Radar Trends to Watch: July 2024
Can anything that is programmable have an embedded LLM? Apparently so. llama.ttf is a plain old font that looks like Open Sans—you can download it and install it. We don’t…
The New O’Reilly Answers: The R in “RAG” Stands for “Royalties”
The latest release of O’Reilly Answers is the first example of generative royalties in the AI era, created in partnership with Miso. This new service is a trustworthy source of…
Radar Trends to Watch: June 2024
May was a month of announcements: between Google, Apple, Microsoft, and OpenAI, there was much ado about—well, very little, in fact. It’s always seemed to me that big announcements steal…
Radar Trends to Watch: May 2024
In the past month, we saw a blizzard of new language models. It’s almost hard to consider this news, though Microsoft’s open (but maybe not open source) Phi-3 is certainly…
Attacking Supply Chains at the Source
We’ve been very lucky. A couple of weeks ago, a supply-chain attack against the Linux xz Utils package, which includes the liblzma compression library, was discovered just weeks before the…
Quality Assurance, Errors, and AI
A recent article in Fast Company makes the claim “Thanks to AI, the Coder is no longer King. All Hail the QA Engineer.” It’s worth reading, and its argument is…
Radar Trends to Watch: April 2024
There are lots of new models, including one from Apple, but that’s hardly news. AI news is infiltrating other sections of Trends (particularly Programming and Security)—but that’s also hardly news.…
Radar Trends to Watch: March 2024
January was a dull month, at least in my opinion. Maybe everyone was recovering from their holidays. February was a short month, but it was far from dull. And I’m…
Radar Trends to Watch: February 2024
2024 started with yet more AI: a small language model from Microsoft, a new (but unnamed) model from Meta that competes with GPT-4, and a text-to-video model from Google that…
Radar Trends to Watch: January 2024
More large language models. Always more large language models. Will the new year be any different? But there is a difference in this month’s AI news: there’s an emphasis on…