Dana Blankenhorn

The AI Silly Season

We’re currently in the “silly season” of hype over “Generative AI,” machine learning programs whose output can be text, code, pictures, audio, or video.

There’s a lot of experimentation and there are a ton of bad takes.

Here’s how it’s going to go.

There are two things to know.

First, any software requires training before it becomes useful. Right now programs like ChatGPT are creating garbage. Interesting garbage, but garbage. As people learn how to get value from these tools, however, there will be huge jumps in productivity. The timing and size will differ from industry to industry, and from organization to organization. But it will happen. People will be able to do more, high-quality work in less time. This won’t reduce the need for people. It will give people more things to do.

The Time Is Now

Here is what 45 years of studying business cycles has taught me.

Now is the time to work on your next great startup.

Right now. When the whole world is collapsing around us. When old business models are failing. When everyone is worried about their job, or about to lose it.

Look at the opportunities. I detailed them three years ago. The end of oil. The machine Internet. DNA as a programming language.

These boil down to renewable energy, control systems, and medicine.

Facebook and the Fall of Free

Facebook has no friends.

Mark Zuckerberg thought he had billions of friends. He was wrong.

That’s one of the clear lessons of the Facebook scandal.

The way competitors, celebrities and the media are piling on Facebook is something to behold. I said they were vulnerable to something like this at the start of the month.  I was right.

Facebook is uniquely vulnerable because it has no customers. It doesn’t sell anything to people. Amazon sells stuff to people, and so when Trump goes after Amazon, Jeff Bezos sees his customers defending him. The same thing is true of Apple, which is why Tim Cook didn’t hold back on attacking the heart of the Facebook business model when given the chance on MSNBC.

Microsoft and Google have (so far) kept quiet about Facebook’s troubles, and for the same reason. Both run services supported by advertising. Microsoft has been backing away from this throughout the century (the MS on MSNBC is like the Cheshire Cat’s smile as it disappears). Google has been trying to diversify into products and autonomous cars. But their dependence still exists.

There’s one more important point to make about all this.

On Net Neutrality

If you have been reading this blog for any length of time, you no doubt believe that I’m a radical. A liberal. A fanatical criminal. 

In some ways this is true. On foreign policy I’m an internationalist who believes in peace. On social policy I believe people should be free to love who and what they want, and to kill themselves in any way that suits them.

This is not true in economic policy. I still consider myself a liberal here, but business was always a liberal force before the Nixon era. Progress is a business word, still often used in advertisements to denote the aims of oil companies and manufacturers, as well as tech outfits.

My economic beliefs are based on those of Adam Smith, who saw wealth inclining the wealthy toward the common good. I consider Trump and his acolytes to be Nietzscheites. (Ayn Rand is just Nietzsche in a skirt.)

More to the point, I consider them Fascists, and resent that I can’t use the word in public without being condemned.

So, when it comes to the subject of net neutrality, I’m sure you’re thinking, Dana is going to tell us that the FCC is wrong, that Democrats are right.

I’m not.

The Political Fight for Secure Identity

I took a train to Buckhead, in North Atlanta, this week to hear some executives brought in by Bloomberg talk about the future of technology.

They talked about the Internet of Things, what I started calling Always-On technologies in 2003, and the transformation this was creating on devices and in networks. But the view of their audience was negative.

They didn’t trust the technology, because they didn’t trust cybersecurity. With good reason. Because, as I noted here in 2012, the issue is tied closely to that of identity and we haven’t addressed the politics of that yet.

Can Open Source Save Ridesharing?

Before coming into the office this morning I took a walk. I crossed some major roads, stood waiting for the lights and looked into the cars that passed by.

Nearly every view was the same. One car, one person. Sometimes it was a big car, an SUV or pick-up. It seemed amazing to me. With gas at $4/gallon, almost no one in Atlanta shares the ride to work.

For most of my working life there have been attempts made to encourage ride sharing. Advertising has been tried. High-occupancy lanes have been tried. Now high prices are being tried. Nothing seems to work.

Does open source have a chance?

Open-Ride, a German program that arranges spontaneous ride-sharing via smartphones, hopes going open source will make things happen. The code, now available on Sourceforge, under the Affero GPL license 3.0 (the most open open source license there is) has a simple mobile interface that collects and matches desired trips.

Nokia, The Law and The Lab

When tech companies fall, they fall hard.

Anyone remember Data General? Wang? Silicon Graphics? Sun? They rise quickly to great heights, until they appear to be enormous institutions, then they fall as fast as they rose.

It's modern corporate evolution, one reason why you need to build a career on your own brand, never expect an employer to maintain one for you.

Nokia is now going down that same road. When phones were based on Real Time Operating Systems, Nokia was king of the hill. No one made as much from so-called “feature phones,” because Nokia had all the carriers locked-up, it owned the OS, and costs were outsourced, under control.

Scott Cleland's Game: Turn Google Into AT&T

Scott Cleland is a Bell troll.

He is what he has always been, an apologist and paid advocate for the Bell companies and their causes. He hides his source of funds, and reporters new to every beat keep buying the act. It's crazy. Crazy like a Fox.

This week he's a concern troll, having issued a "book" (the same way Regnery publishes "books") that is nothing but a long hit piece against Google. USA Today gave him an admiring interview without once asking him where his money comes from, which is like treating Glenn Beck as an unbiased journalist.

Cleland's theme is that you can't trust Google, that Google always lies, that Google is not out to serve anyone but its own shareholders, and that it deserves the strict government scrutiny given his clients, the Bells.

The aim is simple. To hobble Google with lawyers and layers of bureaucracy, hordes of people who spend their days focused inward, taking big salaries to prevent innovators from innovating.

The Many Markets of Open Source

Even people inside the open source market tend to underestimate it.

They think of it the way they think of the software market. If you're not collecting cash tribute for support (the equivalent of a cash price for the code) you somehow don't count.

By that reckoning open source has been a disappointment. Many companies have difficulty converting downloads into cash. Products on the "bottom of the stack" -- operating systems, databases, languages etc. -- have special problems in the era of "the cloud," with data centers consolidating.

But that's, frankly, a pretty stupid way of looking at it.

• What are Facebook and all the other social media sites but scaled, customer-facing open source applications? They're all written with it.
• Clouds are highly dependent on open source for their very being. Virtualization began with companies wanting to run Windows instances under server Linux. Most of the important cloud creation tools are open source.
• Android is a Linux. It's open source, even if the newest versions may be released first only to partners. Android is beating the iPhone the way Windows beat the Mac.

We got another example in today's news, the launch by Texas Instruments of a site called OpenLink, an open source community for wireless hardware development.

If You Don't Like Google Android, Dell, Fork It

The whinging just won't stop over Google's ongoing efforts to control Android and make it less chaotic.

Personally, I've already seen some benefits. A recent update to my Samsung Galaxy's software delivers a much cleaner, faster, more Android-like experience. Nothing like the horror show of crapware I had when I first got the device last year.

And I'm not just saying this because it's something I called for back in October, when no one was listening.

In today’s marketplace the word “Android” is becoming meaningless.

An AT&T “Android” phone is not an Android phone, but an AT&T one. A Samsung “Android” phone is not an Android phone but a Samsung one. If you get a Samsung phone from AT&T you get one thing, if you get the same phone from Verizon you get something else.

In the end, the question for Google is whether it wants to protect its brand, or let its brand be hijacked on behalf of the status quo.

About the only people who seemed to be listening to me last were were at Harvard. Now it seems someone in Mountain View was listening, too.