The Thirty Percent Confession

 

Last time I told you the AI industry is paying a tax it doesn’t have to pay — that a great deal of what we grandly call “AI” is really just looking things up, and we’ve chosen to do that looking-up on the most expensive silicon ever manufactured. A number of you wrote to say I was overstating it. Surely, you said, the people setting hundreds of billions of dollars on fire know something I don’t.

So this week I won’t argue with you. I’ll let one of the largest companies in enterprise software argue with you instead — because it already has, in a research paper it published itself and seems to have hoped you wouldn’t read too closely.

The company is Salesforce. The same […]

By |June 2nd, 2026|2026, Artificial Intelligence, Uncategorized|3 Comments
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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|12 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|62 Comments
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AI and Moore’s Law: It’s the Chips, Stupid

Sorry I’ve been away: time flies when you are not having fun. But now I’m back.

Moore’s Law, which began with a random observation by the late Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that transistor densities on silicon substrates were doubling every 18 months, has over the intervening 60+ years been both borne-out yet also changed from a lithography technical feature to an economic law. It’s getting harder to etch ever-thinner lines, so we’ve taken as a culture to emphasizing the cost part of Moore’s Law (chips drop in price by 50 percent on an area basis (dollars per acre of silicon) every 18 months). We can accomplish this economic effect through […]

By |June 15th, 2023|2023, Artificial Intelligence, cloud computing, competition, Government, Industry, semiconductors, Uncategorized|84 Comments
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Apple’s Space Ambitions are Real

Last summer, a couple weeks before the iPhone 13 announcement, Chinese market analyst Ming-Chi Kuo wrote that the iPhone 13 would include satellite communication capability.

Huh?

This was a bolt from the blue. No other Apple analysts were writing about satellites at that time.  And while Ming has a very good track record based on finding out from Apple’s supply chain about likely details in upcoming products, there was nothing about this satellite tip that even made sense, since it didn’t seem to involve hardware at all.

Generally speaking, a Ming tip is a hardware tip, but this one was not.

Ming’s prediction was widely and quizzically […]

By |June 3rd, 2022|2022, Companies, Internet, mobile technology, networking, space, Uncategorized|217 Comments
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