Journalism

Microsoft recently open sourced a product called Semantic Kernel, a lightweight software development kit (SDK) allowing developers to integrate AI technology into their applications. To find out the thinking behind Semantic Kernel (which Microsoft abbreviates as SK) and how it might be used by developers, I conducted an email interview with the project leader, John … Read more

If 2022 was the year when AI broke through to become a society-changing technology, 2023 has been the year of AI breaking through in the enterprise. Put it this way: generative AI and large language models (LLMs) have become a familiar part of the lexicon for IT departments the world over. Your CIO is now … Read more

14 years ago, I sat down with a representative from Wolfram|Alpha, which billed itself as a “computational knowledge engine.” I described it at the time as a tool that enables “users to type human-like statements and have computations done on those.” It was also written about in the tech media as a potential “Google killer.” … Read more

Remember the catchphrase “Big Data”? It spawned many successful companies in the cloud computing era — such as Snowflake, Databricks, DataStax, Splunk and Cloudera. But now we’re in the AI era and supposedly machine learning software is at or near “intelligence” now (even if it is prone to hallucinating — but then, aren’t we all?). … Read more

There is a rush of companies trying to bring large language models (LLM) and generative AI to the enterprise, and Vectara is one of them. To find out how Vectara is pitching its product to enterprise customers, and how it is trying to solve AI hallucinations, I spoke with founder/CEO Amr Awadallah. Awadallah has a … Read more

Tecton, a machine learning (ML) “feature platform” company founded by the creators of Uber’s Michelangelo ML platform, today announced version 0.6 of its product. The update allows users to “build production-ready features directly in their notebooks, and deploy them to production in a matter of minutes,” said Mike Del Balso, co-founder and CEO of Tecton. … Read more

AI21 Labs, an Israeli generative AI company, today announced its latest large language model (LLM), called Jurassic-2. Up till now, the base model of AI21 Labs has been Jurassic-1, the largest version of which has 178 billion parameters. That made it among the largest LLMs on the market — slightly bigger than OpenAI’s 175B parameter … Read more

Last month, Cloudflare launched a new service called Wildebeest, allowing Mastodon users to set up and run their own instances on its infrastructure. Wildebeest uses a laundry list of Cloudflare services, including Supercloud, Workers, Pages, Durable Objects, and Queues. It’s very much about showcasing Cloudflare’s own products, but (as with Fastly) it is also encouraging … Read more

OpenAI has just announced an enterprise version of its popular generative AI product, ChatGPT. But in this case, OpenAI is a fast follower — not the first-to-market. Cohere, a Toronto-based company with close ties to Google, is already bringing generative AI to businesses. I spoke with Cohere’s President and COO, Martin Kon, about how its … Read more

At the end of last week, news hit that Adobe’s $20 billion acquisition of Figma might not go through, as the U.S. Justice Department is reportedly preparing an antitrust suit to block the deal. This news came in just a couple of days after I spoke with Figma’s CTO, Kris Rasmussen. He wasn’t willing to … Read more

This month Matt Welsh, a former professor of computer science at Harvard, spoke at a virtual meetup of the Chicago Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), explaining his thesis that ChatGPI and GitHub Copilot represent the beginning of the end of programming. Welsh thinks programming is on the cusp of changing from a job that humans … Read more

In a documentary two years ago about the JavaScript framework Vue.js, it was described as a kind of indie alternative in the JavaScript ecosystem, compared to the two leading frameworks — Facebook’s React and Google’s Angular. “It just feels less corporate […] more grassroots,” is how one of the talking heads described it. In comparison … Read more

The last time I wrote about Foursquare was over ten years ago, when it was just a location check-in app for consumers. At that point, July 2012, it was trying to take on Yelp in the consumer recommendations market. Several pivots later and Foursquare is now squarely an enterprise service. It markets itself as “the … Read more

TensorFlow.js is a JavaScript library for training and deploying Machine Learning (ML) models in the browser and on Node.js. It was launched by Google nearly five years ago, but its popularity has increased in recent years thanks to the practice of using ML in programming — part of the generative AI trend engulfing the technology industry … Read more

Netlify is acquiring one of its main competitors, the Jamstack framework and platform company Gatsby. I spoke to Netlify’s co-founder and CEO Matt Biilmann about the deal, why he was interested in the struggling Gatsby, and what it means for the future of Jamstack — the web development trend his own company pioneered and Gatsby … Read more