Back in the day, I used to cover what was once called “corporate computing.” I got to dust off some old skills and talk to some interesting folks. Give it a read, and let me know what you think.
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Back in the day, I used to cover what was once called “corporate computing.” I got to dust off some old skills and talk to some interesting folks. Give it a read, and let me know what you think.
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The Atlantic is out with a delicious piece of doomerism: It’s The End of the Web As We Know It. Were it not for the authors, Judith Donath and Bruce Schneier, I’d have passed right on by, because well-respected publications have been proclaiming the death of the Web for more than a decade. By and large they’ve been proven directionally right, but it’s taking a lot longer than most predicted. Much like the Earth’s coral reefs, the Web has been dying off in waves. In their piece, Donath and Schneier argue that generative AI augurs the Web’s final stage of life. The coup de GPT, if you will.
Donath and Schneier are more thoughtful than your average trend-spotting feature writers. Donath, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center, is the kind of digital polymath I’ve admired for years, but who’s been relatively quiet of late. No longer. And Schneier, a security expert, writes smart stuff about nearly everything I care about as it relates to the Internet. It’s fair to say I’ll read just about anything he writes.
Read MoreWhen I write, I like to listen to music. Most of my first book was written to a series of CDs I purchased from Amazon and ripped to my Mac – early turn of the century electronica, for the most part – Prodigy, Moby, Fat Boy Slim and the like. But as I write these words, I’m listening to an unfamiliar playlist on Spotify called “Brain Food” – and while the general vibe is close to what I want, something is missing.
This got me thinking about my music collection – or, more accurately, the fact that I no longer have a music collection. I once considered myself pretty connected to a certain part of the scene – I’d buy 10 or 15 albums a month, and I’d spend hours each day consuming and considering new music, usually while working or writing. Digital technologies were actually pretty useful in this pursuit – when Spotify launched in 2008, I used it to curate playlists of the music I had purchased – it’s hard to believe, but back then, you could organize Spotify around your collection, tracks that lived on your computer, tracks that, for all intents and purposes, you owned. Spotify was like having a magic digital assistant that made my ownership that much more powerful.
Read MoreI’ve known Larry Lessig for more than 25 years, and throughout that time, I’ve looked to him for wisdom – and a bit of pique – when it comes to understanding the complex interplay of law, technology, and the future of the Internet. Lessig is currently the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School. He also taught at Stanford Law School, where he founded the Center for Internet and Society, and at the University of Chicago. He is the author of more than half a dozen books, most of which have deeply impacted my own thinking and writing.
As part of an ongoing speaker series “The Internet We Deserve,” a collaboration with Northeastern’s Burnes Center For Social Change, I had a chance to sit down with Lessig and conduct a wide-ranging discussion covering his views on the impact of money in government’s role as a regulator of last resort. Lessig is particularly concerned about today’s AI-driven information environment, which he says has polluted public discourse and threatens our ability to conduct democratic processes like elections. Below is a transcript of our conversation, which, caveat emptor, is an edited version of AI-assisted output. The video can be found here, and embedded at the bottom of this article.
Read MoreVint Cerf is one of the most recognizable figures in the pantheon of Internet stardom – and as he enters his ninth decade of a remarkable life, one of its most accomplished. I had the honor of interviewing Dr. Cerf last month as part of the “Rebooting Democracy in the Age of AI” lecture series hosted by the Burnes Center for Social Change at Northeastern University. The conversation also served as the kick-off to my own Burnes Center lecture series, “The Internet We Deserve” where I’ll talk with notable business, policy, technology and academic leaders central to the creation of the Internet as we know it today (last week I spoke with Larry Lessig).
Universally recognized as one of “the fathers of the Internet,” Cerf’s many awards include the National Medal of Technology, the Turing Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Marconi Prize, and membership in the National Academy of Engineering. Dr. Cerf received his PhD from UCLA, where he worked in the famous lab that built the first nodes of what later became known as the Internet. He has worked at IBM, DARPA, MCI, JPL, and is now Chief Internet Evangelist at Google. Cerf has chaired, formed, and participated in countless working groups, governing bodies, and scientific, technological, and academic organizations.
Read MoreAs hype escalated around the debut of ChatGPT more than a year ago, I predicted that OpenAI and Microsoft would rapidly develop consumer subscription service models for their nascent businesses. Later that year I wrote a piece speculating that Google would inevitably follow suit. If Google was smart, and careful, it had a chance to become “the world’s largest subscription service.” From that piece:
Google can’t afford to fall behind as its closest competitors throw massive resources at AI-driven products and services. But beyond keeping up, Google finds itself in an even higher-stakes transition: Its core business, search, may be shifting into an entirely new consumer model that threatens the very foundation of the company’s cash flow spigot: Advertising.
Read MoreReading Ben Thompson’s coverage of Google’s earnings call this week, one thing jumps out, and simply can’t be ignored: Google CEO Sundar Pichai was asked a simple question, and, as Thompson points out, Pichai dodged it completely. A Merril analyst asked this question:
“Just wondering if you see any changes in query volumes, positive or negative, since you’ve seen the year evolve and more Search innovative experiences.”
Read MoreLet’s talk 2024.
2023 was a down year on the predictions front, but at least I’ve learned to sidestep distractions like Trump, crypto, and Musk. If I can avoid talking about the joys of the upcoming election and/or the politics of Silicon Valley billionaires, I’m optimistic I’ll return to form. As always, I am going to write this post with no prep and in one stream-of-conscious sitting. Let’s get to it.
I’ve been following the story of generative AI a bit too obsessively over the past nine months, and while the story’s cooled a bit, I don’t think it any less important. If you’re like me, you’ll want to check out MIT Tech Review’s interview with Mustafa Suleyman, founder and CEO of Inflection AI (makers of the Pi chatbot). (Suleyman previously co-founded DeepMind, which Google purchased for life-changing money back in 2014.)
Inflection is among a platoon of companies chasing the consumer AI pot of gold known as conversational agents – services like ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, Microsoft’s BingChat, Anthropic’s Claude, and so on. Tens of billions have been poured into these upstarts in the past 18 months, and while it’s been less than a year into since ChatGPT launched, the mania over genAI’s potential impact has yet to abate. The conversation seems to have moved from “this is going to change everything” to “how should we regulate it” in record time, but what I’ve found frustrating is how little attention has been paid to the fundamental, if perhaps a bit less exciting, question of what form these generative AI agents might take in our lives. Who will they work for, their corporate owners, or …us? Who controls the data they interact with – the consumer, or, as has been the case over the past 20 years – the corporate entity?
Read MoreThose of you who’ve been reading for a while may have noticed a break in my regular posts – it’s August, and that means vacation. I’ll be back at it after Labor Day, but an interesting story from The Information today is worth a brief note.
Titled How Google is Planning to Beat OpenAI, the piece details the progress of Google’s Gemini project, formed four months ago when the company merged its UK-based DeepMind unit with its Google Brain research group. Both groups were working on sophisticated AI projects, including LLMs, but with unique cultures, leadership, and code bases, they had little else in common. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai combined their efforts in an effort to speed his company’s time to market in the face of stiff competition from OpenAI and Microsoft.
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