ARM Never Made a Chip. Dolby Never Built a Speaker.

There’s a lot of excited arithmetic going around about artificial intelligence. A trillion-dollar valuation here, a hundred-billion-dollar funding round there, the price of a model quoted like the budget of a moon mission. I’ve been writing this column long enough — since the Reagan administration, if you want to make me feel old about it — to have learned one durable thing about computing: the number everybody is staring at is almost never where the money ends up.

Let me tell you about two companies that figured that out early.

The first is ARM. If you’re reading this on a phone, there’s an ARM design inside it. There’s one in the tablet on your nightstand, the car in your driveway, probably the watch on your wrist. […]

By |June 17th, 2026|2026, Artificial Intelligence|0 Comments
Read More

The Cases That Don’t Exist

How GenAI is not yet ready for law

In 2023, a New York lawyer named Steven Schwartz filed a brief in a routine personal-injury case against an airline. The brief cited a half-dozen helpful precedents. The precedents did not exist. Schwartz had asked ChatGPT to find supporting cases, and ChatGPT — being a machine that produces plausible language rather than true statements — invented them, names and citations and quotations and all, then cheerfully assured him they were real when he asked. The legal world treated Mata v. Avianca as a freak show: a cautionary tale about one careless lawyer. An embarrassing one-off.

It was not a one-off. It was the first crack in a dam.

By the end of 2025, a researcher in Paris named Damien […]

By |June 12th, 2026|2026, 2Brains, Artificial Intelligence, law, Uncategorized|3 Comments
Read More

Apple Gave Siri Hands

WWDC answered whether your assistant is private. It never answered whether it’s telling the truth — and Apple just gave it hands.

The smartest thing I’ve read about Apple’s WWDC didn’t come from Apple. It came from an analyst named Nate B. Jones, who watched the same keynote everyone else did and noticed that the real story wasn’t whether Siri had finally gotten smart. The real story, he argued, is a land grab over what he calls the trusted action surface — the place where AI actually meets your work, touches your apps, and is handed permission to do something. There are two great bottlenecks in AI, he points out: raw compute, which is Jensen Huang’s kingdom, and the trusted surface where intelligence becomes useful, […]

By |June 11th, 2026|2026, 2Brains, Artificial Intelligence, Uncategorized|2 Comments
Read More

The Market Behind the Wall

Yesterday I told you what 2Brains is, and how it separates the saying from the knowing. Today, the part that ought to worry some very large companies: what all of it is worth if we’re right.

Wall Street is pricing the AI data-center buildout at something like $1.7 trillion by 2030. Almost all of that spend assumes one particular shape: vast halls of graphics chips answering questions by guessing, one likely word at a time. So ask the heretical question — how many of those “questions” are questions at all? How many are lookups? What’s our refund policy? What was Q3 revenue in the Ohio region? Is this patient allergic to penicillin? Those aren’t creative prompts. They’re retrievals, and an ordinary processor has answered retrievals […]

By |June 10th, 2026|2026, 2Brains, Artificial Intelligence|2 Comments
Read More

Two Brains

For two months this column has been describing an architecture. Here’s the part I kept in the footnotes: I’ve been building it.

I owe you a confession, and then I owe you a demonstration.

The confession first. For weeks I’ve written about why the machines can’t tell truth from plausibility — why detection isn’t a strategy, why fluency isn’t fidelity, why the only honest path is to separate the saying from the knowing and import truth from somewhere you can actually check. I’ve signed each of those columns with a one-line note that I co-founded a company “built on this conviction.” That little disclosure has been doing a lot of quiet work. These columns were not the musings of a neutral observer. They were the argument […]

By |June 9th, 2026|2026, Artificial Intelligence, Uncategorized|8 Comments
Read More