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John Naughton

John Naughton

The Guardian

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The networker From boom to burst, the AI bubble is only heading in one direction

“Are we really in an AI bubble,” asked a reader of last month’s column about the apparently unstoppable rise of Nvidia, “and how would we...

saturday 3

The Guardian

John Naughton

The networker One engineer’s curiosity may have saved us from a devastating cyber-attack

On Good Friday, a Microsoft engineer named Andres Freund noticed something peculiar. He was using a software tool called SSH for securely logging into...

06.04.2024 3

The Guardian

John Naughton

The networker How did a small developer of graphics cards for gamers suddenly become the third most valuable firm on the planet?

A funny thing happened on our way to the future. It took place recently in a huge sports arena in San Jose, California, and was described by some wag...

30.03.2024 5

The Guardian

John Naughton

The networker Ireland opens its arms to tech titans, yet shuts its eyes to failing public services

In 1956, a chap named TK “Ken” Whitaker, an Irish civil servant who had trained as an economist, was appointed permanent secretary of the finance...

23.03.2024 20

The Guardian

John Naughton

TikTok may be on borrowed time in the US, but it still holds a Trump card

Last week, the US House of Representatives, a dysfunctional body that hitherto could not agree on anything, suddenly converged on a common project: a...

16.03.2024 20

The Guardian

John Naughton

The networker Painful day for tech titans as EU finally sinks its regulatory teeth into them

Last Wednesday was a landmark moment for the tech industry, or at any rate for that part of it that aspires to do business in the EU. It was the day...

09.03.2024 20

The Guardian

John Naughton

The networker AI’s craving for data is matched only by a runaway thirst for water and energy

One of the most pernicious myths about digital technology is that it is somehow weightless or immaterial. Remember all that early talk about the...

02.03.2024 40

The Guardian

John Naughton

The networker OpenAI’s new video generation tool could learn a lot from babies

“First text, then images, now OpenAI has a model for generating videos,” screamed Mashable the other day. The makers of ChatGPT and Dall-E had...

24.02.2024 4

The Guardian

John Naughton

The networker OpenAI boss Sam Altman wants $7tn. For all our sakes, pray he doesn’t get it

Once upon a time, nobody outside tech circles had heard of Sam Altman. But then his company, OpenAI, launched ChatGPT, and suddenly he was everywhere...

17.02.2024 60

The Guardian

John Naughton

The networker Forget range anxiety: we should really worry about China’s global dominance in the electric car market

Whenever people learn that I have an electric vehicle (EV) the conversation invariably turns to whether I suffer from “range anxiety” – the fear...

10.02.2024 20

The Guardian

John Naughton

The networker Farewell FaceTime? That’s in store if the UK’s new snooper’s charter becomes law

Way back in 2000 the Blair government introduced the regulation of investigatory powers bill, a legislative dog’s breakfast that put formidable...

03.02.2024 4

The Guardian

John Naughton

The networker It was expensive and underpowered, but the Apple Macintosh still changed the world

Forty years ago this week, on 22 January 1984, a stunning advertising video was screened during the Super Bowl broadcast in the US. It was directed by...

27.01.2024 20

The Guardian

John Naughton

The Observer view on Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel needs a change of course… and leadership

It was plain long before the 7 October attacks that Israel badly needed a change of leadership. That need is now urgent. The prime minister, Benjamin...

20.01.2024 4

The Guardian

John Naughton

The networker If the Horizon Post Office story is treated as a scandal, nothing will change

The key question raised by the Horizon story is whether it’s a scandal or a crisis. Why is that important? Simply this: although scandals generate...

20.01.2024 2

The Guardian

John Naughton

The networker The hard truth about AI? It might produce some better software

As you have doubtless noticed, we are in the middle of a feeding frenzy about something called generative AI. Legions of hitherto normal people –...

13.01.2024 5

The Guardian

John Naughton

The networker Publish Nazi newsletters on your platform, Substack, and you will rightly be damned

It’s funny how naive smart people can be sometimes. Take the founders of Substack, a US-based online platform that enables writers to send digital...

06.01.2024 6

The Guardian

John Naughton

The networker For all the hype in 2023, we still don’t know what AI’s long-term impact will be

“Innovation,” wrote the economist William Janeway in his seminal book Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy , “begins with discovery and...

