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This week we’re going to shake things up, literally (wait until you watch the 3rd story). This week on The Brief we are covering: Spotify reserves your concert tickets, Google rolls out new ad units inside AI Mode, and Firefox wants you to shake your phone for a summary.
I can’t get this ‘shake to summarize’ feature out of my head. It’s an embodied direct line of Big Tech connecting our Paleolithic fingertips to a “Godlike” technology. I can imagine the developer and subsequent boardroom conversation that got this feature approved. “We’ve all read an article and lost interest after a few sentences, amirite?! So, what if when your brain starts to drift after the 2nd sentence, you could violently shake your phone and in real-time, the AI would synthesize everything (up to 5,000 words!) and spit out a stale summary?” Prolonged silence and eyes darting around the room… a slow clap… and the feature was vibe-coded and shipped less than a month later.
I’m all for releasing cool updates, but I’ve seen the clear-as-day data from MIT: AI summaries won’t be remembered, internalized, or recalled at a later point. Period. Synthesized text from LLMs is akin to a small mental tumbleweed that exits our mind’s aperture as quickly as it came in.
But what a great solve for those long-form New Yorker articles!! Who had time to read those anyways. Now you can reduce them to a quick 15 second blink. So then, later on at a cocktail party when someone asks if you “read the piece,” you can say “yes!” And proceed to not have much to add about it at all.
Anyway, just my opinion of course. For now, if you read this far, I’m proud of you. And if you shook your phone to summarize it, let me know if it was terrible!