If ever there were a bromance that seemed made in tech heaven, it’s the one between Microsoft and OpenAI. Microsoft was an early investor in OpenAI, initially putting $1 billion into the company, which allowed the upstart firm to develop and release the groundbreaking generative AI-based ChatGPT to effectively launch the current genAI boom.
That helped OpenAI become the most influential and valuable AI startup in the world. (Since then, Microsoft has invested $13 billion more in the company.)
For its part, Microsoft became the world leader in AI thanks to that early investment. It uses ChatGPT as the basis for its line of Copilot tools. It also owns a chunk of OpenAI and, thanks to the relationship, has reaped billions in revenue. The sky seems to be the limit for even more.
Along the way, the two companies lobbied Congress together, plotted strategy together, and seemed to be in lockstep on pretty much everything. When OpenAI ousted Sam Altman as CEO last year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella worked behind the scenes to get him reinstated.
The companies seemed to be so close that Altman called their relationship “the best bromance in tech.” In front of a sizable audience last year at a conference run by OpenAI, Nadella turned to Altman and said, “We love you guys!” Altman responded, “Awwww.”
If it were a movie, the romance would be so treacly, you’d walk out. But that was then. Now, the companies have their knives out for each other.
This should surprise no one. In March, I noted that the two companies “seem more like frenemies than BFFs.” I pointed out that Altman and OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap openly tried to woo enterprises away from Microsoft’s Copilot and toward OpenAI’s Enterprise ChatGPT. Reuters reported that Altman and Lightcap courted more than 300 corporate executives in New York, San Francisco, and London, dissing Microsoft by saying enterprises would be able to work directly with the people who built genAI technology rather than getting it second-hand from Microsoft.
Nadella had previously taken aim at OpenAI, saying, “If OpenAI disappeared tomorrow…, we have all the IP rights and all the capability. We have the people, we have the compute, we have the data, we have everything. We are below them, above them, around them.”
Going from bad to worse
Since then, things have only gotten worse. There are plenty of reasons they’re fighting, but the biggest reason is — you guessed it — money.
Microsoft’s $14 billion investment in OpenAI includes cash as well as computing resources — in particular, the vast amounts of computing power required to train and run OpenAI’s technologies. The most recent cash infusion came in early October, when OpenAI raised $6.6 billion from investors including various banks, investment funds, Microsoft, and AI chip maker Nvidia. (Microsoft reportedly invested $1 billion of that.)
After the round of funding, OpenAI is estimated at having a value of $157 billion.
Even that isn’t enough for OpenAI, and that’s where some of the disagreements begin. Though it may be worth $157 billion, OpenAI is burning through cash, losing $5 billion a year even as its expenses continue to skyrocket. That won’t end soon. In fact, things will likely get worse.
As a result, OpenAI wants Microsoft to provide it with even more computing power. And Microsoft is balking. The Times notes: “OpenAI employees complain that Microsoft is not providing enough computing power…. And some have complained that if another company beat it to the creation of AI that matches the human brain, Microsoft will be to blame because it hasn’t given OpenAI the computing power it needs.”
OpenAI is now looking elsewhere to get those resources. It’s signed a deal worth nearly $10 billion with Oracle to provide it. In addition, Microsoft and OpenAI have recently renegotiated how much Microsoft’s computing power should be valued monetarily, although it’s not clear whether the new deal lessens or increases the financial value.
Because of these kinds of issues, Microsoft has hedged its bets against relying too much on OpenAI for its AI future. Notably, it paid $650 million or more to hire almost the entire staff from the OpenAI competitor Inflection. It also hired Inflection’s former chief executive and co-founder, Mustafa Suleyman, to be in charge of Microsoft’s AI efforts. Suleyman and OpenAI have already had a number of run-ins, with Altman increasingly upset at Suleyman’s hiring.
All this is a prelude to the biggest issue of all: figuring out the fair market value of Microsoft’s ongoing investment in OpenAI. It’s an incredibly complicated issue, because OpenAI was originally founded as a nonprofit company, and Microsoft made much of its investments during that time. OpenAI has since essentially turned itself into a for-profit company.
Quick: When’s the last time you really, truly thought about your Android device’s Quick Settings setup?
If you’re like most mammals I know, the answer probably ranges somewhere between “eons ago” and “never.” And it’s no surprise: Android’s Quick Settings area, seemingly set to get some significant upgrades in next year’s Android 16 release, is one of those things that’s just sort of there. It’s convenient, sure, but it’s all too easy to forget that it’s completely customizable — and expandable, too. It can turn into an invaluable home for your own custom Android shortcuts, if you take the time to build it up accordingly.
The challenge, aside from simply remembering that you can expand that area of your phone’s interface, is knowing where to begin. Google doesn’t have any great way to track down and identify apps that offer Quick Settings additions, and even when you have an app with a cool Quick Settings option on your phone, you might not even realize it’s there.
But hey, that’s what I’m here for — that, and eating copious quantities of meatloaf. But the former is what’s most relevant for our purposes today.
So set aside your own meatloaf stockpile for a moment, and let’s dig into your device’s equally delicious Quick Settings improvement potential — shall we?
Android Quick Settings tile #1: Your timeout override
The shiny screens on these stunning modern smartphones of ours are typically set to shut themselves off after a certain number of seconds. And that’s generally a good thing. Otherwise, the dodo brains among us (hiya!) would forget to shut our screens off every time we got distracted — by a dancing panda passerby, a plate of steaming squared meat, or whatever manner of diversion tends to claim your attention unexpectedly.
Sometimes, though, you genuinely want your screen to stay on for an extended period, even when you aren’t actively caressing it. Maybe you’re poring over a complex document, staring at one of those weird 3D image things everyone was obsessed with in the 90s, or considering which hue of chartreuse is the most rage-inducing color of all.
