Stephen Witt > Quotes

“Do you realize what you’ve done?” Adar asked Brandenburg after their first meeting. “You’ve killed the music industry!”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“In June 1999, an 18-year-old Northeastern University dropout by the name of Shawn Fanning debuted a new piece of software he had developed called Napster.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“Despite forty years in the music business, he still never knew for certain which of his acts would succeed, and the Hollywood dictum that “Nobody knows anything” held equally true for every other type of show business. Every year hundreds of movies played to empty theaters; dozens of TV shows were commissioned and then killed after a few episodes; thousands of freshly printed books were remaindered and pulped. Perhaps the saying even held true for the corporate world at large, and those who embraced this uncomfortable state of Socratic ignorance were those who tended to survive.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“It was a well-known problem in corporate America—performance targets were too often tied to short-term results.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free

“The compact disc manufacturing process started with a digital master tape, transported from the studio under heavy security. This tape was cloned in a clean room using a glass production mold, then locked away in a secure room. Next, the replication process began, as virgin discs were stamped with the production mold into bit-perfect copies. After replication, the discs were lacquered and sent to packaging, where they were “married” to the jewel cases, then combined with liner notes, inlays, booklets, and any other promotional materials. Certain discs contained explicit lyrics, and required a “Parental Advisory” warning sticker, and this was often applied by hand. Once finished, the packaged discs were fed into a shrink-wrapper, stacked into a cardboard box, and taken to inventory to await distribution to the music-purchasing public.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“The truth, not widely understood until later, was that the deep-learning revolution was as much a revolution in hardware as software. It was the product of not one but two unpopular, cast-off, discredited, and cash-starved technologies whose ideal form could only be revealed in synthesis. Neural nets running on parallel computers: these tightly coupled technologies were the twin strands of DNA for a new and powerful organism, looking to consume all the data in the world.”
― Stephen Witt, The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang and Nvidia, the company shaping the future of AI

“Most listeners didn’t care about quality, and the obsession with perfect sound forever was an early indicator that the music industry didn’t understand its customers.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“Tupac's death was a senseless tragedy, but it was also a great career move.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy

“The institute was a division of the Fraunhofer Society, a massive state-run research organization with dozens of campuses across the country—Germany’s answer to Bell Labs.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“Negative rates are a function of global abundance (brought on by technological advances), and a trend that cannot be stopped even by the strongest central bank . . . For rates to stay positive we have to hoard almost everything in the world from the people that need it, if it is to have value. The artificial scarcity tactics that have been used through the ages to achieve this are getting harder to execute because of technological liberation—which is enabling the emergence of collaborative economy which bypasses rates of return.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“Catanzaro was uncorked now—I sensed that he didn’t often get to share this perspective at his job. “It doesn’t need to inhabit this biosphere. In fact, it doesn’t need to be on the Earth, either, because the thing about artificial intelligence is that it travels at the speed of light. Humans, you know, we actually have to lug bodies around. Artificial intelligence can move along a radio signal as long as there’s an antenna on the other side.” Free of the limitations of biology, Catanzaro explained, AI would rapidly spread throughout the solar system and beyond. “Humans are naturally confrontational—like, we’re territorial animals, and it’s built into our limbic system to defend our turf,” he said. “AI, if it’s truly intelligent, the things that it’s interested in are so much bigger than the little thin crust of Earth that the humans live on. I don’t think that it’s going to be interested in taking that from us. Rather, I feel like AI is going to want to take care of us.” • • • Serving as a zoo animal for a space computer was an experience to be savored at leisure.”
― Stephen Witt, The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip

“TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away from Keyboard, directed by Simon Klose”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“Third, Zwicker had shown that the auditory system canceled out noise following a loud click.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“Wayne got weird.8 He grew out his dreads and covered his body with goonish tattoos. He smoked weed like it was his job and developed an addiction to codeine-based cough syrup. His voice became screwed up and froggy. His production turned psychedelic. In 2003, he’d been a skinny, unexceptional adolescent delivering basic-sounding rhymes over basic-sounding beats. By 2005, he had transformed himself into The Illustrated Man, and his auto-tuned music sounded like garbled transmissions from outer space.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free

