As Bill Gates recalls in his recent book-bumping interview with the Wall Street Journal, in the early innocent days of Microsoft he and his co-founder Paul Allen didn't believe in having an office in Washington, D.C.[1] They were soon to learn that was a mistake.[2] Compare and contrast with the scene in the Capital Rotunda last week for the inauguration of the new populist administration - Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Google, TikTok, and of course Tesla, all represented by their CEOs.[3] Microsoft's market capitalization as of this writing is now greater than the GDP of France.[4] Elon Musk's personal wealth is on par with the GDP of Denmark. Meta's platforms reach an estimated 40% of the world's population.  Apple ad from yesteryear. We're now long past 1984. Consider these other inconvenient truths about global technology: that NVIDIA does not make the GPUs it designs, that most are manufactured by TSMC in Taiwan, which is about as far away from China ...

Our imaginations, having been so stimulated by the "innovation trigger" of early interactions with ChatGPT and its LLM kin, having experienced the illusion of the algorithm reading your mind, we have now firmly entered into the period of inflated expectations. Any day now we expect a knock on the door to be informed by some HAL Junior that not only are we now out of a job, we've also got 20 minutes to evacuate the premise before its bulldozed to make way for another solar farm and data center. AGI is only just one product announcement away, or maybe two, but certainly three at most...  Nose Deep  There is a strong desire on the part of companies trafficking in AI to generate not just chatbot hallucinations but also customers for real business use cases, meaning revenue, and now. To do that we're going to need hardware, fast, lots of it, and gigajoules to power it. So AWS buys a new data center in PA adjacent to a 2.5GW nuclear power plant.[1] Not to be outdone Microso...