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…
Quantum Computing without the Hype
Several weeks ago, I had a great conversation with Sebastian Hassinger about the state of quantum computing. It’s exciting–but also, not what a lot of people are expecting. I’ve seen…
Radar trends to watch: May 2022
April was the month for large language models. There was one announcement after another; most new models were larger than the previous ones, several claimed to be significantly more energy…
Building a Better Middleman
What comes to mind when you hear the term “two-sided market?” Maybe you imagine a Party A who needs something, so they interact with Party B who provides it, and…
The General Purpose Pendulum
Pendulums do what they do: they swing one way, then they swing back the other way. Some oscillate quickly; some slowly; and some so slowly you can watch the earth…
Radar trends to watch: April 2022
March was a busy month, especially for developers working with GPT-3. After surprising everybody with its ability to write code, it’s not surprising that GPT-3 is appearing in other phases…