Andrew Palmer has worked at The Economist since 2007 in several writing and editing roles.
“So I've been with the magazine since 2007. Multiple writing and editing jobs covering a variety of things from Latin America to finance to”
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Andrew Palmer
1 episodes · 19 quoted claims
The Economist has been a weekly news magazine for almost all of its history.
“The Economist for almost all of its history has been a weekly news magazine.”
The Boss Class podcast had produced three series, the latest focused on generative AI in the workplace.
“We've had three series to date, and, as you said, the last one was specifically devoted to this thorny topic of generative AI in the workplace.”
The Economist fact-checks everything it publishes, using a research team.
“we fact check everything that we do. So there's a research team there which has to pull through a ton of stuff.”
Andrew Palmer used Claude to build a browser extension that checks copy against The Economist's style guide in about 75 minutes.
“I went away and in seventy five minutes had built an extension which did check copy against the style guide.”
Colleague Ludwig Seegel had waited a year for developer time to build a style-guide checking tool at The Economist.
“Ludwig Seegel, who you mentioned earlier, had been waiting for a year to get developer time to build this.”
Anton Osika is the boss of Lovable, a Swedish-based vibe coding platform.
“One of the people we spoke to was Anton Osika, who's the boss of Lovable, one of these big vibe coding platforms, Swedish-based.”
Hannah Calhoun, head of AI at Indeed, described how widespread code generation creates a large code review burden for people.
“she described the organizational problems that come from, like, suddenly everyone can generate a lot of code, which means a ton of code has to be reviewed by people.”
Johnson & Johnson initially took a let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom approach to generative AI.
“they had a very conscious sort of let a thousand flowers bloom approach to generative AI in the initial years.”
At Johnson & Johnson, about 15% of generative AI projects delivered 85% of the value, according to Andrew Palmer.
“there's only 15% of projects were delivering 85% of the value”
Johnson & Johnson moved to a centralized, priority-driven AI approach with a central AI council and a data council.
“they have now pivoted to a much more kind of priority-driven, centralized approach, where, you know, there's a central AI Council”
After signing up for auto-apply software with scant details, Andrew Palmer found it had applied to a hundred jobs in about an hour.
“pottered around for like an hour, came back and found that I'd applied to a hundred jobs.”
Advocates envision reverse apply, where AI matches candidates to jobs so candidates do not need to apply.
“There'll be what they call reverse apply. So you don't, as a candidate, need to worry about applying to anything.”
Andrew Palmer said Daniel Kahneman strongly favored using algorithms in decision processes over human judgment.
“Danny Kahneman obviously was very, very pro, like the algorithm being in every process and would bet that that was way better than any human.”
Mike Krieger, a co-founder of Instagram, works in Anthropic's new products division.
“We were talking to Mike Krieger, who's one of the people at Anthropic in their new products division, co-founder of Instagram.”
Mike Krieger described an Aura Ring battery problem that an AI agent resolved alone by deciding he was entitled to a replacement.
“Aura Ring seemed to have a battery problem, interacted only with an agent. And, you know, this thing basically sort of decided for itself.”
Brett Taylor is chairman of OpenAI and founder of Sierra, a customer service AI agent startup.
“I had a conversation with Brett Taylor, who's the chairman of Open AI, but the founder of Sierra, which is another customer service agentic startup.”
Sierra measures its AI agents using a blend of handoff rate to humans and customers' net promoter scores.
“So now they have a combined metric of proportion of handoff calls, but also net promoter scores from customers who've experienced interacting with the agent.”
Andrew Palmer visited an air traffic control center that manages performance with limited session times and mandatory breaks.
“I spent some time at an air traffic control center once, where, you know, their job is to think about what's the optimal performance environment.”