International Women’s Day 2025
We’re at a crossroads in the US with diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Opponents have neutralized the concept by reducing it to a series of letters that can be easily…
Passwords and their Discontents
This article originally appeared in Business Age. In commentary supplied to Business Age, I shot my mouth off saying that passwords are a poor solution for authenticating users–but none of…
The OpenAI Endgame
Since The New York Times sued OpenAI for infringing its copyrights by using Times content for training, everyone involved with AI has been wondering about the consequences. How will this…
Can Language Models Replace Compilers?
Kevlin Henney and I recently discussed whether automated code generation, using some future version of GitHub Copilot or the like, could ever replace higher-level languages. Specifically, could ChatGPT N (for…
Strawberry Fields Forever
Tim O’Reilly forwarded an excellent article about the OpenAI soap opera to me: Matt Levine’s “Money Stuff: Who Controls Open AI.” I’ll skip most of it, but something caught my…
Creativity Isn’t Just Remixing
This is not the first time that I’ve written about AI creativity, and I doubt that it will be the last. It’s a question that comes up repeatedly, and that…
Preliminary Thoughts on the White House Executive Order on AI
Disclaimer: Based on the announcement of the EO, without having seen the full text. Overall, the Executive Order is a great piece of work, displaying a great deal of both…
Prompting Isn’t The Most Important Skill
Anant Agarwal, an MIT professor and of the founders of the EdX educational platform, recently created a stir by saying that prompt engineering was the most important skill you could…
Automated Mentoring with ChatGPT
Ethan and Lilach Mollick’s paper Assigning AI: Seven Approaches for Students with Prompts explores seven ways to use AI in teaching. (While this paper is eminently readable, there is a…
The Real Problem with Software Development
A few weeks ago, I saw a tweet that said “Writing code isn’t the problem. Controlling complexity is.” I wish I could remember who said that; I will be quoting…