Whatever the case, an app called Wakey will give you a single-tap switch in your Android Quick Settings area to keep your screen on anytime the need arises.
To get it up and running on your phone:
First, install the app (obviously, right?!). It’s free with an optional $2.50 upgrade to remove ads and enable some extra features, and it doesn’t require any unusual or eyebrow-raising permissions.
Next, swipe down twice from the top of your screen to open your full Quick Settings panel. Tap the pencil-shaped icon within that panel, then find the “Enable Wakey” button in the inactive tiles area.
Press and hold that button and drag it into your active tiles area. If you want it to be especially easy to access, place it in one of the first four spots so that you’ll see it in the top row of options — even just with one swipe down from the top of your screen.
Wakey’s Android Quick Settings tile gives you a quick ‘n’ simple way to keep your screen from timing out as needed.
JR Raphael, IDG
And that’s it: Whenever you want to prevent your screen from timing out and turning off, you can just tap that spiffy new Wakey tile. Just be sure to tap it again when you’re done with whatever you’re doing and ready to have your standard screen timeout kick back in.
Android Quick Settings tile #2: Your on-demand agenda
One of my favorite Android Quick Settings additions comes from a super-simple app that does one thing and does it well: It shows your next calendar event as a tile within your phone’s Quick Settings for exceptionally easy at-a-glance access.
The app is called CalenTile, and there really isn’t much to it: Once installed, it keeps scrolling text with your next event right at your fingertips, from anywhere on your device — and, in a nice little twist, it also lets you tap that tile to pull up an on-demand access panel with more info along with extra shortcuts for editing the event or creating a new event, too.
See your next event right in Android’s Quick Settings panel and tap it for even more info with CalenTile’s convenient addition.
JR Raphael, IDG
Once you’ve got the app installed, all you’ve gotta do is follow the same steps we went over a moment ago to find its tile within your inactive Quick Settings area and drag it into an active position.
CalenTile costs a whopping $1 and doesn’t require any disconcerting permissions.
Android Quick Settings tile #3: A fast task adding option
I don’t know about you, but keeping track of tasks is without a doubt one of the top things I rely on my phone to do. And with a quick adjustment to your Quick Settings, you can make it easier than ever to add something new onto your list.
Both Todoistand Microsoft To Dohave one-tap Quick Settings commands for fast task adding within their respective Android versions. Just install whichever app you like, then edit your Quick Settings to find and activate its tucked-away task-adding tile.
Android Quick Settings tile #4: An easy way to see the weather
While we’re thinking about easier access to important info, how ’bout keeping a quick overview of the current weather a single swipe away — no matter what else you might be doing on your device?
After all, even with all the exceptional Android weather apps out there, there’s something to be said for being able to see that sort of info quickly, without disrupting other tasks and having to head back to your home screen first.
And a handy little app called Chronusis the key to making it happen. Among many other features, Chronus has the easily overlooked option to add a simple tile into your Quick Settings with up-to-the-minute weather for wherever you may be.
Never wonder about the weather again with Chronus’s handy forecast tile in your Android Quick Settings panel.
JR Raphael, IDG
Once you’ve installed the app, you’ll need to open it once, hit the three-line menu icon in its upper-left corner, and select “Quick Settings” — then tap the button to allow the pertinent permissions at the top of the screen that comes up. You can also configure some things about the weather Quick Settings tile’s appearance in that same area.
All that’s left is to bring the tile into your active Quick Settings area, using the same steps from our first item.
Chronus is free, with an optional $3 that unlocks a variety of extra features (including the ability to be able to tap the weather widget for instant extended forecast info).
Android Quick Settings tile #5: Your always-available calculator
Ever find yourself needing to conduct a quick calculation whilst wading around the ocean of information on your dapper Android device?
Sure, you could stop what you’re doing, head back to your home screen, find your calculator app, and then open it up to perform your mathematic magic before plodding your way back to whatever app you started in — but goodness gracious, that’s an awful lot of inefficient steps. And it’s pretty inconvenient, too.
Instead, make sure you have the official Google Calculator appinstalled on your device. It’s already present by default on Pixels and available to download for free on any other Android phone or tablet.
Then, open up your Quick Settings once more and find that pencil-shaped editing icon. You should see the Calculator tile in the inactive area of that editing interface, and with one quick press-and-drag into the active Quick Settings section, your next calculation will be especially easy to pull off.
Another Google-made Android app that’s quietly gained a hidden-by-default Quick Settings shortcut option in recent months is the excellent Google Files app.
Download the free app onto your device, if it isn’t already there, and follow those same steps from a moment ago to find its inactive tile and make it active.
Then, anytime you need to find a file you’ve saved or deal with any other storage-related duty, you can simply swipe down from the top of your screen to tap that freshly revealed shortcut and fly right over to a full-fledged file manager — no home-screen-returning or app-drawer-hunting required.
Android Quick Settings tile #7: Your recording quick-start
This next shortcut is specific to the Pixel owners among us: Google’s self-made Android phones come with an outstanding audio recording called, rather fittingly, Recorder. It’s a spectacular tool for recording everything from meetings to conversations and even rambling note-to-self memos, complete with Google’s unmatched text transcription and even instant cross-device access of all your recordings.
But what few mere mortals realize is that Recorder holds a hidden shortcut that makes starting a recording a snap. And if you’re carrying a Pixel phone, it’s already there on your device and just waiting to be dug up.
All you’ve gotta do is open up your Quick Settings panel and tap the icon to edit it, just like we’ve been doing with every item in this collection — and then look closely at the list of inactive options at the very bottom of the list. Somewhere in that jungle, you should see a tile labeled “Recorder.”
