With the supply-chain disruptions of the past two years showing no signs of easing anytime soon, businesses are turning to a new generation of AI-powered simulations called digital twins to help them get goods and services to customers on time. These tools not only predict disruptions down the line, but suggest what to do about…
During the first weeks of February, we asked recipients of our Data and AI Newsletters to participate in a survey on AI adoption in the enterprise. We were interested in answering two questions. First, we wanted to understand how the use of AI grew in the past year. We were also interested in the practice…
It seems harder than ever to agree with others on basic facts, let alone to develop shared values and goals: we even claim to live in a post-truth era1. With anti-vaxxers, QAnon, Bernie Bros, flat earthers, the intellectual dark web, and disagreement worldwide as to the seriousness of COVID-19 and the effectiveness of masks, have…
Programs like AlphaZero and GPT-3 are massive accomplishments: they represent years of sustained work solving a difficult problem. But these problems are squarely within the domain of traditional AI. Playing Chess and Go or building ever-better language models have been AI projects for decades. The following projects have a different flavor: In February, PLOS Genetics…
A couple of years ago, Pete Skomoroch, Roger Magoulas, and I talked about the problems of being a product manager for an AI product. We decided that would be a good topic for an article, and possibly more. After Pete and I wrote the first article for O’Reilly Radar, it was clear that there was…
Much has been written about struggles of deploying machine learning projects to production. As with many burgeoning fields and disciplines, we don’t yet have a shared canonical infrastructure stack or best practices for developing and deploying data-intensive applications. This is both frustrating for companies that would prefer making ML an ordinary, fuss-free value-generating function like…
Kevlin Henney and I were riffing on some ideas about GitHub Copilot, the tool for automatically generating code base on GPT-3’s language model, trained on the body of code that’s in GitHub. This article poses some questions and (perhaps) some answers, without trying to present any conclusions. First, we wondered about code quality. There are…
In June 2021, we asked the recipients of our Data & AI Newsletter to respond to a survey about compensation. The results gave us insight into what our subscribers are paid, where they’re located, what industries they work for, what their concerns are, and what sorts of career development opportunities they’re pursuing. While it’s sadly premature to…
In the first article of this series, we discussed communal computing devices and the problems they create–or, more precisely, the problems that arise because we don’t really understand what “communal” means. Communal devices are intended to be used by groups of people in homes and offices. Examples include popular home assistants and smart displays like…
Home assistants and smart displays are being sold in record numbers, but they are built wrong. They are designed with one person in mind: the owner. These technologies need to fit into the communal spaces where they are placed, like homes and offices. If they don’t fit, they will be unplugged and put away due…