What cloud infrastructure taught me about building billing systems
For years, I thought of billing as a domain I would have to learn from scratch. Ledgers. Taxes. Proration. Regulations. Money. After 11 years building cloud datacenter management systems, I assumed my infrastructure experienc...
JDK 27: The quiet before the storm
Every September, with metronomic regularity, we have a new version of the Java platform. One small point about timing is that the first release candidate of JDK 27 was delayed by two weeks due to the release of the first Critical...
People really hate AI, so why can’t they get enough?
Over the summer I talked to the CEO of Springboards, a startup building an LLM that’s designed to come up with a wider variety of responses than its mainstream rivals do. At the start of the call, he said something that’s been stuck in my head since: “We…
EmTech Future 2026: When AI Meets Everything
Yossi Matias, Vice President & Head of Google Research, explores how AI is beginning to reshape biology, infrastructure, manufacturing, and science, and why its greatest impact may come when it intersects with other fields. Step inside the newsroom…
Will Kids Pay the Price for AI Panic?
A backlash against classroom AI is sweeping public schools. But as New Mexico shows, blanket bans risk robbing students of early literacy interventions.
Redefining enterprise intelligence with autonomous AI
Enterprise AI is no longer a future ambition. It is in full operational flight. Model capabilities are advancing faster than most organizations can absorb, while the cost of performance continues to fall. Globally, AI investment is set to reach $2.5…
IBM’s Bob wants to move in: Agent available for on-prem deployment
Bob, IBM’s agentic software development platform is now available to run on premises and in private clouds, sovereign clouds, and air-gapped environments to give users more control over their data. IBM is hoping to lure compan...
AI is less dangerous than humans
Over the past few weeks, people have been pushing a stack of reports at me as evidence that AI is dangerous to humanity. The OpenAI incident disclosures, the METR and Redwood Research joint investigation, the Nightingale Collecti...
Don’t be fooled—LLMs don’t reason
On an afternoon in Seoul in March 2016, I watched a program I helped build put a stone on the fifth line of a Go board in what looked like a gift to its human opponent. Move 37 in game two of the five-game match looked so absurd that some commentators…
AI could boost software engineer productivity by 32.6%
Tools such as Anthropic Claude Code or OpenAI Codex have changed the face of software development, and all the signs are that this investment is set to increase further. But is paying a monthly subscription (and perhaps additiona...
