Artificial intelligence has passed the point of novelty inside most companies. Pilots exist. Tools are licensed. Experiments are underway. Yet the returns remain uneven, and in many cases disappointing. The reason is not model quality or compute costs. It is a framing...
We Are Underestimating How Political AI Is About to Become
When people say AI is becoming “political,” many immediately think of elections, content moderation, or culture-war controversies. That is not what matters most. What is about to become political—very quickly—is control: control over compute, data, energy, standards,...
Phantom Risks
When investors look at an innovative new project, they may get very excited about the vision. But smart investors will quickly look for all of the ways the project might go wrong, and how they could lose capital. Unfortunately, investors are rarely experts in the...
Financing Bold Innovation
A frequent question we get at FTL is how to finance large, innovative projects. Real innovation is exciting. But it can also be scary to investors; they may not have a perfect view of what success looks like—but can always imagine a lot of failure modes. And scary...
Decision Making: The Missing Link in AI
Decision engines will allow AI to solve far more complex and meaningful problems.
Bonjour!
In the US as well as in the UK, I hear complaints that the French are rude—particularly Parisians in the service industries, such as restaurant waiters. On the other side, Parisians sometimes make the same complaint of the tourists who come to town—and there are a lot...
Finding the Counterfeit Coin
I wrote about a brain teaser I encountered as a kid and challenged you to figure out if it has a solution, and if so, what that solution is. That brain teaser works like this: You have 12 identical coins. One of them is counterfeit. The counterfeit coin may be heavier...
The Toughest Brain Teaser
People seem to like the brain teasers I've posted. So here's another. I first ran across this when I was about 12 years old. I still remember it as one of the toughest brain teasers I ever faced. It is a very simple problem to explain, but the answer may not be...
Pythagorean Triplets and Diophantine Equations
Last week I posed a challenge that came from my high school computer teacher: Can you find an efficient method (or "algorithm") to generate Pythagorean triplets? As a reminder, a Pythagorean triplet is a set of three integers that satisfy the Pythagorean equation:...
Brain Teaser: Finding Pythagorean Triplets
In an earlier post I wrote about a brain teaser from middle school. Here's one that is a bit more advanced. My high school computer teacher issued us a challenge: "I want you to write an algorithm to identify Pythagorean triplets." At the time, I didn't know what an...