Press and hold that puppy and drag it up to the area with all your active Quick Settings options, and you’ll then be able to find and tap it for a single-step way to start an audio recording almost instantly — without delay.
Android Quick Settings tile #8: A better way to read
The out-of-the-way Android Reading Mode is one of the most useful smartphone features you probably aren’t using. It’s a one-tap tool you can use to transform practically anything on your screen — an email, a document, even an overly cluttered article you’re reading on an otherwise wonderful website (insert awkward casual whistling here) — and turn it into a delightfully distraction-free experience.
loading="lazy" width="400px">Android’s Reading Mode makes any manner of reading instantly more pleasant — and with the associated Quick Settings tile, it’s never more than a swipe and tap away.
JR Raphael, IDG
Reading Mode eliminates any and all mid-text interruptions, and it also empowers you to pick any color, font, size, and general style your peepers prefer. And if all of that isn’t enough, it gives you the option to play whatever you’re reading out loud like a custom podcast, too — at any reading speed you like and even continuing in the background when you move onto other things.
Specific to our purposes here today, though, what matters is the shortcut to summon Reading Mode from your phone’s Quick Settings area whenever you want it.
Just make sure you have the Google-made Reading Mode app installed from the Play Store, then do that double-swipe-down from the top of your screen to open up your full Quick Settings menu. Tap that pencil-shaped editing icon within it again, find the Reading Mode tile within the inactive tiles area, and drag it into an active place.
Ahh — serenity now.
Android Quick Settings tile #9: Your song ID assistant
Okay, so this next one isn’t technically work-related — but with a little creative thinking, it could be.
Say you’re out on a Very Important Business Lunch, and some song starts playing in the restaurant that you know you recognize but can’t quite identify. (Hint: It’s almost certainly by The Scorpions.)
Maddening, right? Enough to keep you distracted and unable to properly focus on the meeting and/or meating at hand?
Get Google’s recently rolled out Song Search tile in your Android device’s Quick Settings, and you can ID the song in seconds and get back to business.
The tile showed up without any fanfare or announcement via an update to the Google app present on every Android device a little while back. If you edit your Quick Settings and look in the inactive tile area, it oughta be there and waiting to be called into action.
Android Quick Settings tile #10: Your built-in virtual remote
Up next is another Android shortcut that’s quietly lurking in your phone’s dustiest corners and waiting to be discovered. And once you bring it out to the forefront, you’ll wonder how you went so long without ever realizing it was there.
It’s a native virtual remote for any Google/Android-TV-associated devices — everything from TVs with that software built in to set-top boxes and even the newer Chromecast/Google TV Streamer With Google TV And Maybe Also Android TV By Google dongle doohickeys. (I’m pretty sure that’s their official name now, right?) If you’ve got any such apparati in your home and/or office, this easy little addition will bring a brilliant upgrade to your life.
The secret to making this bit o’ goodness appear is opening up the Google TV app — y’know, that thing that probably came preinstalled on your phone and that you’ve probably never bothered to look at. Well, get this: If you open that app up even once, a new TV Remote tile will magically appear in the invisible area of your phone’s Quick Settings panel.
And from there, all that’s left is to edit your Quick Settings — using the same exact steps from above — to drag it up or over into an active and visible position.
Once you do, you’ll always have a universal control for all of your Google-connected screens at your frothy fingertips.
Android Quick Settings tile #11: Instant access to anything
Whew! We’ve covered a bunch of ground already. But if you’re finding yourself wishing you could get to another specific app or action via a custom Quick Settings shortcut you haven’t seen yet, a Swiss-Army-knife-style app called Tile Shortcutsis exactly the tool you need.
Tile Shortcuts makes it as simple as can be to create your own custom Quick Settings tiles for all sorts of specific purposes — like:
Launching any app on your device
Launching a specific process within an app you have installed
Opening any website you want
Performing a variety of system-level activities and settings adjustments
You can even use it to create entire folders of apps, if you’re really feeling adventurous.
Just note: After you create any new tile within Tile Shortcuts, it’s up to you to add it into the active area of your Quick Settings panel — using the same steps we’ve gone over a few times now. Note, too, that the tile may have a generic-seeming name, like “Tile Shortcuts #1,” until you drag it into the active area of your Quick Settings setup and save out.
Tile Shortcuts is free, with optional donations for the developer.
And with that, congratulations are officially in order, my fellow efficiency-seeking emu. You’ve just made your Android phone substantially more useful — and that, m’dear, is a feat worth celebrating with mountains of seasoned meat.
Get six full days of advanced Android knowledge with my free Android Shortcut Supercourse. You’ll learn tons of time-saving tricks for your phone!
Amazon might have accidentally broken the story early, but as anticipated the introduction of Apple’s all-new, M4-processor-powered Mac mini is making big waves. The tiny but incredibly powerful desktop exemplifies all the advantages of Apple Silicon — smaller, faster, and cheaper than we could have seen before, a new building block in the Apple Intelligence ecosystem.
All the rumors were true (again)
It turns out that all the expectation for the tiny Mac were correct:
The Mac mini offers either an M4 or M4 Pro chip.
The M4 CPU offers 4 performance, 6 efficiency cores and a 10-core GPU.
The M4 Pro offers 10 performance and 4 efficiency cores, boosted by a 20-core GPU. And it has 75% more memory bandwidth than the M3 Pro, twice as much bandwidth as available to any AI chip.
All have at least 16GB of unified memory.
As anticipated, it’s much faster than the M1 Mac mini which blew everybody’s minds when it was introduced, and the Neural engine in the M4 Pro model is more than three times faster than the M1 Mac mini.
