Author: Geek Planet

One of the biggest challenges with using AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini is that you don’t know the inner workings. You have a vague idea of what the result is going to look like, based on your instructions, but no idea how the AI chatbot mustered it. And as you go from single to multi-step tasks, the situation gets trickier. This is where Skills come into the picture.  What’s the big shift Think of skills as a set of instructions that can be executed, or applied, with a single word. Claude-maker Anthropic recently introduced Agent skills, an open standard…

Generative AI has dominated the tech news over the last two years. More than 50% of venture capital funding goes to generative AI, which I distinguish from predictive AI, the older and, at one time, the more researched form of AI. Announcements and news from the big consulting firms and top business schools are also dominated by generative AI. The profit figures suggest that they are the most profitable organizations within AI outside of Nvidia. Nirvana, doomsday or — bubble Bubbles 1 Adobe Stock licensed Much of the AI discourse in the media was previously split between nirvana, doomsday and…

Media buyers tend to wince when LinkedIn comes up. The platform’s ad prices have climbed steadily this year, pushing into levels that make even seasoned planners pause. Inside LinkedIn, the view is different. A senior executive there framed the premium as the cost of access to what the company sees as one of the strongest data and intent signals in digital advertising.“Clicks don’t pay the bills, pipeline quality does,” said LinkedIn’s head of ads measurement Jae Oh.  To compare, the average annual CPM rate (as of Oct. 31, 2025) on Meta (Facebook and Instagram) is $5.46, TikTok is $4.66, YouTube…

I am something of a Gary Marcus fan. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is not. Gary Marcus is a psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author. But, more recently, he is best known for his criticisms of Silicon Valley’s love affair with generative AI and LLMs (Large Language Models, such as ChatGPT) which he shares on his Substack. Marcus believes that, someday, we will achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) (though I disagree). But he insists that LLMs, while useful (to some extent), cannot, by virtue of what they are underneath, get there. His criticisms derive largely from their statistical basis, lack of semantic…

This article is republished from Salvo. After forty years’ study of humans and primate apes, Stanford professor of neurology Robert Sapolsky, author of Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will (2023), announced that “We are nothing more or less than the sum of that which we could not control—our biology, our environments, their interactions.” Sam Harris, a well-known atheist and neuroscientist, agrees: “Free will is an illusion.” Denial of free will is popular among scientists generally and is probably the majority view among neuroscientists. As a result, many will assume that free will has somehow been refuted by science. Actually…

Google just dropped a killer promo on annual Google One plans, slashing prices by 50% for new subscribers. If you’ve been on the fence about subscribing at full price, now might be a great time to seal the deal. According to 9to5Google, the New Year’s deal drops the price of the basic 100GB plan from $19.99 per year to $9.99, giving you extra space for your emails, photos, and Drive files for about the price of a fast-food meal. Those who need more space, the premium 2TB plan is now $49.99 for 12 months, down from the usual $99.99. In…

The CMO-CCO split is becoming a corporate fiction Source link

This article is republished from National Review with the permission of the author. To the surprise of absolutely no one, New York Governor Hochul has said that in January, after some minor changes are added, she will sign the bill legalizing assisted suicide. From the Spectrum News 1 story: Hochul said the new amended bill will include additional safeguards, or “guardrails,” to protect family members, caregivers and doctors and ensure that vulnerable populations are not pressured or misled. Of course, these “guardrail” protections–such as they are–will come under sustained assault once the law goes into effect as “barriers” to a good death. They are…

The Monolith: A refresherEarlier in the production of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the idea of putting a screen on the Monolith was floated and quickly rejected. In the book 2001: A Space Odyssey which was written alongside the film, the ape-men are literally possessed by the Monolith and compelled to perform various tasks. But director Kubrick chose to keep things subtle and open-ended instead. This was a good choice because to do otherwise would’ve required additional exposition. So, why the Monolith? It’s hard to know what to make of the explanation that the book offers. To me,…

Google’s gearing up to launch another Pixel, and this time, it’s the A-series that’s up next. Usually, the company drops an A-series handset in March, but multiple sources claim that the Pixel 10a could arrive a month earlier, in February 2026. Renowned tipster Roland Quandt (via a post on BlueSky) suggests that the Pixel 10a could hit shelves by the middle of February 2026. It’s worth emphasizing here that the retail availability of smartphones usually follows an announcement early on. Hence, Google could announce the next A-series handset in early February, and it might be available to purchase in the…