Delusions

One can understand why Jensen Huang goes around proselytising for data centres – or ‘AI Gigafactories’ as he calls them – because he’s talking his book – these things eat up GPUs. Last week’s converts to the Jensen pitch appeared to be bigwigs at the EU, including the flighty French president, who expressed their need for Jensen‘s concept of “AI ...

At a dinner in Taiwan earlier this week, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan (pictured) said Intel wants to be humble. “We want to be humble and learn from the customers and listen to their feedback,” said Tan. Tan said he visited 1,500 customers in his first month as CEO of Cadence and wants to do the same at Intel, reports the ...

Hallucinations, the errors which AI programmes make, are getting worse, according to the New York Times. The latest programmes from OpenAI Google and DeepSeek – so-called ‘reasoning’ systems – are generating more hallucinations than previous systems and no one knows why. Hallucination rates on a test devised by AI tool developer Vectara have risen with reasoning systems. DeepSeek’s reasoning system, ...

Next month the EU is expected to throw in the towel on its aspirations of gaining technological independence from the USA. On June 4th the EU  is due to publish its  ‘International Digital Strategy for Europe’. According to a draft of the strategy document seen by Bloomberg: “The network effects that allowed online platforms to grow to unprecedented size are ...

The grim statistics of Intel’s sale of 51% of Altera to private equity are just another indication among many of how badly Intel has been run for the last 20 years since Andy Grove retired. The 51% stake was sold for $4.46 billion this week while Altera was bought for $16.7 billion ten years ago. Now is a terrible time ...

It looks as though TSMC will have picked up $60 billion in revenues from manufacturing 2nm wafers before Intel has made any significant money from the technology. This will be a disappointment to most in the industry who thought that having a sole source of advanced foundry would be a bad idea. Now it looks a distinct possibility. With hindsight ...

When politicians start involving themselves in industry, they usually end up looking silly. The investments in chips by the US, Europe and Japan seem only to have confirmed the status quo ante that TSMC is the only company which can  make leading-edge chips.  Despite all the money laid out by governments, the only company to get advanced  fabs up and ...

DeepSeek spent only $6 million on computing power to train its R1 model, it says, and showed that  quality results in AI can be achieved with much fewer chips or less advanced ones, than had been supposed. The lower price associated with DeepSeek-R1 is also visible in pricing info published by chatbot provider DocsBot. The price of using an AI ...

Pulling out of the WHO and the Paris climate accords, declaring there are only two sexes in America, abandoning DEI, scrapping the EV mandate, boosting energy supply, declaring free speech are all rolling back the ruling political orthodoxy. All political orthodoxies tend to go too far and maybe liberalism has become a bit too ultra. Socialism gave such power to ...

There is often an Alice in Wonderland tinge to the way politicians talk about technology and I wonder why hosting data centres is seen as a route to being a successful AI country. So it was with the PM’s speech yesterday. He saw accelerating planning permission for datacentres as an important route for his plan to make Britain an AI ...