For connectivity, you’ll find two USB-C ports, a headphone jack on the front, and three Thunderbolt 4 ports (or Thunderbolt 5 ports on the Mac Pro models), Ethernet, and HDMI at the rear.
The M4 Mac mini can support up to two 6K displays and up to one 5K display, while the M4 Pro can support up to three 6K displays at 60Hz. You get hardware-based ray-tracing, too.
For size, it’s just 5-in. square (about 127mm each side).
Pricing: Mac mini with M4 starts at $599. The Mac mini with an M4 Pro starts at $1,399.
Apple Silicon has been transforming Apple’s ecosystem ever since the company acquired PA Semi. First, it enabled the company to deliver uniquely powerful smartphones that delivered computational performance at low energy. Apple has now taken those ideas and put them inside Macs equipped with M-series chips. Not only do these Macs make the Intel chips the company previously used the equivalent of Elmer Fudd trying (and failing) to keep up with the Road Runner, but they also deliver performance while sipping electricity.
As a result, Apple can continue to focus on delivering real computers in multiple form factors — want a tablet? Here’s an M4 iPad Pro. Looking for a super powerful laptop? MacBook Pro is there for you. Searching for a small “bring your own mouse and keyboard” system that won’t break the bank for use in your home or office? This is what Mac mini was born for.
Apple Silicon continues to unleash the imagination of Apple’s product design teams, and I suspect we’ve barely seen what’s coming. And all this performance power is now available to Apple Intelligence, which Apple will introduce globally into spring 2025.
Hyperbole aside, how will Mac mini help you get your work done? Apple shares the following proof points to attest to the performance boost you can expect from M4 chips in mini:
When compared to the best-selling PC desktop in its price range, the mini is up to six times faster and 1/20 its size.
With M4, Mac mini delivers up to 1.8 times faster CPU performance and 2.2 times faster GPU performance over the M1 model.
When compared to the Mac mini with an Intel Core i7, the new M4 mini delivers up to 33 times faster image upscaling performance in Photomator.
When compared to an M1 Mac mini, the new model is up to twice as fast transcribing on-device AI speech-to-text in MacWhisper.
These real world performance advantages are even more impressive on the M4 Pro device.
When compared to the Mac mini with Intel Core i7, the Mac mini with M4 Pro performs spreadsheet calculations up to four times faster in Microsoft Excel. It’s also 26 times faster at DNA sequencing in Oxford Nanopore MinKNOW.
The Neural Engine in the M4 Pro is also more than three times faster than in the M1 Mac mini.
M4 Pro supports up to 64GB of unified memory and 273GBps of memory bandwidth — twice as much as any AI PC chip — for accelerating AI workloads.
So, apart from being smaller, faster, and more energy efficient, how else can the new Mac mini help your company reduce its carbon impact? Just by existing, I suppose — the new Mac mini is Apple’s first carbon neutral Mac. It is made with more than 50% recycled content overall, including 100% recycled aluminum in the enclosure, 100% recycled gold plating in all Apple-designed printed circuit boards, and 100% recycled rare earth elements in all magnets. Apple has also told us the device uses 85% less aluminium than it did before. (Even the electricity used in its manufacture is sourced from 100% renewable electricity.)
This is important stuff and marks a really solid stepping stone on the company’s progress toward being completely carbon neutral by the end of the decade. But Apple is going even a little further than that.
The company understands that within carbon neutrality, it must also consider the consequences of its products during normal use. To address this, Apple has invested in clean energy projects around the world to help mitigate the electricity consumption customers will cause when using these Macs. It is also investing in carbon credits, which it characterizes as being “high-quality.”
Apple has slammed some carbon credit schemes for not delivering what they promise, but in this case has focused those efforts on nature-based projects. Finally, the packaging for the Mac is also entirely fiber-based. Apple aims to remove all plastic from its packaging by next year.
The new AI PC
What this means for users is that Apple’s new AI PC is also the most environmentally-friendly PC. For enterprise buyers, it means that when you purchase a larger number of these machines you’re also ticking a few more boxes in your corporate sustainability policy, while also entering a new space for digital transformation of your business. Plus, of course, you’re reducing your TCO, tech support draw, and reducing your exposure to ransomware and hacks.
With Apple Intelligence already available in some nations and scheduled to arrive in Europe in April next year, Apple’s approach to AI is mandatory. It has set out to design a safe, private, and secure system that works across its entire ecosystem, and the immense contribution of Private Cloud Compute means any business can begin to explore the productivity-boosting capability of AI on machines more powerful than anything else you can purchase at that price.
And given that Private Cloud Compute is something you can weave into your internal enterprise applications, it makes sense for heavily regulated industries to explore it, too. The company is defining what everyone should expect from cloud-based AI.
It’s also important to think about how Apple Intelligence works across Apple’s ecosystem — smartphone, tablet, and Mac. It means the company now offers business the fastest and most flexible secure AI experience. It’s hard not to avoid thinking that when it comes to the incoming world of AI PCs, Apple now (as anticipated) offers the world’s very best ecosystem for AI — all in a tiny box that has created very big waves in a very big pond.
By its actions, Apple is making it clear that it sees the AI opportunity very well and intends to seize the moment.
Microsoft has combined chat and channels in Teams as part of a redesign that will include a new threaded conversation experience.
Channel conversations — currently accessed in the team section — will be moved to chat. The goal is to make it easier for users to view all their messages in one place rather than continuously switching between sections.
“This integrates both chat and channels into your critical workflows, making it easier to access, triage, and organize your conversations,” Jeff Teper, president of Collaborative Apps and Platforms at Microsoft, said in a blog post Monday.
New filters available in Teams can be applied to let users focus on chats, channels, or unread messages.
