Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

To the point.  Musk has been left out of the staging of an "infrastructure" announcement, and he is acting as if he is very unhappy about that. What this portends for the coming months and years of the second Trump administration I do not know -- let me know, dear reader, if you figure it out. On Tuesday, January 21, Donald Trump's first full day as POTUS the second time, he announced a joint venture that would be backed by the US and that would involve as operating companies OpenAI, Oracle, and Softbank. It was supposed to use the billions those companies are pitching in, in order to build data centers and computing infrastructure across the US with an idea to advancing the development of artificial intelligence while creating more jobs than it costs -- though surely some humans will be rendered redundant in the process.  Little were they to know that the Chinese were about to steal a Long March on them with the release of a quite different AI system, DeepSeek.  But we w...

 Recently, I told a brief story here about how Sam Altman got fired by the board of his artificial-intelligence oriented company, then days later returned in triumph to the head of the company, and with a re-jiggered subservient board. Now I return to that subject with further thoughts.  Why did the board attempt to fire Altman? They weren't at all specific about it. On November 17, 2023, noon on the west coast OpenAI's board of directors announced they were firing him, effective immediately, because he had not been "consistently candid in his communications." Nothing more. That lack of particulars smelled to some people like a lack as well of ... candidness.   One prominent theory that has developed over the subsequent weeks is that Altman was playing hardware against software. OpenAI is a software concern, but Altman apparently had aspirations to, and even raised money for, the founding of an AI chip company. THAT sounds like the sort of thing that might create con...

  You may have heard Sam Altman on a news broadcast last weekend. Of course, you may not.  There was a lot else going on: two wars, with potentially important developments in each, as well as a guilty plea from the founder of Binance, launch of a spy satellite by the always-popular North Korean regime, and so forth and so on.  Amidst all of this, the board of directors of a company founded by Sam Altman to research artificial intelligence in a publicly transparent way, aptly called OpenAI, fired Altman. And they did so for no very clearly stated reason. Altman, though, went to Microsoft for assistance. Microsoft offered him a job heading its own AI push, and most of the employees of Altman's old company, OpenAI, threatened to quit if the board didn't persuade their old boss to come back. The implication was that they felt confident enough to quit because the new expanded MS operation headed by their old boss would happily take them on.    Altman may have the min...