Dana Blankenhorn

Open Source in an AI World

The history of generative AI begins with a betrayal. 

OpenAI, meant to give developers a high and rising model for AI development, went closed source and got into bed with Microsoft. Now Microsoft is leading the charge to regulate AI, raising costs for competitors and creating closed source lock-in. The company wants licensing for all AI, bureaucratic delays before anyone or anything can compete with its proprietary offerings.

The current listing for the Google AI page claims it offers an “ecosystem of open-source tools, datasets, APIs and more.” But open source is never mentioned on the page itself. Google, like Microsoft, now thinks AI is too dangerous to be put into the community’s hands.  

If it’s that dangerous, guys, then ban it. Forbid machine learning, forbid progress. If code exists, someone will try to misuse it. That’s part of the law of code. The only answer is for code not to exist.

America’s Two Car Markets

The U.S. has two car markets. Its auto industry serves just one of them.

This was made crystal clear recently when General Motors said it will discontinue the Chevy Bolt, its electric sedan. It did the same with gas-powered vehicles years ago.

Sedans, crossovers, and mini-SUVs are what people drive in cities. Where roads are thin, families are small, and trips are short, you don’t need anything more. A city car will sit in a driveway 23 hours out of 24. This is what I call the mid-market, cars costing $25-35,000, plus tax, title, and license.

Contrast this with the suburban and exurban car markets, which U.S. makers do serve. They’re huge, like tanks. They’re ridiculously overpowered. When they’re electric, they weigh several tons. They destroy roads, and anything else they’re driven on.

The Wealth of AI

The battle over who gets what when productivity blossoms has been going on since the Renaissance made learning cheap 500 years ago. It accelerated with the Industrial Revolution, accelerated again with the Computer Age, and again with the Internet. It’s accelerating again.

The wealth of AI is the rocket fuel of Moore’s Law.

The late, great Gordon Moore was an engineer, who saw his theory as a self-limiting phenomenon. In various editions of my book on the subject I have tried to explain how this constant, exponential improvement works outward, from processors, to everything silicon touches.

Like software.

Software is still mostly written by hand. In the 20^th century productivity improved only in line with the tools used to write it. The 21^st century brought Moore’s Law to software. Once software goes online, in a managed cloud, it’s instantly accessible to everyone. All the barriers created over a century to cordon off markets disappear. Some can be rebuilt, but at an enormous cost to efficiency.

Open source is a big part of this new Moore’s Law of Software. The more hands on the code, the faster the code improves. Software communities mean everyone is building, together, on a constantly rising platform. There’s no more reinventing the wheel.

Media is Community

The destruction of the media by social networking was self-inflicted.

It was caused by publishers forgetting what their business is about.

They thought it was about advertising.

Here’s what I was taught in 1978, at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. Organize and advocate a place, an industry, or a lifestyle. Sell ads against that audience at a premium price. Demonstrate to businesses how your paper reaches their target. Profit.

It’s this misunderstanding that led journalism astray when the Web was spun, a generation ago. I saw this coming and warned against it as loudly as I could. I argued with my teachers that the Internet would create more jobs for journalists over time.

Things Are About to Happen

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it. 

A political campaign can start only after policies are implemented.

In 2023, a lot of things are about to happen that will have profound impacts on how people vote next year.

• Ukraine is coming for Russia. We’ll know a lot more about that by fall.
• Jack Smith is coming for Trump. We’ll know a lot more about that by fall.
• Gun, abortion, and education policies are being implemented by states and we’ll know a whole lot more about their effect by fall.

I haven’t even mentioned the weather, which will show in no uncertain terms just how damaging our reliance on fossil fuels has become. Droughts and hurricanes will wreak terrible havoc on the whole planet this summer, and on Americans too.

The Alzheimer’s Scam

A decade ago, when I first returned to the business beat, a company called Dendreon began pushing a non-cure for prostate cancer called Provenge. 

The idea was to fit a therapy specifically to a patient’s DNA. This cost a lot of money. While Provenge did extend life, it was only by a few months. For this Dendreon wanted $93,000. 

If I had all the money in the world, I’d pay that. But if every prostate cancer patient could force insurers and government agencies to pay that, the system would go broke. You can’t have an unlimited draw from a limited pool of funds. (To the right, at the upper right, is my late mother. I learned recently she taught the first "integrated" second grade class in California history, in 1947. I am very proud of her.)

Fast forward to today. Eli Lilly and Biogen have developed drugs to treat Alzheimer’s Disease.

The Other Urban War

A lot of people want to say American cities are a war zone. They’re not. The whole country is.

But there is a form of warfare happening in our cities. It’s a development war, a transport war.

It’s happening for two reasons.

First, cars don’t scale. Each car takes up space, whether moving or parked.

Second, demographics and economics are creating urban density. A research university, and the businesses that spin off from it, cluster together. The people who work there don’t always make a lot of money.

Cable News (1980-2023)

Broadcasting is dead.

Radio is dead. TV is dead.

Networks no longer invest in these channels at all. Click around some time when you have a chance.

What most people didn’t know, until today, is that cable is also dead.

Most of what you see on major (and minor) cable networks is the same dreck you see on broadcast, reality shows and game shows that cost very, very little to produce. Scripted shows are out. The surprise is that re-runs of this crap can get a rating. Networks don’t even have to produce much new.

What everyone wants is streaming. They want to justify that $10/month (then more) of your money, paid exclusively to them, the programmers. That’s where all their money goes. It’s going to Peacock, it’s going to Paramount Plus, it’s going to MAX. They need to be the “big three” networks because they aren’t. They’re fighting for 5^th, behind Google’s YouTube, Amazon Prime, Apple TV and Netflix.

Even Disney must cut corners to stay in the game. They have total domination over sports, and they’re cutting people at ESPN, which has its own problems I’ll explain later.

In that kind of world, where do you think Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC fit in?

They don’t.

China White

When the history of our time is written, 20-30 years from now, it will be clear how China beat the U.S. in the race for the electric car market.

It was China’s industrial policy that done it.

China used policies best described by Joe Studwell in his book “How Asia Works.” It’s what Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan did. Government sets the strategy and tells business what it wants. It creates incentives allowing business to ignore short-term losses and do it. Then it pulls those incentives once the mission is accomplished, consolidating the market in the strongest hands.

Chinese policymakers also knew, from the beginning, that lithium would be to electric cars what the operating system was to PCs, the point of control for everything above. Lithium has become the world’s China White. 

There is only one big winner in the electric car sweepstakes. China’s CATL dominates the battery space and is almost entirely home grown. Founder Robin Zeng is now richer than Alibaba’s Jack Ma, thanks to assuring ample supplies of lithium from his home country, but also Indonesia and the Congo. 

The Lesson of Buzzfeed

I have been out of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism for 45 years now, and the chief lesson I was taught there should still apply.

It came in my magazine business course. It was the only one I aced.

The lesson was simple. Know your reader.

Journalism is about organizing and advocating a place, an industry, or a lifestyle. You need to know who your target market is, organize that market, and represent its interests. That’s why newspaper publishers would go to chamber of commerce meetings. It’s why industry magazines organized trade shows. It’s why a publication’s mailing list was its key asset. Its why publishers exist, to sell, and why they stand above even editors on the masthead.