Among the other changes is a new @mention view to highlight new messages across multiple chats or channels. There’s also a “custom section” where users can keep conversations relating to a project or topic — whether that’s in chat, channels, or with a Teams bot — in a single place.
Teams users will see a “self-service, guided onboarding flow” when the updates are made available in public preview next month, Teper said. This will help introduce users to the new look and allow them to configure it to the way they want to work: those who prefer to keep chat and channels separate can do so, for example, either during the onboarding or at a later stage.
Microsoft will test threaded conversations with customers during this quarter, with an expected roll out in mid-2025.
Microsoft has combined chat and channels in Teams as part of a redesign that will include a new threaded conversation experience.
Channel conversations — currently accessed in the team section — will be moved to chat. The goal is to make it easier for users to view all their messages in one place rather than continuously switching between sections.
“This integrates both chat and channels into your critical workflows, making it easier to access, triage, and organize your conversations,” Jeff Teper, president of Collaborative Apps and Platforms at Microsoft, said in a blog post Monday.
New filters available in Teams can be applied to let users focus on chats, channels, or unread messages.
Among the other changes is a new @mention view to highlight new messages across multiple chats or channels. There’s also a “custom section” where users can keep conversations relating to a project or topic — whether that’s in chat, channels, or with a Teams bot — in a single place.
Teams users will see a “self-service, guided onboarding flow” when the updates are made available in public preview next month, Teper said. This will help introduce users to the new look and allow them to configure it to the way they want to work: those who prefer to keep chat and channels separate can do so, for example, either during the onboarding or at a later stage.
Microsoft will test threaded conversations with customers during this quarter, with an expected roll out in mid-2025.
The web has been a mixed blessing for people who care about information. Yes, it’s made it easier than ever to access facts and opinions from around the globe — but it also throws out older data as quickly as it brings in new data. (And let’s not even talk about propaganda!)
One shining beacon for recording truthful and accurate records throughout the web’s history has been the Internet Archive.
When he founded the Archives in 1996, his ambitious goal was to provide “universal access to all knowledge.” Kahle and his friends have been remarkably successful. Today, the Archives holds digital copies of 44 million books and texts, 15 million audio recordings, 10.6 million videos, 4.8 million images, a million software programs, and even a copy of Computerworld from 1969.
To do this, he created the Internet Archive and its associated projects, including the Wayback Machine, which allows users to view archived versions of more than 866 billion saved web pages, and the Open Library project, which aims to create a web page for every published book.
It’s that last project that got the Archives into legal hot water. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Kahle opened the library for free ebook borrowing via the Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) program. Publishing companies were not amused and the Internet Archive lost the resulting lawsuit, Hachette v. Internet Archive. The court rejected the Archive’s fair use defense, finding that its digital lending practices infringed on publishers’ copyrights.
That’s a huge problem on its own. The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit with a gross revenue in its most recent 990 filing of only $30.5 million. For the size of the job it’s undertaken, it’s grossly underfinanced.
Recently, though, adding insult to injury, the Archive has been subjected to one cyber-attack after another.The first major incident occurred Oct. 9-10 and involved two simultaneous attacks: First, hackers exploited a GitLab token, compromising the Archive’s source code and stealing user data from 31 million accounts. Concurrently, a pro-Palestinian group called SN BlackMeta launched a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, temporarily knocking the site — and the Wayback Machine — offline.
Blackmeta said it hit the site because it belongs to the United States, which supports Israel in the ongoing Palestine-Israel conflict. Uhm, no, no it doesn’t. The only cause the Internet Archive espouses is freedom of information, and it has no connection with the US government.
Maybe it should. I could argue that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) should track the public web, but it doesn’t.
Then, on Oct. 20, the Internet Archive suffered yet another security breach: This time, hackers exploited unrotated Zendesk, the help desk support program’s application programming interface (API) tokens, to access the Archive’s support platform.
The results have been one mess after another. Many of the Archive’s services, including the Wayback Machine, have gone dark. In addition, people are worried that some of the data stored by the Archive has been deleted or compromised.
Operators managed to get the site back up, and a few days ago, Kahle told CBC Radio, “It’s just so sad. It’s great to be back up, and we have millions of people now accessing the site again.”
That didn’t last. Since then, it’s been hammered yet again!
Enough already — crashing the Internet Archive won’t make a lick of difference to the world’s geopolitical problems. No one will get rich from ripping off the Internet Archive users. There is no point in messing with the Archive. None!
The Archive is a useful library. That’s it. That’s all. And that’s enough.
In particular, the Archive keeps the only real records of what’s been on the Web. As we put more of our records and news on the Web and nowhere else, that’s vitally important for historians and other people who appreciate knowing who said what to whom and when.
The Archive needs to be preserved, not vandalized. I’m reminded of the dim-minded protestors whose big idea was to throw pumpkin soup on the Mona Lisa. Quick! What were they protesting?
You don’t know, do you?
It was about the right to healthy, sustainable food.
That attack made no difference whatsoever.
Vandalism, whether on a politically neutral, useful website or on world-famous art, is not helpful; it’s only harmful. And, in the Internet Archive’s case, it’s also pointless.
Amidst the mountains of vendor cheerleading for generative AI efforts, often amplified by enterprise board members, skeptical CIOs tend to feel outnumbered. But their cynical worries may now have some company, in the form of a report from Apple and an interview from Meta — both of which raise serious questions about whether genAI can actually do much of what its backers claim.
The debate involves some fairly amorphous terms, at least when spoken in a computing environment context — things like reasoning and logic. When a large language model (LLM), for example, proposes a different and ostensibly better way to do something, is it because its sophisticated algorithm has figured out a better way? Or is it just wildly guessing, and sometimes it gets lucky? Or did it hallucinate something and accidentally say something helpful?
