on technology
Last week somebody rebuilt a working website using a swarm of cheap AI agents bossed around by a smarter one, and the whole thing cost about eight dollars sandwich and a coffee. But the part that lit up my corner of the internet wasn’t the website. It was that the agents caught their own lies. One of them went out and collected a couple hundred quotes for the site and reported back that every last…
There s a lot of excited arithmetic going around about artificial intelligence. A trillion-dollar valuation here, a hundred-billion-dollar funding round there, the price of a model quoted like the budget of a moon mission. I ve been writing this column long enough — since the Reagan administration, if you want to make me feel old about it — to have learned one durable thing about computing: the…
How GenAI is not yet ready for law In 2023, a New York lawyer named Steven Schwartz filed a brief in a routine personal-injury case against an airline. The brief cited a half-dozen helpful precedents. The precedents did not exist. Schwartz had asked ChatGPT to find supporting cases, and ChatGPT — being a machine that produces plausible language rather than true statements — invented them, names…
WWDC answered whether your assistant is private. It never answered whether it’s telling the truth — and Apple just gave it hands. The smartest thing I’ve read about Apple’s WWDC didn’t come from Apple. It came from an analyst named Nate B. Jones, who watched the same keynote everyone else did and noticed that the real story wasn’t whether Siri had finally gotten smart. The real story, he argued,…
Yesterday I told you what 2Brains is, and how it separates the saying from the knowing. Today, the part that ought to worry some very large companies: what all of it is worth if we’re right. Wall Street is pricing the AI data-center buildout at something like $1.7 trillion by 2030. Almost all of that spend assumes one particular shape: vast halls of graphics chips answering questions by guessing,…