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The day has finally arrived: My new book Hyperscale is now on bookshelves in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and beyond!
It tells the story of the data center buildout the tech industry has…
It’s election season, and most of the national discourse is focused on the midterms and the increasing likelihood that Democrats will take back the House and perhaps even the Senate. But here in California, the eyes of the tech elite are focused on another target: Proposition 40, aka the billionaire…
Greetings all,
I had some big plans for this week, and well, then I got Covid. In the early stages, I’d hoped to still put out a podcast at least, but I was quickly disabused of that aspiration and left more or less out cold in bed for the last…
In just two weeks, my new book Hyperscale will be out in the world!
It’s the first book from a major publisher to chronicle the data center buildout and the backlash to it, while asking…
This post offers up a close reading of a section of the Stochastic Parrots paper, to make sense of an increasingly contested analogy. The reading is my interpretation, which draws from the text in the …
“Stochastic parrots,” a term coined by four leading AI researchers in a paper in 2021, essentially holds that large language models are not “intelligent” but are rather systems that output material based on what’s in their training data. Now, while LLMs and technologies described as AI today have become more…
This week, California governor Gavin Newsom signed a spate of new laws that establish some of the strongest AI protections for workers in the United States. Okay, they’re some of the only AI labor protections in the nation, but it’s good news nonetheless.
They cover a lot of ground: One…
While billionaires and world leaders expound the dangers of all-powerful, “super intelligent” AI, the reality on the ground is that it's a tech product that’s only made possible by countless human beings, laboring for sometimes dollars a day, doing work like “cleaning” data sets so they’re usable, scanning books…
Note: This article makes reference to a mass shooting. I made a conscious choice not to use the name of the shooter.
For the past several weeks, we’ve been treated to breathless coverage of the…
In his typically rambling, occasionally genocidal speech to the United Nations, one that included threats to “annihilate” Iran and to bring “freedom” to the “failed state” of Cuba, Donald Trump announced that he was issuing a nationwide rebranding of “artificial intelligence” to “super intelligence.”
You can tell when Trump has…
Thinking about technology, society, and the good life.
A newsletter about AI, Silicon Valley, labor and power.
Tech critic Paris Marx provides the critical take on Silicon Valley you’ve been missing
A newsletter about taking control of our attention and finding a more human side of the internet. Featured in Wired and Rolling Stone.