AI and Moore’s Law: It’s the Chips, Stupid

Sorry I’ve been away: time flies when you are not having fun. But now I’m back.

Moore’s Law, which began with a random observation by the late Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that transistor densities on silicon substrates were doubling every 18 months, has over the intervening 60+ years been both borne-out yet also changed from a lithography technical feature to an economic law. It’s getting harder to etch ever-thinner lines, so we’ve taken as a culture to emphasizing the cost part of Moore’s Law (chips drop in price by 50 percent on an area basis (dollars per acre of silicon) every 18 months). We can accomplish this economic effect through […]

By |June 15th, 2023|2023, Artificial Intelligence, cloud computing, competition, Government, Industry, semiconductors, Uncategorized|84 Comments
Read More

If you want to reduce ChatGPT mediocrity, do it promptly

My son Cole, pictured here as a goofy kid many years ago, is now six feet six inches tall and in college. Cole needed a letter of recommendation recently so he turned to an old family friend who, in turn, used ChatGPT to generate the letter, which he thought was remarkably good. As a guy who pretends to write for a living, I read it differently. ChatGPT’s letter was facile but empty, the type of letter you would write for someone you’d never met. It said almost nothing about Cole other than that he’s a good kid. Artificial Intelligence is good for certain things, but blind letters of reference aren’t among […]

By |February 7th, 2023|2023, Artificial Intelligence, Education, Technology|104 Comments
Read More

What about the layoffs at Meta and Twitter? Elon is crazy! WTF???

I first arrived in Silicon Valley in 1977 — 45 years ago. I was 24 years old and had accepted a Stanford fellowship paying $2,575 for the academic year. My on-campus apartment rent was $175 per month and a year later I’d buy my first Palo Alto house for $57,000 (sold 21 years later for $990,000). It was an exciting time to be living and working in Silicon Valley. And it still is. We’re right now in a period of economic confusion and reflection when many of the loudest voices have little to no sense of history. Well my old brain is crammed with history and I’m here to tell you that the current situation — despite the news coverage — is no […]

By |November 21st, 2022|2022, Artificial Intelligence, Companies, competition, Cringely's Rules, Economy, Entrepreneurship, history, Startups, strategy, Venture Capital|113 Comments
Read More

Tesla won the self-driving car war, they just aren’t telling us

There was a time when I could figure something out, just plain figure it out of raw data, then blurt my conclusions out to the world through this rag just to see what would happen. And what would inevitably happen was a thousand experts would pipe up just to tell me to pipe down, saying that I was too frigging stupid to read, much less write. Except occasionally I got it right (pure luck) so, damn it, they had to keep reading my work. Well I’m back to try again and here it comes: When the history of autonomous cars is written, the winner will be Tesla. Heck, I think they’ve already won.

Autonomous […]

By |September 17th, 2020|2020, Artificial Intelligence, Companies, mobile technology, self-driving cars, transportation|175 Comments
Read More

Kai-Fu Lee’s new book says Artificial Intelligence will be Google vs China and will kill half the world’s jobs

Kai-Fu Lee was born in Taiwan but grew up in Tennessee, which is nothing — nothing — like Taiwan or China. His PhD is from Carnegie-Mellon and for the first half of his career Lee was “that voice recognition guy” first at Apple, then Microsoft, then Google. Lee took Google to China the first time (a new Google China effort is starting just now). Today Lee is an Artificial Intelligence expert who runs a $1 billion venture fund with offices in Taipei and Beijing and, according to Anina (the pretty girl in the picture with me who has lived in Beijing for most of the last decade) he’s “an absolute technology rock star […]

By |August 31st, 2018|2018, Artificial Intelligence, cloud computing, Economy, Intellectual Property|86 Comments
Read More