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Category: Generative AI

For Tech, the World Is Just Not Enough

For Tech, the World Is Just Not Enough

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Image by stokpic from Pixabay

There’s no doubt that AI has changed the world, and we’re still basically at the beginning of this cycle in tech. New to the zeitgeist, at least. The idea of human-like thinking machines was first posited at the Dartmouth Conference in 1956. This year, ‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton won a Nobel even though he’s now scared of AI. Is anyone paying attention?

“Hinton shares his Nobel with John J. Hopfield of Princeton University. Hinton’s work built upon Hopfield’s breakthrough work where he created a network system that could save and recreate patterns. Combined, their work led to future breakthroughs in Machine Learning (systems that can learn and improve data without programming) and the concept of artificial neural networks, which is often at the core of modern AI,” said Tech Radar.

Hinton left “Google’s DeepMind where he and his team helped lay the groundwork for today’s chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Gemini. However, when Hinton left in 2023, he sounded the alarm, worrying that Google was no longer, as he told The New York Times, “a proper steward” for AI.” Read More...

Why Is Tech Becoming So Creepy?

Why Is Tech Becoming So Creepy?

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Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

Seriously and this is what concerns us about GenerativeAIs and AIs in general. What begins as a tool does have a tendency of going down the slippery slope in not too long a time, and you can’t help but wonder why. Why are there no safeguards in place?

This is creepy: “iPhone users baffled by ‘scary’ feature that suggests they check in with ex-lovers and dead relatives,” the Daily Mail reported.  “’Messages introduces Check In, an important feature for when a user wants to notify a family member or friend that they have made it to their destination safely,’ Apple explained.”

All well and good, and exactly why would that matter to a deceased relative? Read More...

Who’s the Boss?

Who’s the Boss?

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Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

Everyone’s over the lockdown, and it seems that the world is returning to business as usual. In fact, Amazon CEO announced that as of January 2, 2025, all Amazon employees would be required to return to the office full time. “Andy Jassy, who took over from founder Jeff Bezos in 2020, said the move to end the company’s hybrid model was designed toward “being better set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other and our culture to deliver the absolute best for customers and the business,” NBC reported. “He noted that the company’s three-day-a-week policy, instituted in 2023, had only reinforced the view that a full return was necessary.”

“Amazon has become the latest firm to end working from home in the name of company culture—a PwC reports suggests it could have the opposite effect”, said Fortune by way of MSN. “The Big Four accounting firm conducted 13 months of research and surveyed over 20,000 business leaders, chief human resources officers and workers for its new Workforce Radar Report—and it found that hybrid workers feel more included and productive than those who sit at their company’s desk five days a week…Working in the office 5 days a week to build company culture is a myth, PwC report says.

According to a global online office hours we recently attended, most companies in Europe all back to a work from the office only policy. But is that the right policy today, when companies were literally kept alive during the lockdowns, due to remote work? Were there no takeaways from this inadvertent test of a new corporate work model in this age of technology? Read More...

The Importance of Transparency

The Importance of Transparency

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Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

We’ve found that in tech, founders/the tech press, etc, in many cases, have a bad habit of stretching the truth, let’s call it, or at least of altering a narrative to suit their purposes. It’s top-down and the members of the tech cabal do it constantly – often with the willing assistance of the tech media, who let’s say tend to shy away from presenting the full picture.

Last week, “Microsoft and Apple (gave) up their OpenAI board seats,” MSN reported. “Microsoft reportedly told OpenAI that it’s confident in the direction the company is taking, so its seat on the board is no longer necessary.”

That’s the snapshot, which is often as far as many readers get, and let’s not forget that MSN, or Microsoft News, is a Microsoft property. Read More...

The Demise of Internet 1.0

The Demise of Internet 1.0

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Image by Johnson Martin from Pixabay

Some strange things are going on in tech these days, and we wonder if, with the advent of AI, tech has lost its way.

