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THE WEEK
Public Service Announcement: Eclipse Glasses
They’re not eclipse glasses. They’re not. Eclipse. Glasses.
They’re staring-at-the-sun glasses. If you’re in the path of totality but the sun is not completely blocked by the moon and the world hasn’t gone suddenly eerily twilight and it hasn’t gotten noticeably colder and a chill hasn’t yet run up your spine and a sense of elation and unease hasn’t washed over you —if all of that hasn’t yet happened and you’re staring at the sun, wear those special staring-at-the-sun glasses.
If you’re not in the path of totality and you’re staring at the sun, wear those special staring-at-the-sun glasses. If it’s next week and you’ve forgotten that there ever was an eclipse and you’re staring at the sun, wear those special staring-at-the-sun glasses. Rule: if in doubt, wear those special staring-at-the-sun glasses.
But there’s an even simpler rule: Don’t look at the sun if you can see it.
It’s kind of a Zen Koan.
If You Missed It in Mazatlan…
“With mostly sunny skies expected, Nova Scotia will offer prime viewing points for Monday’s eclipse, said CBC meteorologist Ryan Snoddon. He said people looking for a total eclipse will need to be in the northern tip of Cape Breton, in the communities of St. Margaret Village, Bay St. Lawrence and Meat Cove.”
Quotes of the Week
If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God! — Ralph Waldo Emerson
…you flew your lear jet up to Nova Scotia
To see the total eclipse of the sun. — Carly Simon
Image of the Week
That’s me in my eclipse glasses and Dr. Dobb’s t-shirt from a different but equally epic eclipse. Sorry, I mean my staring-at-the-sun glasses.
SOME THOUGHTS ON AI
I know I said I was going to trace the history of machine learning this week, but I had got distracted.
Did you read that article about Google maybe charging for AI-assisted search? The story explained that, surprise, surprise, LLMs are expensive. And inference is more expensive than training, which is already expensive.
I wrote last week that the current business model for the big AI companies or AI projects within the big companies didn’t seem to be about creating products to charge for, but rather to compete to make the fastest, biggest, smartest models.
I’m not stupid. Of course there are AI products being announce all the time. The point I was trying to make was that we didn’t seem to be in a profit-making phase at the top end of the AI food chain.
The Google story shows that I was wrong. It indicates that the big AI companies, or at least Google, are abruptly banging up against the high cost of GAI and are realizing that they’re going to have to cover that cost somehow. Somehow being another name for the customer.
Which draws my attention to the Apple approach.
Despite rumors that Apple will release a Chatbot, I still doubt it. It’s broadly understood that Apple isn’t technologically competitive with those other big companies on LLMs. If that’s the case, Apple is not going to put out a technology demo to prove that to everyone. And a generic Chatbot is just a technology demo. Now, a chat facility in an existing product or service, that is a different matter, and that sounds like Apple.
An LLM trained on and inferencing on Apple data can be impressive and not be directly comparable to capabilities other companies are providing.
Not selling AI products but incorporating AI into existing products and blending the cost into the cost of existing products. That sounds like Apple. The customer doesn’t know what the screen costs Apple, or any other component. Apple can tweak features and prices and other variables and you won’t know what you’re paying for the AI capabilities, you’ll just know that Apple products are getting smarter. And are still expensive.
I’m not suggesting that Apple won’t trumpet the AI features of its products and services. Just that they will sell those features as features. Not products.
Next week I’ll get back to AI history, probably.
A TECH HISTORY CLASSIC BACK IN PRINT
I’m happy that we were able to bring this classic book back into print after all these years. From the Foreword to Charged Bodies, Tom Mahon’s award-winning Silicon Valley history-through-interviews:
Charged Bodies is the story of Silicon Valley itself: the unlikely saga of how a sleepy valley of pear orchards was transformed into a global hub of technological innovation.
Tom cast a wide net in his search for the meaning of Silicon Valley, from Frederick Terman’s leaky attic radio laboratory at Stanford, where Bill Hewlett and David Packard did research and dreamed about starting a company, to John Billingham’s office at NASA Ames Research Center, where he headed up a project to search for extraterrestrial intelligent life. Tom interviewed an orchardist who grew up and grew fruit in the Valley, and a private detective, and an environmental activist, and a Jesuit priest — whoever could give him insight into the soul of Silicon Valley.
For this new edition of Charged Bodies, Tom has written a new Afterword, reflecting on the past 40 years and what the Internet and social media and artificial intelligence have wrought.
— Michael Swaine
Series Editor, Pragmatic Stories, The Pragmatic Bookshelf
BEFORE YOU GO…
The Pragmatic Bookshelf
Here’s the link to Tom’s book.
Blogroll
AI Supremacy
Ahead of AI
Mark Watson’s AI Books and Blog
Kent Beck’s advice for geeks
When We Were Trekkies
Tales from the Jar Side
Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media
Bookshop.org
New York Review of Books
Pragmatic Bookshelf
ICYMI
Thanks for reading. You can read all the back issues of Swaine’s World at my blog home.
Coming Attractions
In the coming weeks, more on the story of the AI revolution and how we got here. Probably.