On Technique
In a previous article, I wrote about how models like DALL-E and Imagen disassociate ideas from technique. In the past, if you had a good idea in any field, you…
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…
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…
Intelligence and Comprehension
I haven’t written much about AI recently. But a recent discussion of Google’s new Large Language Models (LLMs), and its claim that one of these models (named Gopher) has demonstrated…
What’s ahead for AI, VR, NFTs, and more?
Every year starts with a round of predictions for the new year, most of which end up being wrong. But why fight against tradition? Here are my predictions for 2022.…
MLOps and DevOps: Why Data Makes It Different
Much has been written about struggles of deploying machine learning projects to production. As with many burgeoning fields and disciplines, we don’t yet have a shared canonical infrastructure stack or…
The Quality of Auto-Generated Code
Kevlin Henney and I were riffing on some ideas about GitHub Copilot, the tool for automatically generating code base on GPT-3’s language model, trained on the body of code that’s…
2021 Data/AI Salary Survey
In June 2021, we asked the recipients of our Data & AI Newsletter to respond to a survey about compensation. The results gave us insight into what our subscribers are paid, where…
Communal Computing’s Many Problems
In the first article of this series, we discussed communal computing devices and the problems they create–or, more precisely, the problems that arise because we don’t really understand what “communal”…
Communal Computing
Home assistants and smart displays are being sold in record numbers, but they are built wrong. They are designed with one person in mind: the owner. These technologies need to…