Ever since artificial intelligence became a topic of popular conversation, the environmental cost of all these large-language models and the massive server farms that make them possible has been the subject of much concern. Every week or two, it seems, there is another article about the vast appetite these systems| The Torment Nexus
OpenAI recently released a new version of its ChatGPT artificial-intelligence engine, called GPT-5. Normally, I wouldn't choose to write about the latest iteration of a product that is in its fifth generation, especially since GPT-5 doesn't seem radically different in most important ways from GPT-4. In| The Torment Nexus
Let's all agree, for the sake of argument, that there's a lot of bad stuff on the old interwebs, okay? I mean, there's some really bad stuff – and not just porn, but violence and death and that sort of thing. I would rather| The Torment Nexus
In a recent essay in Asterisk magazine entitled Scapegoating the Algorithm, Cambridge PhD and social scientist Dan Williams wrote that there seems to be a sense that the United States (and possibly other parts of the world) is going through an epistemic crisis, which he describes as a "breakdown| The Torment Nexus
Ever since Google climbed onto the artificial intelligence bandwagon last year by announcing that AI results would start appearing at the top of search pages, there has been a suspicion that by using AI to provide answers, Google would inevitably wind up displacing websites and media companies whose businesses depend| The Torment Nexus
As a journalist by training, I have what you might call an addiction to facts. I believe that there are things that are true and things that are not, and that we can determine one from the other through observation, rational thought, and meticulous research. Obviously, there are some things| The Torment Nexus
Hi everyone! I'm going to keep this (mercifully) short. I don't do this a lot, and in fact I think I've only done this one other time. I write and publish this newsletter because I love writing about tech and the impact it has| The Torment Nexus
You might have noticed that there’s a tiny bit of anxiety about artificial intelligence these days — its design, its implementation, its uses and misuses, its reason for existing at all. Is it ruining society? Is it making our kids stupid? Is it going to kill| The Torment Nexus
I'd like to apologize in advance for the topic of this week's newsletter, which I fear may not interest all (or perhaps even most) of you. It would be nice to think that lots of people care about the nuances of how news and information gets| The Torment Nexus
Ever since ChatGPT first emerged on the scene in 2022, there has been a vociferous debate about whether the indexing (or "scraping") of public content that AI companies do when they are training a large-language model should be considered an infringement of the copyright held by publishers and/| The Torment Nexus
A little over six months ago, I (and pretty much everyone else with a pulse) was writing about Bluesky's meteoric growth, which seemed to be driven in equal parts by frustration with Elon Musk's MAGAfication of Twitter/X and the search for somewhere to talk about| The Torment Nexus
This isn’t an AI newsletter per se, in the sense that I don’t always write about it. However, I do write about it fairly often, mostly because I don’t think there’s anything else happening — apart from maybe crypto — that| The Torment Nexus
I've never met Marc Andreessen, although at one time in the distant past we were Twitter friends — I enjoyed the long threads he used to do, and I wrote about a few of them at Gigaom in a previous lifetime (including one about how newspapers should "| The Torment Nexus
Let's get this out of the way right up front: I don't have an iPhone, I have a Pixel. And I run Windows and Linux on my desktops, not MacOS. That said, I am a longtime Macbook Air fan, having had more than half a dozen| The Torment Nexus
If you've been following the news about Google's I/O conference at all, you probably know that it was all about artificial intelligence — and that isn't an exaggeration. Literally every announcement, every feature, and every app demonstration involved AI in some form or another. An autonomous AI agent called Project| The Torment Nexus
The Torment Nexus: Analysis and perspective on technology and culture| The Torment Nexus
I know what many of you may be thinking now, as you read the headline of this post. You might be remembering the photo reproduced below, in which Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen (who, it must be said, has a large and rather egg-shaped head, no offense intended) is| The Torment Nexus
