecosystem that users can’t help but live in. Billions of people use Google Search every day, so Google built a generative-AI product known as “AI Overviews” right into the results page, granting it an immediate advantage over competitors.
This is why a recent proposal from the Department of Justice is so significant. The government wants to break up Google’s monopoly over the search market, but its proposed remedies may in fact do more to shape the future of AI. Google owns 15 products that serve at least half a billion people and businesses each—a sprawling ecosystem of gadgets, search and advertising, personal applications, and enterprise software. An AI assistant that shows up in (or works well with) those products will be the one that those people are most likely to use. And Google has already woven its flagship Gemini AI models into Search, Gmail, Maps, Android, Chrome, the Play Store, and YouTube, all of which have at least 2 billion users each. AI doesn’t have to be life-changing to be successful; it just has to be frictionless. The DOJ now has an opportunity to add some resistance. (In a statement last week, Kent Walker, Google’s chief legal officer, called the Department of Justice’s proposed remedy part of an “interventionist agenda that would harm Americans and America’s global technology leadership,” including the company’s “leading role” in AI.)
[Read: The horseshoe theory of Google Search]
Google is not the only competitor with an ecosystem advantage. Apple is integrating its Apple Intelligence suite across eligible iPhones, iPads, and Macs. Meta, with more than 3 billion users across its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, enjoys similar benefits. Amazon’s AI shopping assistant, Rufus, has garnered little major attention but nonetheless became available to the website’s U.S. shoppers this fall. However much of the DOJ’s request the court ultimately grants, these giants will still lead the AI race—but Google had the clearest advantage among them.
Just how good any of these companies’ AI products are has limited relevance to their adoption. Google’s AI tools have repeatedly shown major flaws, such as confidently recommending eating rocks for good health, but the features continue to be used by more and more people simply because they’re there. Similarly, Apple’s AI models are less powerful than Gemini or ChatGPT, but they will have a huge user base simply because of how popular the iPhone is. Meta’s AI models may not be state-of-the-art, but that doesn’t matter to billions of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp users who just want to ask a chatbot a silly question or generate a random illustration. Tech companies without such an ecosystem are well aware of their disadvantage: OpenAI, for instance, is reportedly considering developing its own web browser, and it has partnered with Apple to integrate ChatGPT across the company’s phones, tablets, and computers.
[Read: AI search is turning into the problem everyone worried about]
This is why it’s relevant that the DOJ’s proposed antitrust remedy takes aim at Google’s broader ecosystem. Federal and state attorneys asked the court to force Google to sell off its Chrome browser; cease preferencing its search products in the Android mobile operating system; prevent it from paying other companies, including Apple and Samsung, to make Google the default search engine; and allow rivals to syndicate Google’s search results and use its search index to build their own products. All of these and the DOJ’s other requests, under the auspices of search, are really shots at Google’s expansive empire.
As my colleague Ian Bogost has argued, selling Chrome might not affect Google’s search dominance: “People returned to Google because they wanted to, not just because the company had strong-armed them,” he wrote last week. But selling Chrome and potentially Android, as well as preventing Google from making its search engine the default option for various other companies’ products, would make it harder for Google to funnel billions of people to the rest of its software, including AI. Meanwhile, access to Google’s search index could provide a huge boost to OpenAI, Perplexity, Microsoft, and other AI search competitors: Perhaps the hardest part of building a searchbot is trawling the web for reliable links, and rivals would gain access to the most coveted way of doing so.
The Justice Department seems to recognize that the AI war implicates and goes beyond search. Without intervention, Google’s search monopoly could give it an unfair advantage over AI as well—and an AI monopoly could further entrench the company’s control over search. The court, attorneys wrote, must prevent Google from “manipulating the development and deployment of new technologies,” most notably AI, to further throttle competition.
And so the order also takes explicit aim at AI. The DOJ wants to bar Google from self-preferencing AI products, in addition to Search, in Chrome, Android, and all of its other products. It wants to stop Google from buying exclusive rights to sources of AI-training data and disallow Google from investing in AI start-ups and competitors that are in or might enter the search market. (Two days after the DOJ released its proposal, Amazon invested another $4 billion into Anthropic, the start-up and OpenAI rival that Google has also heavily backed to this point, suggesting that the e-commerce giant might be trying to lock in an advantage over Google.) The DOJ also requested that Google provide a simple way for publishers to opt out of their content being used to train Google’s AI models or be cited in AI-enhanced search products. All of that will make it harder for Google to train and market future AI models, and easier for its rivals to do the same.
When the DOJ first sued Google, in 2020, it was concerned with the internet of old: a web that appeared intractably stuck, long ago calcified in the image of the company that controls how billions of people access and navigate it. Four years and a historic victory later, its proposed remedy enters an internet undergoing an upheaval that few could have foreseen—but that the DOJ’s lawsuit seems to have nonetheless anticipated. A frequently cited problem with antitrust litigation in tech is anachronism, that by the time a social-media, or personal-computing, or e-commerce monopoly is apparent, it is already too late to disrupt. With generative AI, the government may finally have the head start it needs.