How can America build the kind of bike network found in places like the Netherlands? It’s a future I won’t live to see. But I remember what the great park designer Frederick Law Olmsted said when asked why he was building things that wouldn’t be finished until long after he was gone. “We did this […]
It’s as difficult to maintain control over technology as it is to maintain control of the polity. It’s the one weird trick that capitalism and democracy share. It saddens me so few people today comprehend it. Let’s start with tech. The huge inflow of capital into AI over four years, starting with Palantir, extending to […]
If DeepSeek is warning us about anything, it’s the danger that the Cloud Czars could be going the way of AT&T. Until this century, AT&T dominated communications. While I often blamed management for its failure, it’s clear now that the failure was financial. AT&T built and rebuilt its network primarily with debt. It kept its […]
It’s wrong to say Americans are urban people. It’s right to say city folk are a minority that Red America fears. That’s because America is a suburban nation. We live in one or two story homes, each with its own lot. The distances are navigated in the rolling living room known as a car. About […]
DeepSeek is a good hack. It uses Agile programming, parallel processing, and a focus on efficiency to deliver a Large Language Model that can train databases using a tiny fraction of the computing resources needed by OpenAI, Gemini, or Co-Pilot. Plus, it’s all open source. DeepSeek is a proof of concept that does for AI […]
When I was a child in the 1950s, in the heart of the manufacturing era, a President could create a business policy around a few key men. Engine Charlie ran GM and, later, the Defense Department. In that post he succeeded Electric Charlie, who had run GE. In the oil era, the Bush family was […]
Sam Altman (the Gary Kildall of AI) specializes in mischaracterizing Generative AI technology, promising to create “Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI) Real Soon Now. AGI is supposed to replace humanity with cloud servers and make creative people obsolete. This goes down great in Silicon Valley salons and the Trump White House. It’s also bullshit. AI, like […]
What I find most frustrating among liberals today is the belief that Donald Trump is an aberration, that he represents some disease in the American body politic, that “we’re not like that.” He’s not an aberration. Americans are just like that. We always have been. I’ll go further and say all people are like that. […]
Nvidia and other AI Infrastructure stocks are falling on news that China’s DeepSeek has a Large Language Model (LLM) that can be trained at 2% of the cost of other models. (Illustration from ChatGPT.) I expect the bust to spread quickly. Microsoft, Google and Meta are all vulnerable given their huge investments in AI infrastructure. […]
We have been living in the Era of Technology for 16 years. Tech dominates our economy and our politics, much as oil did in the generation before it, and manufacturing before that. As I wrote recently, tech has switched sides, moving from being given power in 2008 to seizing it in 2024. It’s time to […]
