The NVIDIA Tax

The Tax You’re Paying on a Chip You Never Bought

I live in Virginia, which means I have a front-row seat to the strangest tax increase in modern American life. Nobody voted for it. It isn’t on any ballot. But it’s showing up on the electric bills of people who have never typed a prompt into a chatbot and wouldn’t know a GPU from a garden hose.

In January, Consumer Reports profiled a man in Manassas who had lived in the same house for nearly forty years and opened an electricity bill for $281 — roughly triple what he’d paid the month before. He is not a heavy user. He did not buy […]

By |May 29th, 2026|2026, Uncategorized|1 Comment
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The Permission Slip

A while back I asked in this space what would happen if Dario Amodei was wrong. I want to come back to that, because I think the question matters more now than it did then, and for a reason that has nothing to do with whether I like Dario or his company. I do, for the record. That’s not the point.

The point is a document. In Machines of Loving Grace, Amodei made the case that scaling compute would eventually solve essentially every hard problem in artificial intelligence. Buried in that optimism — or maybe not buried, maybe right out in the open — was a quiet absolution. Hallucinations, the embarrassing tendency of these systems to state […]

By |May 28th, 2026|2026|2 Comments
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Where the heck have I been all this time?

I owe you all an explanation of where I have been. The story starts in 2022 when ChatGPT came out and everyone decided to get rich. I know I did. So, I bullied my dear friend – a legendary lawyer – into building a legal writing tool. Within a week we knew our mission was close to impossible because of failures in GenAI.  There were imperfect products we could have sold but didn’t – dooming ourselves instead to a three-year product cycle to defeat the nightmare called LLM hallucinations.

I was the chief architect, in over my head despite starting at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab back in 1978. Then last July I had a heart attack and a stroke followed by 10 weeks in […]

By |May 27th, 2026|2026|9 Comments
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I’m writing again…

I’m Writing Again

For those of you who are still here — and given how long it’s been, “still here” is a real act of patience — thank you. I haven’t written a column since 2022.

Just like everyone else, I’ve been busy all this time on Artificial Intelligence, founding with two partners a company called 2Brains (why it wasn’t 3Brains I’ll never know) that I will explain to you shortly. The work we were doing together is unfinished, but it’s not stopped. The patents are filed, the architecture is documented, and the small team continuing the work includes me. Writing is part of how I think; not writing for three years has felt […]

By |May 21st, 2026|Uncategorized|50 Comments
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Apple’s Vision Pro headset is a hobby. Why won’t Tim Cook say that?

I’ve been following the press and social media coverage of Apple’s pricey new Vision Pro Augmented Reality headset, which now totals hundreds of stories and thousands of comments and I’ve noticed one idea missing from all of them: what would Steve (Jobs) say?  Steve would call the Vision Pro a “hobby,” just as he did with the original Apple TV.

You know I’m correct about this.

And the fact that Apple hasn’t gone for the H-word and no other writers are suggesting it is the topic of this column, not the Vision Pro, itself.

It would appear that nobody at Apple has the balls to call the Vision Pro a […]

By |June 16th, 2023|2023, augmented reality, Media, strategy, Technology, Television, virtual reality, wearable technology|193 Comments
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