Before everyone starts publishing “Best of 2023” stories, here is the Lie of the Year. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). This lie was crafted as OpenAI started pushing “Generative Artificial Intelligence” programs like its ChatGPT, and it continues to spread. Generative AI came from the cloud-based database computing we’ve had for a decade. It’s descended from […]

The world is at war. The war is not going well. People are anxious, depressed, and withdrawn, fearful that the horrors are about to overtake us. The President is old, infirm. He could lose re-election next year and then where would we be? It’s 1943. There are differences between 1943 and 2023. While the fighting […]

Few news stories of 2023 were as misunderstood as the insanity at OpenAI.  First. There was always a contradiction inside the nature of the company. It was a non-profit owning a for-profit. That had to resolve itself. Non-profits do what they do for humanity. For-profits do it for themselves. You can’t split the difference. Second. […]

Decades ago, when I first moved to Atlanta’s Kirkwood, it was a poor neighborhood. But I found several small grocery stores within walking distance. These “Korean Groceries,” as I called them after their owners, sold cigarettes, malt liquor, sugary sodas, and lottery tickets. These were the essentials of poverty life in the late 20th century. […]

The events of the weekend at OpenAI remind me of an African coup. And countercoup. UPDATE: The Countercoup also failed. The OpenAI board refused to take Altman back, replacing him with a former head of the Twitch gaming service. Altman and Brockman were given jobs at Microsoft.  OpenAI co-founder Ivan Sutskever, who had seen Jakub […]

Everyone and Dolly Parton is afraid of Big AI  programs that can replace people. But even Little AI programs can be scary. They need to know a lot about you to work. If I am to give you personalized service, after all, don’t I need to know something about whom I’m dealing with? What do you […]

We think of technology as improving productivity on the bleeding edge of change. That means everyone today is focused on Artificial Intelligence. But big productivity gains are still coming from changes made a decade ago and more. Take the Affordable Care Act of 2010. Everyone talks about how it increased the number of people covered […]

Back in the 1990s I wrote about how PCs were like fruit on a wharf, their value declining every hour they spent waiting for a buyer. This was the heyday of Dell Computer, which solved the problem by building computers to order. The machines were customized, assembled as parts, and never saw a store shelf, […]

The best thing you can do for your health and the planet today is get an electric bike. There are many reasons. It takes less work, thus less food, and the load from recharging the bike isn’t as great as that. You wind up riding more, thus substituting more car miles, with an e-bike than […]

One hallmark of the chip sales market over the last years has been an emphasis on the Cloud. Throughout my 40 year career covering this industry, sales have regularly tipped, from client to server and back again. The 1980s were a client decade, the 1990s a server decade. During this century, the Cloud changed much […]