Or is taking a different direction. Here are some seemingly unrelated events that all seem to be headed in the same direction…

First, Sam Altman approached Scarlett Johansson to be the voice of his AI, Sky, although she turned him down. “Sky drew widespread attention for its striking similarity to Johansson, particularly her role as an AI voice assistant in the movie Her,” Forbes reported. “‘OpenAI itself has acknowledged the vocal similarities between Sky and Johansson but stressed the voice “is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson” and belongs to “a different professional actress using her own natural speaking voice.”
Still, they did remove the voice from the ChatGPT4o model. Read More...

THIMK!

THIMK!

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 That’s not a typo. It was a Mad magazine cover – Mad having been the Onion or Babylon Bee of its day – and according to dpgreatlife, “Thimk” was a poke at Thomas J. Watson, Sr., who was once at NCR and later IBM. Watson’s simple mantra was “Think.”

The Atlantic recently ran a piece entitled THE RISE OF TECHNO-AUTHORITARIANISM Silicon Valley has its own ascendant political ideology. It’s past time we call it what it is.

In the relatively early days of Web 2, we wrote an editorial warning that the age of social was creating companies with greater populations than have most countries on the planet. In fact, we called them as nation-states, and warned back then that they could  become more powerful than any government on the planet. It might have taken them 10+ years, but it seems at least the Atlantic seems to be catching on. Read More...

The Bad Boys of Tech, Part 2

The Bad Boys of Tech, Part 2

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 Unless you’ve been cut off from all worldly communications, you’ve heard that co-founder and CEO Sam Altman was very unceremoniously booted from OpenAI – and was informed in a Google Meet, despite Microsoft being a major OpenAI investor and partner.

No one seems to know the precise reason why he was terminated. Malfeasance? Was it his reported lack of transparency with the board, which now consists of three independent directors holding no equity, and its Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever? A coup?

Or something quite different transpiring behind the curtain… Read More...

Technology’s Marks of Evil?

Technology’s Marks of Evil?

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Image by Alexa from Pixabay

What is it with that name and the need to control? Or manipulate. We refer to the Mar(c)(k)s Andreessen and Zuckerberg, respectively.

Although the spellings may be different to deceive the clueless.

Marc Andreessen, who a while back explained Why Software Is Eating the World, is now instructing us on Why AI Will Save The World. Mind you, in his earlier a16Z blog post, while he was right about how technology would take over, he didn’t bother to mention what we’d have to surrender for the privilege: our privacy and all our personal information. Read More...

Barreling Towards The Terminator Trifecta

Barreling Towards The Terminator Trifecta

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 With summer just a few weeks away, the lists of summer movies are starting to appear. Entertainment talk lately has turned to whether or not James Cameron (The Terminator, Avatar, Titanic et al) will make yet another Terminator movie and what does this have to do with tech? Read on.

The movie, if you will recall, is about a future where sentient robots have taken over the world. Their goal: eradicate humanity. It was science fiction, but how often do these films turn out to be prescient? (How a movie predicted Ohio’s toxic derailment)

We can also tell you on fairly good authority that another Terminator movie is in the serious discussion stages, especially since we seem to be at least close to Skynet going live – the last part of The Terminator tech trifecta. Read More...

The Return of the Dark Lords of Social

The Return of the Dark Lords of Social

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Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

From what we’ve witnessed about the tech space to date, tech is all about invention and reinvention.

Example: it’s a communications tool. How long has the telephone been around, meaning landlines? Instead of calling, we ping or email or Zoom. Nothing new, really: only the words and devices and delivery mechanisms have changed to deceive the clueless.

Tech is also about glorification and vilification – and sometimes both, in the same person. Everyone’s (former) hero Elon Musk bought Twitter and the tech media banded against him – no matter that Twitter had been a platform for propaganda and surveillance under Jack Dorsey’s tenure. Yet, no matter what, Dorsey, for some reason, can seemingly do no wrong. Read More...