Would a CIO ever trust a human employee with such tendencies? Not likely, but IT leaders are regularly tasked with integrating genAI tools into the enterprise environment by corporate executives expecting miracles.
The conclusions drawn by AI experts from Apple and Meta may help CIOs set more realistic expectations about what genAI models can and cannot do, now and in the near future.
“Our findings reveal that LLMs exhibit noticeable variance when responding to different instantiations of the same question. Specifically, the performance of all models declines when only the numerical values in the question are altered.
“Furthermore, we investigate the fragility of mathematical reasoning in these models and demonstrate that their performance significantly deteriorates as the number of clauses in a question increases… When we add a single clause that appears relevant to the question, we observe significant performance drops (up to 65%) across all state-of-the-art models, even though the added clause does not contribute to the reasoning chain needed to reach the final answer.”
What does mathematical reasoning have to do with AI-powered business applications? The Apple research team spelled it out:
“Mathematical reasoning is a crucial cognitive skill that supports problem-solving in numerous scientific and practical applications. Consequently, the ability of large language models (LLMs) to effectively perform mathematical reasoning tasks is key to advancing artificial intelligence and its real-world applications.”
What today’s state-of-the-art LLMs do is not logical reasoning, the researchers concluded:
“Current LLMs are not capable of genuine logical reasoning; instead, they attempt to replicate the reasoning steps observed in their training data… It may resemble sophisticated pattern matching more than true logical reasoning.”
“When a departing OpenAI researcher in May talked up the need to learn how to control ultra-intelligent AI, LeCun pounced. ‘It seems to me that before “urgently figuring out how to control AI systems much smarter than us,” we need to have the beginning of a hint of a design for a system smarter than a house cat,’ he replied on X.
“He likes the cat metaphor. Felines, after all, have a mental model of the physical world, persistent memory, some reasoning ability and a capacity for planning, he says. None of these qualities are present in today’s ‘frontier’ AIs, including those made by Meta itself.”
Later, the WSJ story lets LeCun make his central point:
“Today’s models are really just predicting the next word in a text, he says. But they’re so good at this that they fool us. And because of their enormous memory capacity, they can seem to be reasoning, when in fact they’re merely regurgitating information they’ve already been trained on.
“‘We are used to the idea that people or entities that can express themselves, or manipulate language, are smart — but that’s not true,’ says LeCun. ‘You can manipulate language and not be smart, and that’s basically what LLMs are demonstrating.’”
That is the key issue. Enterprises are putting far too much faith in genAI systems, says Francesco Perticarari, general partner at technology investment house Silicon Roundabout Ventures in London, England.
It’s easy to assume that the rare correct answers given by these tools are flashes of brilliance, rather than the genAI having gotten a lucky guess. But “the output is not based at all on reasoning. It is merely based on extremely powerful computing,” Perticarari said.
Putting genAI in the driver’s seat
One frequently cited selling point for genAI is that some models have proven quite effective at passing various state bar exams. But those bar exams are ideal environments for genAI, because the answers are all published. Memorizations and regurgitation are ideal uses for genAI, but that doesn’t mean genAI tools have the skills, understanding, and intuition to practice law.
“The logic is that if genAI can pass the bar exam, it can handle my business, build systems that are robust and that work now,” said Alan Nichol, co-founder and CTO of AI vendor Rasa. “[Business leaders] are taking this dangerous, naive approach and just letting the LLM figure it out,” he said.
Nichol pointed to Apple’s analysis that the more complex and multilayered math problems got, the more the LLMs got lost and confused.
“It’s supposed to understand this math, but something is definitely fishy. The medium through which they are doing [these calculations] is natural language. It’s fuzzy and imprecise,” he said. “Language models were never supposed to do a lot of these things. There are vanishingly few situations where you want your software to guess what it should be doing, what the next few steps should be.”
Nichol stressed that these systems, left to their own devices, are reckless. “Four out of five times, genAI doesn’t follow its own instructions,” he said. “You want it to guess business logic? It just doesn’t work and is extremely slow and consumes a tremendous amount of tokens.”
Perticarari from Silicon Roundabout Ventures is especially concerned about hallucinations coupled with the lack of meaningful guardrails. GenAI seems to easily overcome — or be tricked by a user into overcoming — many of the safeguards organizations attempt to place around it.
“If you have a one-year-old, you wouldn’t give her a loaded gun and then try and explain to her why she shouldn’t shoot you,” Perticarari said. “[GenAI is] not sentient. Humans are sentient and they assume the system is intelligent, too. Letting genAI run on autopilot to me is crazy. Don’t give anything to a black box.”
Fighting FOMO
Perticarari blames enterprise executives and board members for falling victim to countless AI sales pitches. He says that CIOs have to be the voice of sanity.
“It is always easy during a gold rush to sell hype. [Sales execs] just keep delivering endless layers of selling without really understanding,” Perticarari said. “CIOs need to ask, ‘How fundamental and vital is the task that [we] are outsourcing to genAI?’”
Jake Reynolds, the CTO at cybersecurity vendor Wirespeed, agrees. He maintains that a lot of the rush to genAI has been pushed by board members, and “the CIO had to tag along.”
Executives are giving in to FOMO (fear of missing out), thinking that “their largest competitor is doing it, so we are going to do it,” he said. “But it doesn’t deliver. Even with the more objective mathematics, it starts falling apart. Try to get consistency out of it. You can’t. The words it predicts changes every time you tweak a little knob… Are you really OK with your product only working 80% of the time?”
Reynolds encourages CIOs to slow down and be as minimalistic as practical. “We’re not laggards. We’re just realists about what the technology can really do,” he said.
