Exploring the power and pitfalls of Artificial Intelligence.
While media attention recently has been focused on Anthropic and OpenAI, a new AI announcement from outside Silicon Valley quietly upstaged them on June 22nd. Fugu is a new AI system from a Japanese AI lab called Sakana, built around a large language model and an orchestration layer. On the challenging SWE-Bench Pro benchmark, Sakana…
As enterprises deploy AI, they are discovering the high cost of actually running an AI model, the “inference” costs. Uber spent its way through its 2026 AI budget in four months, with its COO Andrew Macdonald saying: “If you’re not actually able to draw a direct line to how [many] useful features and functionality you’re…
Did a Munich court just open a legal can of worms for AI companies? Traditionally, internet platforms and search providers like Google have been legally insulated from the content that their platforms display. If they provide a link via a search to a website that had defamatory content or obscenities, they are protected in the…
As AI project failures appear increasingly in the press, a less reported consequence is that insurance companies are starting to exclude AI from their policies. The Financial Times reports that large insurance companies including AIG, Great American and WR Berkley are limiting their liability for AI agents and chatbots. In one case, the proposed policy,…
The AI investment tsunami that began with the public launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 is starting to crash against the rocks of reality. An early AI adopter was Uber. As far back as 2016 the ride-sharing company had used machine learning for dynamic pricing and fraud detection. In 2022 it used neural networks to…
Enterprise implementation of AI is turning out to be a rocky road. In May 2026, Starbucks abandoned its high-profile AI-based inventory system, after nine months of failing to get it to work. The “Automated Counting” system was deployed at 11,000 Starbuck stores, rolling out from September 2025. Staff were provided with handheld tablets to scan…
In two separate incidents in May 2026 at US graduation ceremonies, guest speakers were loudly booed by the students when they praised AI. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was booed at the University of Arizona’s graduation ceremony, and executive Gloria Caulfield seemed utterly bewildered when she was booed by students after calling AI “the next…
One of the areas where large language models (LLMs) like Anthropic’s Claude have made substantial progress is in generating computer code. Just as LLMs can produce outputs in English or Spanish, they can do so in computer languages like Python, Java, Ruby and more. This is all very cutting edge, and the true effect on…
Although Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are very much in vogue, there are many other flavours of AI. Some are mostly historical, like expert systems, but others are very relevant to the present. Machine learning, for example, is the technology behind most of the predictive maintenance use cases in industry that you will read…
Has the productivity impact of AI gone missing in action? We are now well over three years on from the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, since when there has been huge investment in AI across the global economy. No less than 61% of all venture capital ($259 billion) went into AI companies in 2025,…