Earlier this month I attended Vivatecha huge tech conference in Paris. One fear dominated the discussions: the prospect of ending up stuck using American AI, trained on American values. While the US and China are locked in an AI arms race, France and Germany, which consider their engineering talent second to none, feel boxed out. … Read more
You went down the coding agent rabbit hole last November along with everyone else? It was an intense time for the nerds. I spent a lot of time talking to coding agents during that holiday. And it’s been an absolute rocket ship of a ride since then. Claude Code seems to have gotten the thunder … Read more
It’s been 17 years since I sat in on the iconic weekly search quality meeting in the Ouagadougou conference room at Google’s Mountain View campus. That Thursday morning, around three dozen engineers, product managers, and executives sat at a table or sprawled on the floor to discuss why certain search queries or categories didn’t yield … Read more
Philosopher Nick Bostrom recently posted a paperwhere he postulated that a small chance of AI annihilating all humans might be worth the risk, because advanced AI might relieve humanity of “its universal death sentence.” That upbeat gamble is quite a leap from his previous dark musings on AI, which made him a doomer godfather. His … Read more
Sometime in the Next year or two, Apple’s new CEO, John Ternus, will step onto a stage and tell the world that his company has a revolutionary product. This product, he’ll say, will put the full and awesome power of AI into everyone’s hands. It probably won’t represent a breakthrough in AI research, and it … Read more
Sportswriting legend Red Smith once said that writing a column is easy: “All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” In 2026, though, no blood is required. All you do is sit down at a laptop and have Claude or ChatGPT write the story for you. That seems to be the takeaway … Read more
The company isn’t exactly breaking new ground. The idea of a chatbot standing in for a human is fairly common. As is the idea of cashing in on it. For instance, Manhattan psychologist Becky Kennedy has built a parenting advice business that features a chatbot named Gigi trained on her acumen and knowledge. Kennedy’s company … Read more
Apple is allergic to nostalgia. In 2008, when the Macintosh was about to turn 25, I mentioned it to Steve Jobs and he instantly shut down the discussion. “If you look backward in this business, you’ll be crushed,” he told me immediately. “You have to look forward.” Now that Apple’s 50th anniversary looms, however, the … Read more
It’s a chilli March morning in the undisclosed mid-Atlantic hotel hosting Palantir’s developer conference. The defense contractors, military officers, and corporate executives in attendance are unprepared for the weather; they’d assumed the previous day’s mid-70s temperatures would hold. A cold rain turns to steady snowfall, and Palantir passes out heavy blankets. As people move between … Read more
Before last week the name Alap Shah didn’t ring a bell for many people. The 45-year-old financial analyst and tech entrepreneur had spent the past two decades working in relative obscurity. Then last weekend he coauthored a blog with the research firm Citrini titled “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis.” It was a “thought exercise” about … Read more