Judicious use of genAI tools can mitigate disappointment or worse, agrees Nichol. “We should just let the LLMs do what the LLMs are amazing at. Don’t let the LLM do everything.”
The US government has announced new rules restricting investments in China’s AI and other tech sectors deemed threats to national security, expanding the existing restrictions that were so far limited to exports.
First introduced by the US Treasury in June, the rules are based on an executive order signed by President Joe Biden in August 2023.
They focus on three critical areas: semiconductors and microelectronics, quantum information technologies, and certain AI systems.
“This narrow set of technologies is core to the next generation of military, cybersecurity, surveillance, and intelligence applications,” the Treasury said in a statement.
The US already restricts or bans the export of many technologies covered by the new rules to certain countries. The new program complements existing export controls and inbound screening measures by blocking US investments from aiding the development of sensitive technologies in countries of concern, the Treasury added.
Fueling the trade war
This marks the latest development in the ongoing trade war between the US and China, which has already witnessed numerous restrictions.
Analysts are skeptical of the policy’s impact, cautioning that it may further intensify tensions and stifle innovation and growth.
“The scope of restrictions is now expanding beyond the sale of technology IP or chips to include investments in the Chinese tech sector,” said Neil Shah, VP of research and partner at Counterpoint Research. “This move aims to stifle Chinese tech companies on both fronts — limiting financial and technology inflows. Unfortunately, this will make it difficult for Chinese companies to innovate quickly and will further intensify the geopolitical tech cold war.”
This also means that if China retaliates — while protecting its own manufacturing ecosystem — it could affect large and small tech companies that still rely on China as a key market.
Restrictions could stifle collaboration and knowledge exchange between nations, potentially slowing innovation by reducing opportunities to work on advanced projects.
“Companies might also need to reassess their strategic priorities, which may lead to an unnecessary increase in innovation costs,” said Charlie Dai, VP and principal analyst at Forrester. “On the other hand, regulatory concerns will force enterprises outside the US to further prioritize localization strategies to achieve self-sufficiency in critical areas, potentially leading to increasingly isolated innovation ecosystems.”
The new rules may also require US enterprises to closely monitor both domestic and international regulatory shifts and establish agile compliance programs to adapt swiftly to evolving requirements.
“These constraints can also diminish R&D investments and have profound long-term economic effects, stifling advancement in pivotal sectors like semiconductors, quantum computing, and AI, ultimately hampering overall technological progress,” said Thomas George, president of Cybermedia Research.
Opportunity for emerging markets
For other emerging markets, however, the tightened US restrictions could present new opportunities by attracting redirected foreign investments from US firms.
“As trade tensions rise and new regulations emerge, US companies increasingly move away from Chinese manufacturing,” said George. “Instead, they want to collaborate with countries such as India, Mexico, and Vietnam. This shift is crucial as it enhances companies’ resilience and allows them to navigate new US export controls more effectively.”
Companies should reduce dependency on any single country by diversifying supply chains to mitigate risks associated with regulatory changes in specific regions, according to Dai.
“Engaging with research and advisory firms can help them better understand the potential impact of various regulatory changes, prepare contingency plans, and develop strategies to assess and mitigate risks,” Dai said.
The Phoenix fabrication facility of the world’s largest semiconductor chip maker is yielding more usable chips than similar plants in Taiwan, according to the Taipei Times.
Rick Cassidy, president of TSMC’s US division, said during a webinar last week that the share of usable chips from the company’s Phoenix plant exceeds that of similar Taiwanese plants by 4%. If true, the superior performance at the Phoenix fab is notable because the US government has been working to spur a return of the semiconductor manufacturing industry to US shores, where manufacturing tends to be more costly.
Better yields would help offset those higher costs.
“Four percent higher yield is certainly good news,” said Harry Moser, president of the Reshoring Initiative, a non-profit that offers companies assessments on offshoring costs. “To be competitive, we need a higher yield. It is agreed that US factory capital cost and operating cost will be 10% to 20% higher than in most other countries. The 4% will offset some of that difference.”
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted critical gaps in the semiconductor supply chain as imports to the US and other nations ground to a halt, affecting the production of everything with electronics, from smart phones to cars. The CHIPS and Science Act, passed in 2022, earmarked more than $52 billion in funding and tax incentives for use by the US semiconductor industry to create new or expand existing manufacturing and R&D facilities.
The CHIPS Act was created to address both future possible supply chain catastrophes and to re-establish the US as a major chips manufacturer.
To date, the CHIPS Act has allocated more than $32 billion in proposed funding across 18 companies, 16 states, and 26 projects. However, no CHIPS funding has yet been disbursed to any companies, according to the US Department of Commerce.
TSMC is the main supplier of chips for both Nvidia and Apple. The CHIPS Act allocated $6.6 billion in grants and $5 billion in loans, along with a 25% tax credit, to incentivize the company to build three fabs in Arizona. TSMC’s first facility was scheduled to open this year, but the company pushed that back to next year after labor shortages surfaced.
The US reshoring efforts come at a time when the industry doesn’t have anywhere near the workforce — including technicians, computer scientists, and engineers — required to support future needs. By some estimates, the US semiconductor industry will face a worker shortfall of between 59,000 and 146,000 workers by 2029. A minimum of 50,000 trained semiconductor engineers will be needed over the next several years in the US to meet the overwhelming and rapidly growing demand, according to a study by Purdue University.
The broader US economy is set to have a gap of 1.4 million such workers, according to a 2023 study from the Semiconductor Industry Association. So the competition will be fierce over those skilled workers. Compounding the problem is an ongoing exodus of existing talent as older workers retire. A study from Deloitte found that nearly 90% of tech leaders interviewed cited recruiting as their biggest challenge.
