Category: Book Related

Do You Trust The Conjurer? (Predictions 2026, #1)

Cecco de Caravaggio The Conjurer (The Musician) c. 1600-1620

The modern English verb ‘to conjure’ is derived from the Latin conjurare, meaning ‘band together by an oath, conspire.’ Its roots con (‘with’) and jur (‘legal right or authority, law’) echo with questions central to our present day struggle with technology: Who do we trust to determine authority? Why do we believe in them?

Conjuring also evokes magic, sorcery, and wonder, essential elements of the tech industry mythos. My earliest pieces on the impact of generative AI leaned on the metaphor of magical “genies” doing our bidding in a relationship bound by loyalty and trust. Do those genies work for us, or are they the product of conjurers beyond our control? Do they demand faith, or instill it?

Read More
Leave a comment on Do You Trust The Conjurer? (Predictions 2026, #1)

SIGN UP FOR THE NEWSLETTER

Stay up to date on the latest from BattelleMedia.com

Health Takes Center Stage, Open Evidence Acquired (Predictions 2026, #5 and #4)

Yesterday The Information scooped my well laid plans for today’s health and AI-related predictions. If you’ve been following along this past week, you know I decided to write one prediction post a day for the first working week of the year. Today marks #5, which predicts that health will become a central player in society’s debate around AI, and #4, which predicts OpenEvidence will be acquired. I knew that OpenAI was working on health-related product offerings – the company said as much when it hired Fidji Simo from Instacart. But I didn’t know OpenAI would announce its health product so early in the year. Oh, and by the way, Google is expected to quickly do the same.

That said, I think there’s a lot more room to run in this story. OpenAI’s announcement is just the prelude. Health offers the perfect test case of just about every crucial limitation –  and every massive opportunity – that AI represents in society today.

Read More
2 Comments on Health Takes Center Stage, Open Evidence Acquired (Predictions 2026, #5 and #4)

AI Can’t Cost This Much (Predictions 2026, #8)

That’s some Big Iron you got there, Mister!

Some of you gave disagreed with my last prediction, that Anthropic would file for an IPO, stating, accurately, that OpenAI has a far more pressing need for fresh capital, given its commitments to various partnerships totaling  more than $1.4 trillion and counting. That’s a good point, but I don’t think OpenAI will ever really spend that money, and my next prediction explains why: I think the costs involved with delivering AI will come down significantly in 2026.

I’m not either an economist nor a supply chain expert, so what I’m about to write is informed more by historical rhyming than quantitative analysis. But when I see eye-watering numbers about the cost of data centers, compute, and chips, I start to wonder if innovation has been factored into the calculations. When trillions of dollars are projected to be spent, trillions that would require trillions more in revenue (and profit) to justify, a lot of butterflies start to flap their wings.

Read More
5 Comments on AI Can’t Cost This Much (Predictions 2026, #8)

Anthropic Goes Public (Predictions 2026 #9)

According to the Financial Times (and pretty much everyone else), 2026 has the potential to be the biggest IPO year in history. SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic all could go public this year; the proceeds from those three combined “would outstrip the total haul from about 200 US IPOs in 2025.”

Were any one of the three companies to successfully complete a public offering this year, they’d not only make thousands of lawyers, investors, bankers, and employees very rich, they’d also be setting a record: Each company is already privately valued at well above the benchmark for the largest public offering in history, which was Alibaba’s 2014 debut at $170 billion.

Read More
1 Comment on Anthropic Goes Public (Predictions 2026 #9)

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.

Read More
2 Comments on Is OpenAI Today’s Netscape? Or Is It AOL?

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.

Read More
Leave a comment on The Planet Is Warming, But Our Speech Has Chilled

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. 

Read More
Leave a comment on Tech And Society’s Faustian Bargain

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.

Read More
1 Comment on CloudFlare To The AI Industry: Pay Up!

The Standard, Part 2: “The Internet Weekly”

Fourth in a series. Previous installments: 

The Standard, Part 1 

Read More
Leave a comment on The Standard, Part 2: “The Internet Weekly”

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. 

Read More
5 Comments on AI Is Breaking The Internet. Can Bill Gross Fix It?