For decades, the computing industry has followed a simple formula: make transistors smaller and pack more of them onto a chip. That strategy fueled the extraordinary rise in computing power predicted by Moore’s law. But as components approach atomic scales, engineers are increasingly running into the physical limits of silicon and the effects of quantum…
I am sitting in the sweltering Nevada heat watching a man struggle to lift a bar over his head. If the man manages to do it, he will win $250,000. The man is Boady Santavy — a two-time Olympic weight-lifting contestant from Canada — and he has muscles that look culled from the Marvel Cinematic Universe:…
Fr. Brendan McGuire used to be a Silicon Valley technology executive. Now he’s hearing their confessions. Today, the Irish-born pastor of St. Simon Catholic Parish in Los Altos, California, is helping to shape the moral conscience of the artificial intelligence industry. Earlier this year, he was among the faith leaders invited by Anthropic, the AI…
new video loaded: The Prophet of Silicon Valley transcript Back transcript The Prophet of Silicon Valley Stewart Brand, an author and visionary, deeply influenced the internet era from the 1960s onward. Yet the systems he inspired have become fundamentally unintelligible to their creators. The Opinion columnist Ezra Klein explores the tension between Brand’s “how to”…
Struggling to find a foothold in the increasingly competitive market for artificial intelligence, two start-ups on Friday said they were merging in a trans-Atlantic alliance to better compete with American tech giants. Cohere, a Canadian company founded in 2019, is acquiring Aleph Alpha of Germany. The governments of both countries helped facilitate the deal. The…
This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts. If you were looking for the most influential philosopher of the internet, the person who laid down the way Silicon Valley thought in its more idealistic era, the person you’d find is Stewart Brand….
Silicon Valley leaders including White House AI & Crypto Czar David Sacks and OpenAI Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon caused a stir online this week for their comments about groups promoting AI safety. In separate instances, they alleged that certain advocates of AI safety are not as virtuous as they appear, and are either acting…
