Netflix upbeat despite setback
was essentially flat in the second quarter, we expect it to return to more typical growth in the third quarter, and are seeing that in these early weeks of the third quarter.’’
This isn’t just blind optimism from Netflix. It suffered flat growth during the same period last year, and recovered during the second half of the year, as it predicted.
Identifying what caused the drop in US subscribers isn’t an exact science. And chief executive Reed Hastings doesn’t think ‘‘streaming wars’’ was a credible reason.
Many will point to Netflix’s February price hike that added US$2 (NZ$3) to the firm’s HD and 4K monthly subscriptions, and US$1 to its basic package as a more prominent cause.
Hastings suggests the price increase was a factor in the domestic slump. He also implied that a lack of original content was to blame too.
The third quarter is likely to be more encouraging for the company, as the new season of Stranger Things attracted 26.4 million views within its first four days.
evidence. The idea of implanting stuff in our brains to keep up with AI is just nonsense,’’ says Professor Noel Sharkey, emeritus professor of AI and robotics at the University of Sheffield.
Neuralink’s ambitions may seem a stretch, but it has been Silicon Valley’s recurrent dream for humans to one day morph into machines.
Ray Kurzweil, an AI expert and director of engineering at Google, has long held the view that humanity’s future is beyond biology.
He argues that technology is already binding with humans, and has forecast the ‘‘nonbiological portion’’ of human intelligence to predominate by the 2030s, by which time ‘‘the majority of search queries will be answered without you actually asking’’.
Alan Turing, the mathematician who is widely considered a founding father of AI, suggested almost 70 years ago that there is no known reason why a computer couldn’t do everything a human brain does – certainly a daunting thing to consider for Musk.
But he also suggested that if machines could eventually compete with people, where would they start?
It is for this reason, as Mansson suggests, that Musk’s dreams of a ‘‘symbiosis’’ with AI many not be entirely necessary and remain, for now, just a distant possibility.
‘‘I think they will succeed in doing something, but the vision that he has should be interpreted as a vision: something that’s far away.’’ – The Telegraph