30.12.2023 5

The Guardian

John Naughton

The networker Why AI is a disaster for the climate

What to do when surrounded by people who are losing their minds about the Newest New Thing? Answer: reach for the Gartner Hype Cycle, an ingenious...

23.12.2023 4

The Guardian

John Naughton

The networker Let’s hope Epic’s antitrust win over Google is the first of many tech giant losses

The big news last week was that a jury in San Francisco had found Google guilty on all counts of antitrust violations stemming from its dispute with...

16.12.2023 9

The Guardian

John Naughton

ChatGPT exploded into public life a year ago. Now we know what went on behind the scenes

If a week is a long time in politics, a year is an eternity in tech. Just over 12 months ago, the industry was humming along in its usual way. The big...

09.12.2023 6

The Guardian

John Naughton

The networker Europe’s AI crackdown looks doomed to be felled by Silicon Valley lobbying power

Wednesday will be a fateful day in Brussels, a faraway city of which post-Brexit Britain knows little and cares less. It’s the day on which the...

02.12.2023 3

The Guardian

John Naughton

The networker Preserving our digital content is vital. But paying $38,000 for the privilege is not

Way back in 2004 the two founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, thought that it would be a cool idea to scan all the printed books in the...

25.11.2023 40

The Guardian

John Naughton

The networker If you think ‘bossware’ surveillance culture in the workplace is new, think again

“There are,” F Scott Fitzgerald once observed, “no second acts in American lives.” Except when there are. Exhibit A in this connection is...

18.11.2023 5

The Guardian

John Naughton

The networker How did Sam Bankman-Fried attract investors? Well, Fomo probably helped

On 22 September last year, a fascinating article appeared on the website of Sequoia Capital, one of the leading venture capital firms in Silicon...

11.11.2023 8

The Guardian

John Naughton

The networker AI is not the problem, prime minister – but the corporations that control it are

Earlier last week, just around the time when the driver of Rishi Sunak’s armoured Jaguar might have been thinking about typing “Bletchley Park”...

04.11.2023 3

The Guardian

John Naughton

The networker Artists may make AI firms pay a high price for their software’s ‘creativity’

Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first give access to Midjourney, a text-to-graphics “generative AI” that is all the rage. It’s...

28.10.2023 4

The Guardian

John Naughton

The networker The advanced silicon chips on which the future depends are all made in Taiwan – here’s why that matters

When the history of our time comes to be written, one thing that will amaze historians is how an entire civilisation managed to impale itself on its...

21.10.2023 6

The Guardian

John Naughton

The networker Musk’s plan X: keep users in the dark, feed them dung and watch sales mushroom

A t 4am a couple of weeks ago, Ryan Carson, a young activist for social justice, was sitting with his girlfriend at the B38 bus stop at Lafayette...

14.10.2023 4

The Guardian

John Naughton

The networker Encryption services are sending the right message to the quantum codebreakers

A spectre is haunting our networked world. It’s the prospect of quantum computers. These are machines that harness some of the weirder properties...

07.10.2023 5

The Guardian

John Naughton

Observer comment cartoon Rishi Sunak the helicopter – cartoon

01.10.2023 5

The Guardian

John Naughton

The networker Has Google’s monopoly on the search engine market finally timed out?

A lthough you’d never guess it from mainstream media, the most significant antitrust case in more than 20 years is under way in Washington. In it,...

30.09.2023 5

The Guardian

John Naughton

The networker When it comes to creative thinking, it’s clear that AI systems mean business

I n all the frenzied discourse about large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 there is one point on which everyone seems to agree: these models are...

23.09.2023 10

The Guardian

John Naughton

The networker The EU cable guys have tied down Apple, yet big tech is still bossing the Tories

S ometimes, when Apple launches a new device (or even an upgrade of an existing one), it’s tempting to think that the accompanying blurb is a...

16.09.2023 6

The Guardian

John Naughton

The networker How savvy trillion-dollar chipmaker Nvidia is powering the AI goldrush

I t’s not often that the jaws of Wall Street analysts drop to the floor but late last month it happened: Nvidia, a company that makes computer...

09.09.2023 30

The Guardian

John Naughton

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