About six weeks ago, I sent an email to Satya Nadella complaining about the monolithic winner-takes-all architecture that Silicon Valley seems to envision for AI, contrasting it with “the architecture of participation” that had driven previous technology revolutions, most notably the internet and open source software. I suspected that Satya might be sympathetic because of past conversations we’d had when his book Hit Refresh was published in 2017. I made the case that we need an architecture for the AI industry that enables cooperating AIs, that isn’t a winner-takes-all market, and that doesn’t make existing companies in every industry simply […]

Anthropic has announced two new AI models that it claims represent a major step toward making AI agents truly useful. AI agents trained on Claude Opus 4, the company’s most powerful model to date, raise the bar for what such systems are capable of by tackling difficult tasks over extended periods of time and responding more usefully to user instructions, the company says. Claude Opus 4 has been built to execute complex tasks that involve completing thousands of steps over several hours. For example, it created a guide for the video game Pokémon Red while playing it for more than […]

On Dec. 21, 2022, just as peak holiday season travel was getting underway, Southwest Airlines went through a cascading series of failures in their scheduling, initially triggered by severe winter weather in the Denver area. But the problems spread through their network, and over the course of the next 10 days the crisis ended up stranding over 2 million passengers and causing losses of $750 million for the airline. How did a localized weather system end up triggering such a widespread failure? Researchers at MIT have examined this widely reported failure as an example of cases where systems that work […]