Delusions

I’m not quite sure what a black hole means to a politician but the £22 billion black hole which the government is banging on about doesn’t really seem very significant. After all it is about the same amount as the price of a leading-edge fab, or two thirds of TSMC’s 2024 capex budget. If a private company can afford that, ...

There’s something strange about governments wanting a ‘Semiconductor Strategy’ when you consider the way in which companies have evolved and grown.  No government could have strategised the success of  Arm Nvidia or x86. Arm was a fortuitous  mix of a small, low power core, a nascent mobile phone industry  and Nokia’s determination to keep x86 out of the mobile computing ...

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, has made a good point – AI is not like human intelligence. “I think one of the most unfortunate names is ‘artificial intelligence’,”Nadella told Bloomberg earlier this week. “I don’t like anthropomorphising AI,” added Nadella, “I sort of believe it’s a tool”. This is a good steer – after all there’s an awful lot computers ...

I am told that Russian hackers have been detected taking both sides of internet debates on issues espoused by the Wokerati like gender identification. Why? Well the general thrust of what the Russkies were up to was to wind up participants on both sides of the argument. So the conclusion is that they want to get peoples’ passions excited. Why? ...

The canard that TSMC makes 90% of the world’s most advanced chips has been taken apart by the industry’s foremost process technology analyst Scotten Jones. In SemiWiki, Jones points out that that this much-quoted ‘stat’ does not stand up to scrutiny. Jones takes ‘advanced’ as being processes with densities of  100 million transistors per millimeter squared (MTx/mm2) which is the ...

The playbook for a techie with a technology to sell is to go to industrial companies and tell them they’ll become uncompetitive if they don’t buy it. In the 70s, AI software was being packaged as ‘expert systems’ and peddled as indispensable to any company wanting to stay in business. To many CEOs, paranoid about falling behind their competition, and ...

Earlier this week, EC Commissioner Ruud Függ declared Europe’s determination not to let Big Tech  grab a monopoly in the AI market. “We’re going to compete,” stated Függ, “we Europeans are going to beat the crap out of the competition.” Er no . . . . it wasn’t quite like that actually. What actually happened was that, earlier this week, ...

While groups in America form to pursue GenAI, break off from each other to form new groups, raise billions of dollars of capital, and get the backing of major companies and set share prices soaring, what is happening in Europe? More bureaucracy is the answer. The EU is reported to be about to set up  the European Artificial Intelligence Office ...

‘AI’ has proved to be a powerful tool for raising and investing phenomenal amounts of capital. But asking for capital to build a ‘network of fabs’ to build AI chips seems to be stretching the potency of AI’s money-raising capabilities beyond its limit. No one knows if demand for accelerators is going to continue at the current rate while  the ...

Our ministers can be so embarrassing. Speaking on the subject of autonomous cars, Mark Harper, the Secretary of State for Transport, says: “I’ve seen the technology being used in California for example, without a safety driver, so in full, autonomous mode,” says Harper, “this technology exists, it works and what we’re doing is putting in place the proper legislation so ...