Category: Innovation

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Book review: The Infinite Machine: Demis Hassabis, Deep Mind, and the Quest for Superintelligence —Sebastian Mallaby, (New York, NY, USA. Penguin Press, 2026, xxi, 456 pp)

Demis Hassabis co-founded DeepMind, the lab startup where AlphaGo and AlphaFold were created. The latter won the Nobel Prize for Hassabis and his co-inventors. He truly is one of the most talented computer scientists of our age. This charming and best-selling book by Sebastian Mallaby, titled The Infinite Machine, provides insight into how Hassabis works …

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Frontier Pick and Shovel Markets

A firm in a “pick and shovel” market produces a good or service that serves as an input to other businesses. A “frontier” pick-and-shovel supplier has made a significant technical breakthrough in applied science or engineering that has enabled capabilities in its product previously considered impractical, uneconomical, or impossible. Pick-and-shovel markets have been around for …

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Artificial Intelligence and the Jevons Paradox

What can a nineteenth-century economist teach a twenty-first-century Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at one of the largest technology firms? More to the point, why is Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, quoting William Stanley Jevons? Jevons was a dominant figure in economic thought in Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century, but not today. His …

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10 Years Ago Today

It is 10 years ago today that the most significant consumer technological innovation, possibly of the last 50 years, was introduced. Here is Steve Jobs introducing it: If you have never seen it, you should watch. The original iPhone is a shadow of its counter-parts today. But the design is essentially the same. All mobile …

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