OpenAI releases Operator agent as rivals enhance their AI services - ”When users ask Operator to perform a task in a website, the agent navigates to the relevant URL using a built-in browser. It can type, click and scroll to carry out the requested action. Operator regularly takes screenshots of the website to check that everything is working as expected. ”
Intuit CTO keeps 8,000 engineers on track with a base platform of common services - Centralizing, standardizing.
The 2024 State of Platform Engineering? Fledgling at Best - The New Stack - “The majority of the organizations surveyed – 56% – have had platform teams for less than two years. A mere 13% of respondents reported working in “platform engineering” for more than five years."
Why run AI on-premise? - Big ol' list of why you’d chose private cloud. // “While cloud-based AI services offer scalability and cost-effectiveness, especially for testing and early use cases, enterprises are increasingly considering on-premise AI solutions. Factors such as data sovereignty, security, performance, and cost are driving this shift, particularly as AI projects grow and require more data and processing power. Enterprises are also exploring less resource-intensive models and open-source options to reduce costs and improve efficiency."
Alternatives to “sorry” - American English meanings for “sorry."
Deepseek: The Quiet Giant Leading China’s AI Race - ”Open source, publishing papers, in fact, do not cost us anything. For technical talent, having others follow your innovation gives a great sense of accomplishment. In fact, open source is more of a cultural behavior than a commercial one, and contributing to it earns us respect. There is also a cultural attraction for a company to do this.”
The return of skinny jeans? Men’s catwalks suggest wide-legged trousers are out and calf-huggers back in - Looks like a dodged a bullet on this one by wearing my old Gen-X pants despite the trends.
M&A and the Product Model - Silicon Valley Product Group : Silicon Valley Product Group - At tech companies, achieving synergies is very difficult, and predicting if you can do the work is even harder. // “Most people experienced in due diligence have a reasonable understanding of assessing the product – the customers, the financials, the offering, the technology used to build that product, and especially the go-to-market for that product. Yet these same people often do not have the experience to understand what it will take to integrate the newly acquired product with the parent company’s existing systems and operations, or migrate the customers to the existing company’s systems, or in many cases, especially in cases of significant technical debt, to re-platform the product, or to change the product to work effectively with the parent company’s go-to-market channels.” // Keeping the acquired company as a mostly separate entity - product wise - is a good strategy, e.g., YouTube, maybe Red Hat? It means you won’t kill off the thing you acquired the company for by meddling with it, integrating it into the way your company works.
Spotify’s playlists have altered the music industry in unexpected ways - artists are often disrupted first. Study how their business models - and personal compensation changes - and you can prepare and defend yourself.
Swings and roundabouts – or slides? - “German policymakers made some strategic bets some decades ago that have backfired significantly over time: dependence on Russian energy, underinvestment, over-reliance on parts of the manufacturing sector as China has gained ground – in electric vehicle production for example – and a failure to keep up with digital technology."