Gary Marcus and other deep thinkers are suddenly shocked that “Artificial Intelligence” lies. They’re even said to be “scheming.” This should surprise no one. But let’s see if it can be explained in words of one syllable that geniuses might understand. First, computers aren’t human. They lack the context to tell truth from fiction. Their responses […]
After 46 years I have finally retired from daily news reporting. It’s been a great run. But when my last daily outlet, InvestorPlace, closed in September, I realized I don’t need it anymore. I can do what I want. The problem is that writers retire to pine boxes. Writing is all I ever wanted to […]
A hallmark of today’s AI Bubble is that proprietary solutions are leaving open source in the dust. The arc of OpenAI, from an open source foundation to a profit-hungry business, is often used to illustrate the point. The investment required to build AI models, and the potential profits, have kept open source out of the game. […]
Billions of dollars are being invested today in Nvidia data centers and software, aiming at something called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). AGI is the “Holy Grail” of ChatGPT, of Grok, of Gemini and Claude. The claim is that AGI can replace people, reasoning better on any problem than you and I do. The goal is […]
Historically, we Americans have a habit of seeing adversaries as larger than they are, their weaknesses as strengths we should emulate. This was true for Iraq in the 1990s, for Japan in the 1980s, and for the Soviet Union through the Cold War. There were Americans who wanted to copy Nazi Germany in the 1930s, […]
The AI stock boom that began two years ago passed another test this month, as enterprise software companies reported big results. Salesforce.com and ServiceNow (right) both reported great quarters. I expect Adobe will do the same. These companies produce the software big companies use to compete. They’re saying customers are buying AI-based applications with both […]
Fiet is the Dutch word for bicycle. They do have bicyclists in the Netherlands, spandex-clad road warriors who think nothing of a 100 km ride on a cold morning. But those are cyclists, not fietsers. For decades I was a cyclist riding my yellow Romic road bike frame, with its Shimano and Campagnolo hardware, all […]
It’s MARTA, which claims to “serve” metro Atlanta, but doesn’t even serve the city. (Shown is the mostly-empty south parking lot at the East Lake MARTA station.) It wasn’t supposed to be this way. When I moved to my present home in 1983, it was to be near the train station that still sits a […]
Over the holiday, hanging out at Facebook for the first time in years, I found Cluetrain co-author Doc Searls flagging something called Kwaai. Kwaai aims to build open source tools for AI, much as the open source cloud developed after the dot-com crash early this century. I looked at the website and thought deeply about […]
Wars are unhealthy for economies and other living things. Peace, even an uneasy peace, is healthier for the economy. This includes trade peace. The old order of good vs. evil has fallen, since Americans chose evil. This offers opportunities for a world defined by spheres of influence. America would dominate the western hemisphere, China the […]
