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John NaughtonThe Guardian |
Way back in the mid-1990s, when the web was young and the online world was buzzing with blogs, a worrying problem loomed. If you were an ISP that...
“Monopoly,” said Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley’s answer to Darth Vader, “is the condition of every successful business.” This aspiration is...
“Are we really in an AI bubble,” asked a reader of last month’s column about the apparently unstoppable rise of Nvidia, “and how would we...
On Good Friday, a Microsoft engineer named Andres Freund noticed something peculiar. He was using a software tool called SSH for securely logging into...
A funny thing happened on our way to the future. It took place recently in a huge sports arena in San Jose, California, and was described by some wag...
In 1956, a chap named TK “Ken” Whitaker, an Irish civil servant who had trained as an economist, was appointed permanent secretary of the finance...
Last week, the US House of Representatives, a dysfunctional body that hitherto could not agree on anything, suddenly converged on a common project: a...
Last Wednesday was a landmark moment for the tech industry, or at any rate for that part of it that aspires to do business in the EU. It was the day...
One of the most pernicious myths about digital technology is that it is somehow weightless or immaterial. Remember all that early talk about the...
“First text, then images, now OpenAI has a model for generating videos,” screamed Mashable the other day. The makers of ChatGPT and Dall-E had...
Once upon a time, nobody outside tech circles had heard of Sam Altman. But then his company, OpenAI, launched ChatGPT, and suddenly he was everywhere...
Whenever people learn that I have an electric vehicle (EV) the conversation invariably turns to whether I suffer from “range anxiety” – the fear...
Way back in 2000 the Blair government introduced the regulation of investigatory powers bill, a legislative dog’s breakfast that put formidable...
Forty years ago this week, on 22 January 1984, a stunning advertising video was screened during the Super Bowl broadcast in the US. It was directed by...
It was plain long before the 7 October attacks that Israel badly needed a change of leadership. That need is now urgent. The prime minister, Benjamin...
The key question raised by the Horizon story is whether it’s a scandal or a crisis. Why is that important? Simply this: although scandals generate...
As you have doubtless noticed, we are in the middle of a feeding frenzy about something called generative AI. Legions of hitherto normal people –...
It’s funny how naive smart people can be sometimes. Take the founders of Substack, a US-based online platform that enables writers to send digital...
“Innovation,” wrote the economist William Janeway in his seminal book Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy , “begins with discovery and...
What to do when surrounded by people who are losing their minds about the Newest New Thing? Answer: reach for the Gartner Hype Cycle, an ingenious...
The big news last week was that a jury in San Francisco had found Google guilty on all counts of antitrust violations stemming from its dispute with...
If a week is a long time in politics, a year is an eternity in tech. Just over 12 months ago, the industry was humming along in its usual way. The big...
Wednesday will be a fateful day in Brussels, a faraway city of which post-Brexit Britain knows little and cares less. It’s the day on which the...
Way back in 2004 the two founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, thought that it would be a cool idea to scan all the printed books in the...
“There are,” F Scott Fitzgerald once observed, “no second acts in American lives.” Except when there are. Exhibit A in this connection is...
On 22 September last year, a fascinating article appeared on the website of Sequoia Capital, one of the leading venture capital firms in Silicon...
Earlier last week, just around the time when the driver of Rishi Sunak’s armoured Jaguar might have been thinking about typing “Bletchley Park”...
Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first give access to Midjourney, a text-to-graphics “generative AI” that is all the rage. It’s...
When the history of our time comes to be written, one thing that will amaze historians is how an entire civilisation managed to impale itself on its...
A t 4am a couple of weeks ago, Ryan Carson, a young activist for social justice, was sitting with his girlfriend at the B38 bus stop at Lafayette...
A spectre is haunting our networked world. It’s the prospect of quantum computers. These are machines that harness some of the weirder properties...
A lthough you’d never guess it from mainstream media, the most significant antitrust case in more than 20 years is under way in Washington. In it,...
I n all the frenzied discourse about large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 there is one point on which everyone seems to agree: these models are...
S ometimes, when Apple launches a new device (or even an upgrade of an existing one), it’s tempting to think that the accompanying blurb is a...
I t’s not often that the jaws of Wall Street analysts drop to the floor but late last month it happened: Nvidia, a company that makes computer...