Scaling False Peaks
Humans are notoriously poor at judging distances. There’s a tendency to underestimate, whether it’s the distance along a straight road with a clear run to the horizon or the distance…
The Metaverse Is Not a Place
The metaphors we use to describe new technology constrain how we think about it, and, like an out-of-date map, often lead us astray. So it is with the metaverse. Some…
Radar Trends to Watch: August 2022
The large model train keeps rolling on. This month, we’ve seen the release of Bloom, an open, large language model developed by the BigScience collaboration, the first public access to…
SQL: The Universal Solvent for REST APIs
Data scientists working in Python or R typically acquire data by way of REST APIs. Both environments provide libraries that help you make HTTP calls to REST endpoints, then transform…
Artificial Creativity?
There’s a puzzling disconnect in the many articles I read about DALL-E 2, Imagen, and the other increasingly powerful tools I see for generating images from textual descriptions. It’s common…
Radar Trends to Watch: July 2022
This month, large models are even more in the news than last month: the open source Bloom model is almost finished, Google’s LaMDA is good enough that it can trick…
2022 Cloud Salary Survey
Last year, our report on cloud adoption concluded that adoption was proceeding rapidly; almost all organizations are using cloud services. Those findings confirmed the results we got in 2020: everything was “up and…
“Sentience” is the Wrong Question
On June 6, Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer, was suspended by Google for disclosing a series of conversations he had with LaMDA, Google’s impressive large model, in violation of his…
Closer to AGI?
DeepMind’s new model, Gato, has sparked a debate on whether artificial general intelligence (AGI) is nearer–almost at hand–just a matter of scale. Gato is a model that can solve multiple…
Radar Trends to Watch: June 2022
The explosion of large models continues. Several developments are especially noteworthy. DeepMind’s Gato model is unique in that it’s a single model that’s trained for over 600 different tasks; whether or…