The model release train continues, with Mistral’s multimodal Pixtral 12B, OpenAI’s o1 models, and Roblox’s model for building 3D scenes. We also have another important AI-enabled programming tool: Cursor is an alternative to GitHub Copilot that’s getting rave reviews. Security will never cease to be a problem, but this month seems particularly problematic. The Mirai […]
Published: 2024-10-01 09:55:29
AI is everywhere—we’re in a middle of a technology shift that’s as big as (and possibly bigger than) the arrival of the web in the 1990s. Even though ChatGPT appeared almost two years ago, we still feel unprepared: we read that AI will change every job, but we don’t know what that means or how […]
Published: 2024-09-17 10:04:49
A recent article in Computerworld argued that the output from generative AI systems, like GPT and Gemini, isn’t as good as it used to be. It isn’t the first time I’ve heard this complaint, though I don’t know how widely held that opinion is. But I wonder: Is it correct? And if so, why? I […]
Published: 2024-09-10 09:53:05
This month, we’ll give AI a rest. Alex Russell has finished an excellent series of posts titled “Reckoning.” It’s a must-read for web developers. If you want to understand why our networks and laptops are much faster than they were 15 or 20 years ago, but the web is slower, it comes down to one […]
Published: 2024-09-03 10:00:09
Platform engineering is the latest buzzword in IT operations. And like all other buzzwords, it’s in danger of becoming meaningless—in danger of meaning whatever some company with a “platform engineering” product wants to sell. We’ve seen that happen to too many useful concepts: Edge computing meant everything from caches at a cloud provider’s data center […]
Published: 2024-08-20 10:10:40
Over the years, many of us have become accustomed to letting computers do our thinking for us. “That’s what the computer says” is a refrain in many bad customer service interactions. “That’s what the data says” is a variation—“the data” doesn’t say much if you don’t know how it was collected and how the data […]
Published: 2024-08-13 17:22:32
July was a big month for model releases: There are new large models from Mistral and Meta, smaller multilingual models from Mistral and DeepL, another Mistral model that specializes in code generation, and a small version of GPT-4o. The security world saw another software supply chain disaster when CrowdStrike released a bad software update that […]
Published: 2024-08-06 10:02:43
Like almost any question about AI, “How does AI impact software architecture?” has two sides to it: how AI changes the practice of software architecture and how AI changes the things we architect. These questions are coupled; one can’t really be discussed without the other. But to jump to the conclusion, we can say that […]
Published: 2024-07-23 10:18:39
The first AI image generation model I got to play around with was Midjourney v2 in summer 2022. A month earlier, OpenAI had launched DALL-E 2 in beta, and the results looked unbelievably magical. You could generate images in any art style simply by prompting an AI with the name of an artist. I didn’t […]
Published: 2024-07-16 09:57:13
It’s clear that generative AI is already being used by a majority—a large majority—of programmers. That’s good. Even if the productivity gains are smaller than many think, 15% to 20% is significant. Making it easier to learn programming and begin a productive career is nothing to complain about either. We were all impressed when Simon […]
Published: 2024-07-09 10:06:08
Can anything that is programmable have an embedded LLM? Apparently so. llama.ttf is a plain old font that looks like Open Sans—you can download it and install it. We don’t know whether this is a massive vulnerability or a way to embed AI in almost any text-based application. Probably both. It may just be a […]
Published: 2024-07-02 09:54:51
As AI continues to advance at a rapid pace, developers are increasingly turning to AI-driven development (AIDD) to build more intelligent and adaptive applications. However, using natural language prompts to describe complex behaviors to AI can be a real challenge. While natural language is expressive, it lacks the structure and efficiency needed to clearly communicate […]
Published: 2024-06-25 10:18:06
Last month, The New York Times claimed that tech giants OpenAI and Google have waded into a copyright gray area by transcribing the vast volume of YouTube videos and using that text as additional training data for their AI models despite terms of service that prohibit such efforts and copyright law that the Times argues […]
Published: 2024-06-18 12:58:16
AI is too often seen as an enterprise of, by, and for the wealthy. We’re going to take a look at a Digital Green’s Farmer.Chat, a generative AI bot that was designed to help small-scale farmers in developing countries access critical agricultural information. Developing countries have frequently implemented technical solutions that would never have occurred […]
Published: 2024-06-18 10:04:34
Generative AI may be a groundbreaking new technology, but it’s also unleashed a torrent of complications that undermine its trustworthiness, many of which are the basis of lawsuits. Will content creators and publishers on the open web ever be directly credited and fairly compensated for their works’ contributions to AI platforms? Will there be an […]
Published: 2024-06-14 16:03:51