Category: Book Related

Is OpenAI Today’s Netscape? Or Is It AOL?

As is his want, last week Fred Wilson wrote a provocative post I’ve been thinking about for the past few days. Titled “Netscape and Microsoft Redux?“, Fred notes the parallels between the browser wars of the late 1990s and the present-day battle for dominance in the consumer AI market. And he asks a prescient question: What new, world-defining product might we be missing by focusing on AI chatbots?

In the early days of the Web, everyone thought the most important new product to emerge from the Internet was the browser. Netscape, a startup with just a few months of operating history, defined the market for those browsers in 1994, then dominated it for several years thereafter. But by the late 1990s, the lumbering incumbent Microsoft had stolen Netscape’s lead by leveraging distribution and pricing advantages inherent to its massive Windows monopoly.

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The Planet Is Warming, But Our Speech Has Chilled

Image from the AlphaEarth launch.

More than a decade ago I was working on a book about the impact of data on society. I was obsessed with a maddening and seemingly impossible idea: What if we could track every single piece of data that mattered in the world, and from that data, gain unimaginable insights that would shake us into an entirely new age – the equivalent of moving from Medieval times to the Renaissance?

Of course, I was struggling with this thesis well before AI became mainstream. I knew that the compute and algorithms needed to turn my musings into reality were on the horizon, but I simply could not find a way to realize the concepts I sensed were playing out all around me. I felt like Captain Ahab, madly chasing a spectral leviathan of data. I spent days staring out at the ocean from a rented cottage on the beach, imagining every molecule of water as information dancing across sentient processors. It was about this time that I made an uneasy peace with my ambitions to be the next Gleick or McPhee. Rather than submit to the insanity of the matrix, I abandoned the project, and it has haunted me ever since.

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Tech And Society’s Faustian Bargain

Capture.

I led my predictions for 2025 with the dog-bites-man observation that technology has eclipsed finance as the most powerful industry in the world. More than six months into the year, I’d like to emend my conclusion. Tech hasn’t eclipsed finance. It has captured it. 

Finance has always leveraged technology – at Wired in the early 1990s, we were fond of saying that technology’s twin engines of innovation were money and sex – but the most interesting story was always money. Care to understand the future of internet infrastructure? Bone up on how hedge funds optimize network latency. Want to peer into the future of online consumer services back when the Web was a glint in Marc Andreessen’s eye? Start with online banking. 

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CloudFlare To The AI Industry: Pay Up!

Cloudflare founders Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn from a 2015 SXSW presentation (image)

There are precious few companies in the tech world that are willing to stick their necks out and “do the right thing,” and even fewer who both operate at Internet scale and enjoy Wall Street’s unabashed fandom.

In fact, I can only think of one: Cloudflare. And today, the $65 billion public company* announced a new policy that has the potential to tilt the balance of the Internet back toward the little guys. Starting this morning, Cloudflare will automatically block AI crawlers from copying the content of every website the company protects. And it’s doing it for free.

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The Standard, Part 2: “The Internet Weekly”

Fourth in a series. Previous installments: 

The Standard, Part 1 

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AI Is Breaking The Internet. Can Bill Gross Fix It?

Bill Gross, ocean boiler.

Bill Gross has been here before. 

Back when the Internet was young, when the dot-com wave broke across the monied shoals of Wall Street opportunism, Gross built a world-changing company, took it public, then sold it for billions. 

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The Standard, Part 1 – The End and The Beginning

A good place as any to lose your company.

Note: Third in a series. First post, second post.

The Oak Grove cemetery in Tisbury, Massachusetts encompasses roughly ten acres of rolling woodlands and narrow dirt roads. Its 1,800 or so headstones date back two centuries, making Oak Grove a relative newcomer as New England graveyards go. I’ve been visiting this sacred, spectral spot on the island of Martha’s Vineyard for nearly five decades. Half my family is buried there. 

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Get Wired: The Launch (1992-93)

The launch issue of Wired.

(continuation of a previous post)

If you ever have a hit on your hands, my advice is to take notes. Living in the whirlwind of blinding success is a little like experiencing your own wedding – everyone tells you to enjoy it, to remember every detail. But decades later, all you can recall is leaving the reception, relieved that everyone seemed to have a good time. 

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One Fateful Phone Call: How I Ended Up At Wired

The Iron Door, California’s Oldest Saloon. (It had a pay phone in the back).

Living at the cutting edge of technology in the early ’90s required either a magical token forged of copper and silver, or the capacity to memorize a ridiculously long string of numbers. Either the token or the code would connect you to a vast telecommunications network driven by immense computers housed in bunker-like buildings scattered around the world.

Labor Day 1992. I squeezed into a pay phone behind the oldest bar in California, The Iron Door, pride of Groveland, California – the “gateway to Yosemite.” I never could remember my access code, but I did have a token – also known as a quarter – which I slipped into the pay phone, then dialed my voicemail, a state of the art service that cost me an extra five bucks a month. Back then everybody used voicemail, it was an asynchronous lifeline to the rest of the world.

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Is AI the “Big Bang” or Merely a “Turning Point”? Much Depends on the Answer

According to scholar Carlota Perez, one of tech’s most revered theorists, society regularly goes through technology-driven “revolutions.” These structural cycles can take fifty years or more, and are defined by core technologies which shape life as we know it. Her list of previous cycles include the Industrial Revolution; The Age of Steam and Railways; The Age of Steel, Electricity and Heavy Engineering; and The Age of Oil, the Automobile, and Mass Production.*

Back in the early 2000s, Perez has identified the Internet (more formally, ICT, or “information communications technologies”) as the dominant technological force driving our current age. Perez’s framing has been a favorite of pundits ever since – and has played a central role in the debate as to whether a much-hyped “Next Big Thing” – crypto, the metaverse, quantum computing – is merely a feature of an ongoing revolution, or the starting gun to an entirely new age.

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