In February, the city of Toronto announced plans for a new development along its waterfront. They read like a wish list for any passionate urbanist: 800 affordable apartments, a two-acre forest, a rooftop farm, a new arts venue focused on indigenous culture, and a pledge to be zero-carbon.
The idea of an affordable, off-the-grid Eden in the heart of the city sounds great. But there was an entirely different urban utopia planned for this same 12-acre plot, known as Quayside, just a few years ago. It was going to be the place where Sidewalk Labs, the urban innovation arm of Alphabet, was going to prove out its vision for the smart city.
Sandwiched between the elevated Gardiner Expressway and Lake Ontario, and occupied by a few one-story commercial buildings and a mothballed grain silo, Quayside shouldn’t have been that hard to develop. But controversy ensued almost from the moment in October 2017 that Waterfront Toronto, a governmental agency overseeing the redevelopment of 2,000 acres along the lake shore, announced that Sidewalk had submitted the winning proposal. Read More
Daily Archives: June 29, 2022
China’s Tech Giants Lost Their Swagger and May Never Get It Back
On trading floors in New York and Hong Kong, the brightening mood toward Chinese technology companies is unmistakable: With stocks like Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. surging from multi-year lows, talk of a new bull market is growing louder.
Yet speak to executives, entrepreneurs and venture capital investors intimately involved in China’s tech sector and a more downbeat picture emerges. Interviews with more than a dozen industry players suggest the outlook is still far from rosy, despite signs that the Communist Party’s crackdown on big tech is softening at the edges.
These insiders describe an ongoing sense of paranoia and paralysis, along with an unsettling realization that the sky-high growth rates of the past two decades are likely never coming back. Read More
Find the smartest technologist in the company and make them CEO
Marc Andreessen arrived in Silicon Valley 28 years ago, fresh from the University of Illinois, where he and a colleague developed NCSA Mosaic, the graphic web browser that opened the world’s eyes to the potential of the internet. As an entrepreneur, Andreessen launched Netscape, whose IPO was the bellwether event of the first internet boom, and Opsware, an early cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) company. He then cofounded Andreessen Horowitz with Ben Horowitz, building it into one of the world’s premiere venture capital firms.
Andreessen’s experience gives him a unique perspective on how new technologies develop, disrupt, and create opportunities for business. It’s a perspective that is of particular interest at a time like this, when so much is unclear about the future of technology. Andreessen recently joined McKinsey senior partner Tracy Francis and the Quarterly editorial director Rick Tetzeli for a wide-ranging discussion. An edited version of the conversation follows. Read More
The Year in AI So Far: Massive Models and How to Use Them
The world of artificial intelligence and machine learning moves very fast. So fast, in fact, that it’s remarkable to think that it was only a decade ago when the AlexNet model dominated the ImageNet competition and kicked off the process that made deep learning a bona fide technology movement. Today, after years of headlines about game-playing, we see ever-increasing innovation that applies to the real world.
In the last couple of years alone, AI/ML models like GPT-3 and AlphaFold delivered capabilities that catalyzed new products and companies, and that stretched our understanding of what computers can do.
With that in mind, we thought we’d revisit our AI/ML coverage in Future over the first half of the year, as well as catch you up on some — but certainly not all — of the major industry developments during that time. As you’ll see, some combination of large language models, generative models, and foundation models are a major source of attention, and we’re just skimming the surface in terms of understanding what they can do and how the world outside of large research labs can utilize their power. Read More
Rick's Cafe AI 