“had passed around floppy disks full of cracked shareware through the postal service.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“His personal favorite came from a visit to Boeing headquarters in Seattle, where, in the gift shop, he found a collection of audio samples from roaring jet engines.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“He was the greatest music pirate of all time. He”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free

“The bias against neural nets, Hinton felt, was “ideological,” a word he pronounced in the same venomous tone that Huang had used to say “political.” The ideology of the research community at the time was that it was not enough that AI be useful. Instead, AI should somehow “unlock” the secrets of intelligence and encode them in math. The standard, 1,100-page AI textbook of the time was a survey of probabilistic reasoning, decision trees, and support-vector machines. The neural nets got just ten pages, with a brief discussion of backgammon up front. When Hinton’s colleague designed a neural net that outperformed state-of-the-art software for recognizing pedestrians, he couldn’t even get his paper admitted to a conference. “The reaction was well, that doesn’t count, because it doesn’t explain how the computation is done—it’s just not telling us anything,” Hinton said.”
― Stephen Witt, The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip

“Krizhevsky himself escaped the dragnet. Rarely saying a word to anyone, he was not the ideal collaborator, and he departed Google in 2017. His share of the auction money was just under $15 million, enough not to work anymore, especially given the asceticism of his lifestyle. In 2019 he granted a Japanese news crew a visit inside his Bay Area home. Krizhevsky lived like a Benedictine monk, in a spartan apartment above a Vietnamese restaurant. The walls inside were completely bare; the only items of furniture were a desk, a couch, a digital piano, and a television; the only sign of life in the place was his house cat. Krizhevsky, the Orville Wright of the neural net, told the news crew he had walked away from the technology. “Maybe it’s just my personality,” he said, “but when I spend a very long time specializing in something, after about ten years I start to lose interest.”
― Stephen Witt, The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang and Nvidia, the company shaping the future of AI

“The discs themselves contained a series of microscopic grooves, representing a series of ones and zeros. The laser fired its beam at the grooves and bounced back the information to a sensor. Then the circuitry translated that information into an electrical impulse, which was sent to a speaker, completing the transformation from digital signals on plastic to analog vibrations in the air.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“reality, as humans heard it, was something of a fiction.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“The executives were more afraid of Jensen yelling at them than they were of wiping out the human race.”
― Stephen Witt, The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip

“Universal was selling one out of three albums in the United States, and one out of four in the world. But it wasn’t enough: even as the music industry’s number one supplier, Universal’s overall top-line revenues had gone down. The compact disc was going obsolete, and the revenue streams that Steve Jobs had promised him from iTunes were failing to materialize. Digital sales of music accounted for 1 percent of Universal’s revenues in 2005.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free

“Anyone who had ever worked in a record store knew that Tuesdays were the busiest day, when the new releases hit the shelves.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“While some of the files were indeed untraceable artifacts from random denizens of the Internet, the vast majority of pirated mp3s came from just a few organized releasing groups.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free

“Now I saw where the fear was coming from. The executives were more afraid of Jensen yelling at them than they were of wiping out the human race.”
― Stephen Witt, The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang and Nvidia, the company shaping the future of AI

“As head of RNS, Kali was the gatekeeper to the distributed archive of secret “topsite” servers that formed the backbone of the Scene.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“Fourth—and this is where it gets weird—Zwicker had shown that the auditory system also canceled out noise prior to a loud click.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“America Online, the company whose business model was to drown the earth in unsolicited junk mail CDs.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free

“But the final word went to Morris Chang. He didn’t attribute Huang’s success to his work ethic, which, at TSMC, would have been considered slightly above average—nor did he find him especially adaptable. Chang was ninety-two years old when I spoke with him, wearing a purple corded sweater and sitting in front of a striking piece of abstract art, his face serene, his hair completely white. In seventy years of corporate life across two continents he had seen every manner of executive there was to see. To him, the explanation was simple, and there was no secret: “His intellect is just superior.”
― Stephen Witt, The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang and Nvidia, the company shaping the future of AI