3-in-3: Empire State Zeppelins, AI Breakthroughs & Breaking Boundaries

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This week's 3-in-3 bridges

• the intriguing history of the Empire State Building's zeppelin ambitions,
• the cutting-edge advancements in AI with Anthropic's Claude 3, and
• the empowering call to transcend secondhand limitations and redefine personal boundaries.

Thing 1 - Did you know about Zeppelin at the Empire State Building

The dirigible Los Angeles "docking" at the Empire State Building. The composite 1930 photograph is from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's traveling exhibition, "Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop." Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Empire State Building aimed for the skies in more ways than one!  Its spire was designed to be a landing dock for airships a.k.a. blimps a.k.a. zeppelins!
If it worked you'd step off your airship right into the heart of New York City!

This grand plan, however, never quite flew (badum-tsh)

Docking these giants on a skyscraper turned out to be a bit too tricky, and yes, dangerous.  The only airship to ever even attempt it was a US Navy ship in 1931 for quick mail exchange.

While airships continued chugging along for a while, the Hindenburg disaster kinda put a stop to them. By World War II, airships were relegated to military use, and after the war, that was about it.

(source 1, source 2)

Thing 2 - AI of the week

The top news this week seems to be Claude 3. And for a good reason!

Keep reading...

• Anthropic AI released Claude 3. Their most powerful model, Claude 3 Opus beats GPT-4 and Gemini Ultra on some benchmarks!

Benchmarks published by Anthropic

It also got a 101 score on an IQ test, which is higher than the human average!!

• Inflection released Inflection-2.5 model to Pi users. They call it the "world's best personal AI"
• Midjourney banned all Stability AI employees from their platform. It seems like they were trying to scrape data 👀
• Midjourney also launched v6 turbo mode - make images at 3.5x the speed for 2x the cost
• Elon sued OpenAI

Thing 3 - Overcome secondhand boundaries

Pay attention to how readily people talk themselves out of things—and be wary of adopting the same narrative. People will often try to convince you their limiting beliefs should become your own. They do not. Find your own ceiling.

- James Clear

Choose your own direction, light up your way with your personal aspirations, not the dimmed light of common expectations.

Cheers, Zvonimir