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.
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Hydrogen. Another clean energy dead end?
Hydrogen is often touted as the next big thing for clean energy, but the numbers don't add up,
The CEO of OpenAI says something for the history books
The year was 1874. Max Planck was told by his professor there was not much left to do within the realm of theoretical physics. Fast-forward a bit to 1943 and Thomas Watson predicted that the world wouldn’t need more than 5 computers. More recently, in 1981 Bill Gates questioned the need for more than 640 kb of memory for your PC.
ChatGPT, another step away from the truth
OpenAI’s ChatGPT just reached another low. Not only did they release a circus monkey to the wild, but together with Microsoft they created hype while hiding the true evil behind their flowery talk about responsibility, accountability, no-bias, and the AI’s amazing capabilities.
Don't You Forget About Me
Everyone is getting very excited (or horrified) about the capabilities of the likes of ChatGPT. However, very little discussion is about the training data used to train these models and how to remove inaccurate information.
Pause AI? Naïveté or stupidity?
We should pause any development of AI for the next 6 months. That's the message from the Future of Life Institute, which published an open letter which subsequently was signed by about 1,700+ people by the time I started writing this article. Another race of the righteous.
You have data. What's next?
It is fashionable these days to talk about the AI revolution. A few years ago the theme was Big Data. Before that? Who cares. Despite the talk about using computers to do marvelous things, many organizations are still crunching data in their spreadsheets that are sent around by email.
Apple doesn’t need AI. It’s got humans
With AI, we have a new gold rush. We’re seeing a brewing conflict between Microsoft and Google. Facebook has a new algorithm based off of this technology. Baidu's Ernie is badly trying to mount a response. There is one company name missing in all this.
Fly, baby, fly
Google unveils drone delivery-network ambition. The new venture is appropriately called Wing Aviation and according to its CEO it will be ready by mid-2024 to deliver millions of boxes. The basic premise for this business is the last-mile delivery problem.
The things you don't hear about electric cars (much)
It is 2023. There is one topic missing from the cover pages of tech magazines and the front pages of newspapers: self-driving cars.
Search? Still doesn’t work
It is 2023 and the topic of search is making the headlines again. After incremental improvements, even public beta of useless conversation with a machine is portrayed as a quantum leap forward. Here is my take on the sad state of the search industry. After 30+ years of search development, this is what we got.