Recurrent Patterns

Recurrent Patterns is a venture exploring strategies and insights around leading-edge companies, technology and cultural trends. Vaclav engages with leaders, entrepreneurs, scientists, authors and others who can share their perspectives in long-form conversations.

For regular updates sign up here.

Vaclav Vincalek Vaclav Vincalek

The circus monkey

OpenAI organization announced on November 30th, 2022 the availability of ChatGPT. This is the next version of GPT3, which supports a dialog between a user and machine. GPT3 is a language model, which provides answers to requests like 'write me a short story about a boy and his dog' or 'create a blog post about blockchain'. Unlike GPT3, ChatGPT is supposed to carry on a dialog as you dig deeper into a topic.

Read More
Vaclav Vincalek Vaclav Vincalek

The big party is closer than ever

December 5th, 2022 will be remembered as a milestone in moving humanity closer to having an unlimited source of energy available to us. The scientists at the US National Ignition Facility (NIF) announced a successful fusion experiment where they achieved an ignition. The most important outcome? It produced more energy than it consumed.

Read More
Vaclav Vincalek Vaclav Vincalek

The missing link in the blockchain

Don’t think about the technology first. The first step is figuring out the business problem you’re looking to solve. Then you can start looking at solutions, which might include technology.

Read More
Vaclav Vincalek Vaclav Vincalek

By the balls

This week, we all saw a very big fight between the richest man in the world and the richest company in the world. Those who were hoping for a nuclear exchange between Elon Musk and Tim Cook at Apple must have been disappointed when they made peace.

Read More
Vaclav Vincalek Vaclav Vincalek

Nobody wants to talk to computers

The original thought behind Alexa and Google Assistant and Siri (Cortana doesn't count) was that we would surround ourselves with these magical boxes and engage in conversation. However, most of the commands are 'play music', 'what's the weather tomorrow', or 'start the timer'.

Read More
Vaclav Vincalek Vaclav Vincalek

Time to sue AI

Millions and millions of bits and bytes have been used to write about AI. Some of the evergreen topics tend to focus on biases, people losing jobs, or AI being sentient. Not much is written about how little we know about what's happening inside the algorithms. Similarly, we know less than you may think about how to test AI. And related to testing, we have issues with the training of AI systems.

Read More
Vaclav Vincalek Vaclav Vincalek

The right platform to build the next pyramid

How did the Egyptians build pyramids without Slack and Office365? We are living inside Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, searching for the holy grail of communication and collaboration.

Read More
Vaclav Vincalek Vaclav Vincalek

Making money while driving to the office

Today's example is brought to you by Hivemapper. Its promise is that you can earn money while you are driving. Now, it’s not like Uber or Lyft where you have to drive someone around or deliver food. No, just for driving around you can get paid.

Read More