Continuations

Based on recent meetings it would appear that the national security establishment may share Leopold Aschenbrenner’s view that the US needs to get to ASI first to help protect the world from Chinese hegemony. I believe firmly in protecting individual freedom and democracy. Building a secretive Manhattan project style ASI is, however, not the way to accomplish this. Instead we now need an Actually Open™ AI more than ever. We need ASIs (plural) to be developed in the open. With said development ...

There is a lot of excitement among startups and other companies about building for Amazon’s and Google’s voice platforms. My reaction to this can be summed up as follows:Google and Amazon will have a perfect copy of every enduser interaction. So anything that takes off they can wrap into the core based on what they have learned. And something that can be accessed directly by saying just “Alexa” or “OK Google” will alway get more use then something where you need to add another provider’s name...

For the New Year, I tweeted that we should “ll work together in 2014 to keep the Internet open for the benefit of humankind everywhere." That couldn’t be any more pressing as there is a full scale assault under way and we don’t seem to be doing much about it. First, thanks to Edward Snowden we have a much better view into the extent of domestic and international surveillance activities. The non-democratic ultra-secret and blackhat based approach taken by the NSA has done much to undermine the...

Probably the most interesting exchange on yesterday’s VC Panel at Google I/O was around how investors think about open versus closed systems. Dave McClure got the most memorable line of the day with “Open is for losers." Dave was obviously being provocative on purpose. My own thinking here was captured by comments from Chris Dixon and Brad Feld. Chris pointed out that open is the basis for more overall consumer surplus generation (i.e. more total net benefit to society), while closed is the b...

Following up to yesterday’s post, here is what I think folks should do about the threat of platform lock-in at the application/content layer. First, recognize that this is directly related to net neutrality. The ability of existing platforms and content owners to try to force the web back into walled gardens is limited by the ability of entrepreneurs to start open competitors and reach people directly and on a level playing field. Second, start voting with your mouse. At the moment we have en...

Yesterday, Tim O'Reilly published a provocatively titled post: “The War for the Web." In it he discusses the dangers to the web as an open platform from the attempts by the biggest players to own more and more of the user experience: We’re heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it’s more than that, it’s a war against the web as an interoperable platform. Instead, we’re facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amaz...

The New York Times has an API and developer network. The Guardian just announced the Open Platform. These initiatives are critically important in keeping the NYT and the Guardian relevant. Opening up and giving access to the existing articles and data is a great first step, but the trick will be to turn these into real hubs, which also allow for inbound news and data. The Guardian has taken a big step in this direction with its data store (kudos to the team at AMEE, which is a featured partne...

On Friday evening the much anticipated WolframAlpha launched publicly. It is great fun to play around with, not only because it has some hilarious easter eggs, but because there is a renewed sense of exploration. At least I found myself coming up with ever new queries to see what it knows (computes) and what it doesn’t. For instance, here are two queries that show off the range of WolframAlpha:how old is Barack Obama? area under x^2 between 2 and 4?One thing is for sure – a lot of homework wi...