The tech industry’s golden era is ending—not with a bang but with desperate monetisation schemes. Windows isn’t just Microsoft’s bad habit; it’s the nicotine delivery system for an entire industry refusing to evolve beyond outdated business models that no longer fit our increasingly complex technological landscape.
Continue readingCategory: Technology and its malcontents
Eye of the Master
There’s no shortage of books about artificial intelligence right now. Most fall into one of two camps: breathless optimism or existential dread. The Eye of the Master is something else entirely—a rare and rigorous exploration of how we got here.
This is one of the most illuminating books I’ve read on the current wave of AI. Pasquinelli doesn’t waste time on hype or speculation. Instead, he takes us back to the intellectual roots of machine learning—tracing how ideas from neuroscience, cybernetics, psychometrics, and even art history quietly shaped the architecture of neural networks and the metaphors we use to describe them.
Continue reading
NVIDIA is a long-term bet against Moores’ Law
The abridged version of my latest Substack post. You can find the full essay as NVIDIA is a long-term bet against Moores’ Law on The Puzzle and its […]
Continue reading
Let Generative AI Be Itself, Not an Imitation Human
The first proper post is up on the Substack, Let Generative AI Be Itself, Not an Imitation Human.
Continue readingBook Updates Moving to Substack
For those following my book-related posts, I’m making a slight change to how I share this work. To better organise this expanding body of work, I’ve recently launched a Substack newsletter where I’ll be sharing book excerpts, work-in-progress concepts, and applications of the analytical framework I’m developing.
Continue reading
Predicting the unpredictable
Predicting the future of work presents significant challenges due to the intricate interplay between technological advancements and human decision-making. To better understand the potential outcomes and critical decision points, more sophisticated models are necessary.
Continue readingThe limits of generative AI
Whilst cruising the interwebs I can across a nice description of the limits of large language (LLMs) models.
Continue readingContinue readingEven the effects already discovered are due to chance and experiment rather than to the sciences; for our present sciences are nothing more than peculiar arrangements of matters already discovered, and not methods for discovery or plans for new operations.
Aphorism VIII. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, Book 1, 1620
Where will LLMs take us?
Not a week seems to pass by without some surprising news concerning large-language models (LLMs). Most recently it was when an LLM trained for other purposes played chess at a reasonable level. This seemingly constant stream of surprising news has led to talk that LLMs are the next general-purpose technology—a technology that affects an entire economy—and will usher in new era of rapid productivity growth. They might even accelerate global economic growth by an order of magnitude, as the Industrial Revolution did, providing us with a Fifth Industrial Revolution.
Continue reading“I am still struggling to find a proper definition of AGI… ur thoughts”
The short answer is that AGI is a bit meaningless as a term as we don’t really know what ‘I’ is. The best approach is the assume that AGI means “human-like intelligence in machines” while accepting that “human-like intelligence” is something of an unknown.
Continue reading