Competition in the Digital Age
From a firm’s perspective, the emergence of a new technology wave is a new opportunity to generate a financial return. The question is precisely how. That topic remains as salient today, in the era of artificial intelligence, as it was when firms first encountered smartphones, the commercial internet, and personal computers. Before we fully embrace …
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 …
Continue reading "Artificial Intelligence and the Jevons Paradox"
Epiphany plays an outsized role in the reductionist two-step model of invention. Step one is when an idea pops into an inventor’s head, and step two is when the invention spreads in an economy over time. This model is misleading in numerous ways that would take a book to enumerate. Today’s column focuses on step …
Continue reading "Spillovers, Bottlenecks, and More Invention After Invention"
A prototype is a product or service's early sample, model, or release. It is built to test a concept or process and serves as a tangible representation of an idea. Some prototypes are primarily commercial, while others are scientific. The advent of digitization has significantly revolutionized the prototyping process over several decades in both commercial …
The Worlds I See. Curiosity, Exploration, and the Discovery at the Dawn of AI—Fei-Fei Li (New York, NY, USA: Flatiron Books, 2023, 322 pp.) Fei-Fei Li is known for leading the development of ImageNet, which helped catalyze machine-learning approaches to vision recognition, and for being an essential voice shaping the science behind Artificial Intelligence (AI) …
Continue reading "A Review of Fei-Fei Li’s book, The Worlds I see."
The commercial future of AI will soon be bigger than the actions of any firm, individual, research team, or open-source community. In the near term, a massive tailwind of potential use cases and nearly completed projects will determine the rate of progress in creating value for users and suppliers. Still, the source of the next …
Large language models (LLMs) have overrun commercial markets, more like a tsunami than a normal technical wave of interest. The topic is everywhere –news stories, blogs, podcasts, startup investments, analyst reports, hackathons, and government announcements. A virtual frenzy surrounds it. If you possess a technical background, you might find this frenzy puzzling. The technological roots …
Digitopoly 