BlogFlock
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…
Tim Cook isn’t the “main character” at Apple anymore. During the company’s keynote presentation on September 9, the long-serving CEO publicly passed the torch to his successor, former hardware engineering lead John Ternus, in time…
In a year rife with backlash to big tech, data centers, and AI, one company still manages to stand out: Flock Safety. Over the past decade, Flock has been building out a massive network of surveillance cameras across the nation. The images those cameras record are uploaded to a central…
One of the challenges of the current debates around AI is whose narratives we are forced to argue from.
1). The well-funded "AI safety" contingent…
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