A TSMC spokesperson shared statements regarding the Phoenix fab with Computerworld from a third quarter earnings call by CEO C.C. Wei, but declined to comment on Cassidy’s claim directly.
“Our first fab entered engineering wafer production in April with 4-nanometer process technology, and the result is a highly satisfactory, with a very good yield,” Wei said. “This is an important operational milestone for TSMC and our customers, demonstrating TSMC’s strong manufacturing capability and execution.”
Wei said he expects volume production of the company’s first Arizona fab to start in early 2025, and he is “confident” it will deliver “the same level of manufacturing quality and reliability” from our fabs in Taiwan.
TSMC is also building two other fabs in the Phoenix area that will use more advanced technologies based on its customer needs, Wei said. The second fab is scheduled to begin volume production in 2028 and the third fab will begin production by the end of the decade.
“Thus, TSMC will continue to play a critical and integral role in enabling our customers’ success, while remaining a key partner and enabler of the US semiconductor industry,” Wei said.
Reshore Now’s Moser said it would be good to know whether the Phoenix fab uses identical equipment as in Taiwan, speculating that the US plant could have been more modern. “Was it accomplished solely by US workers or significantly by Taiwanese brought over to aid the start-up?” he said.
Apple’s week of Mac began today with a newly announced iMac, now beefed up with an M4 chip and more internal memory. Apple says the iMac is up to 4.5 times faster than an equivalent all-in-one Intel Core 7 Windows PC — and promises the machine will deliver up to six times the performance of the most popular Intel-based iMac.
The inference is obvious: if you use your iMac professionally, you might want to think about an upgrade. Reinforcing the point, Apple says the iMac is up to 1.7 times faster for most tasks and 2.1 times faster for more advanced tasks when compared to the M1 model.
Apple sets the scene for its AI
Part of the reason for this improved performance is the big boost to 16GB of unified onboard memory (configurable to 24GB). That memory boost is to support Apple Intelligence, which is also available for Macs running macOS Sequoia 15.1 or above. The Neural Engine in M4 chips is 3x faster than the M1. (Apple Intelligence is also now available for iPhones and iPads running iOS/iPad OS 18.1.)
Be warned, the entry-level $1,299 iMac might not reach these performance heights as it ships with an 8-core CPU; the rest of the range offers 10 cores. You do get hardware-accelerated ray tracing, which is going to make a big difference when you use the Mac.
Apple’s AI platform play means all its current devices will now support Apple Intelligence, meaning the company now offers the world’s biggest AI ecosystem.
What else is new?
The iMac display continues to be the same 24-in. 4.5K Retina display we all know and love, with a new nano-texture glass option available if color fidelity and anti-reflection matters to you.
Starting at $1,299, the new iMacs are available in a “parade” of colors, including green, yellow, orange, pink, purple, blue, and silver. Buyers get: a 12-megapixel Center Stage camera with support for Desk View; a brilliant microphone and speaker system; and four USB-C ports, all of which support Thunderbolt 4. You can even run two external displays. Wrapping it up, you’ll find Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.1 along with TouchID support, thanks to a button on the keyboard.
Overall, this is a solid and update, but it has to be said that it doesn’t seem to be the main attraction — that honor this week is likely to be all about a smaller machine….
We’re still waiting for the Mac mini
I can’t help but feel the iMac is being seen through a lens of pre-announcement speculation for the Mac mini. That product is already attracting lots of interest — just look at the pre-release headlines:
“This is the Mac Mini’s big moment” (The Verge).
“A tiny Mac mini could be the ultimate travel companion and I can’t wait for it” (TechRadar).
“Apple Mac mini with M4 chip could be a game-changer for creatives, here’s why” (Hindustan Times).
Talk about setting the scene.
Even Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has put his well-connected assessment out there; he obliquely tells us that even if you are quite happy with your M1 Mac mini, the move to M4 processors “could feel as significant as that first shift from Intel machines to Apple chips.”
That’s borne out by Apple’s iMac claims above. What we can piece together from the iMac introduction is that the new Mac mini will also deliver huge performance boosts in contrast to the M1 or M2 models already in use.
That’s an upgrade productivity benefits are built on in some industries, and it suggests that if your business has M1 (or older) Mac minis in its fleet, the new M4 models seem to be a tempting upgrade. After all, you don’t even need to replace the display….
Will a M4 Mac mini be the new Mac for business?
This introduction is expected to be about more than the silicon inside these Macs — it’s also the new design around them. If reports are correct, the new mini may be significantly smaller as Apple’s designers draw yet another benefit out of the energy and heat dissipation advantages of the company’s Arm-based chips.
Expect it to be a small aluminium box that’s taller but otherwise similar in size to the current Apple TV. I visualize this as being a box about half the size of a regular paperback book and perhaps as thick as three average length novels stacked atop each other. That’s really small. And it should now come with 16GB of base memory and support for Apple Intelligence.
Speaking just last year, MacStadium CTO Chris Chapman told me his existing server farms full of Mac minis used so much less power that his data center providers were, “always calling us up to tell us we’re not using enough power for the space.”
If the smaller size means lower energy consumption (and given what we know of Apple’s silicon evolution so far, it probably does), then for enterprises handling hundreds of these machines — or any other Mac, come to that — the M4 upgrade promises significant reductions in energy costs.
A good start to a week of Mac
Combined with the faster chip, these tiny desktop Mac minis or larger iMacs are going to run just about anything you want as effectively as a hot knife through butter.
That’s why the upcoming Mac mini has generated so much interest, even before its introduction. Combined with the impressive iMac rollout today and anticipation around the expected powerful MacBook Pro improvements, Apple’s big week of Mac news is off to a strong start. But will it distract or focus interest on the company’s end of year results announcement Thursday?
