Author: admin

Posted on

The New World Order: Sitrep

by Barry Briggs

The world has changed over the past decade. Not long ago, international politics was dominated by the United States and supported by smaller, but wealthy countries with Western democratic values. Now the power and influence wielded by the US and its allies is in decline – a decline, I argue, is accelerating.

Power hates even the hint of a vacuum. Two countries – Russia and China – whose interests and values are inimical to those of the West are assuming their place in a new tripartite world. In different ways they seek to extend their power across the globe while suppressing, violently in many cases, the rights and freedoms of individuals and whole minority groups.

Russia

In 2005, Russian President Vladimir Putin famously told an audience that the fall of the Soviet Union “was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” It’s an obvious conclusion that the attempted invasion of Georgia in 2008, the annexation of the Crimea in 2014, and the current, disastrous war in Ukraine are all part of a larger plan to restore the USSR.

However, it’s my view that Putin – an extremely intelligent, cunning leader – seeks rather to emulate the 17th century Tsar Peter the Great, whom he frequently mentions in speeches. Peter, who ruled as an absolute monarch for 43 years, was a brilliant polymath credited with modernizing backwards Russia – and expanded its borders both east and west. Peter is Putin’s role model.

But Putin is not mired in the past. He is a modern man well versed in current technologies, as this remarkable dialog with PhDs and postdocs in St. Petersburg a few years ago demonstrates. And his five-hour end-of-year press conferences (most recently, here) much of which are ad lib interactions with journalists demonstrate clear, perhaps unmatched among leaders, intellectual agility.

However, Putin, a former KGB agent, is – frankly – hamstrung by his abject hatred of the West and in particular of the United States. He, and most Russians, hold the US responsible for the collapse of the USSR, and while most Americans believe the Cold War over, Putin and Russia see the USSR’s downfall only as a setback. The war continues. That then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attempted, in Putin’s view, to interfere with the 2014 Russian elections was for him unforgivable, and continued evidence of America’s desire to weaken Russia – and Putin.

Putin’s strategy toward world and Russian affairs, then, can be summed up as follows:

  • Expand Russia’s borders either directly or with client states to buffer against the US-dominated NATO alliance. Hence the war in Ukraine; and all sorts of mischief in Eastern European countries.

  • Expand trade with friendly non-Western nations such as China, India, Turkey, North Korea and Iran. Russia’s massive oil and gas reserves, once supplying the bulk of energy to Europe, are now being redirected. Russia needs this infusion of cash to both support its war in Ukraine and to reduce the crushing inflation (central bank rates are 21%!) at home.

  • Crush all opposition internally – as did Peter the Great, all the other Tsars after, and for that matter the Communist rulers. Putin – and many Russians – believe that Gorbachev, a reforming Westernizer, caused the USSR to fall while Stalin, a brutal dictator, made the USSR “strong.”

  • Use any and all methods short of war to weaken and disrupt the United States. In this I believe Putin has been remarkably successful by using such means as social media to divide Americans and to manipulate the election of the US president of his choice. To be clear, Putin’s goal is less a Republican consensus, but rather a weakened, divided, polarized – and paralyzed – America. More on that later, but suffice it say, as I did in this blog post, it’s not that hard, sadly.

Militarily, it is notable that the Ukraine war has depleted the Red Army and other branches – significantly, perhaps up to one million casualties. But Russia’s losses have been China’s and North Korea’s gains as both have supplied Moscow.

Finally, in any calculus involving Russia, its huge stocks of nuclear weapons must be taken into account. Several thousand Russian nuclear warheads on a hair trigger target the United States. Let’s not forget that history could end in the space of just a few minutes.

China

Two or three decades ago we hardly considered China a threat. Now, both militarily and economically, it presents the biggest challenge to the United States and to our way of life perhaps in our history.

I remember in the 1970s, shortly after Nixon “opened” China, a conversation I had with a fellow who planned to get rich by selling to China. What goods was he planning to sell? Nails. And screws. The most basic construction materials.

Fast forward to the present: Shanghai is perhaps the most modern city on Earth; BYD sells more electric cars than any other company; the Chinese navy boasts more ships than that of the US. It is a truly stunning transformation driven by an economic philosophy completely antithetical to ours: centrally managed development, a planned economy, that – unlike the failed “5-year plans” in the USSR – succeeded beyond expectations. After the chaos and repression of the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward, China actually has leapt forward, and quite far.

Just check out the explosive growth of Chinese high-speed railroads in just 12 years, far surpassing rail progress in the US — or anywhere in the world:

Xi Jinping’s ambition, simply put, is global domination through nonviolent means. For all its investment in the People’s Liberation Army (over two million active serving personnel in ground, naval, air, and rocket forces), China has not engaged in armed conflict since the end of the Korean War in 1953 – whereas the US and Russia, for better or worse, both have experienced, battle-hardened militaries.

Instead, China views economics as its principal weapon. Its so-called “Belt and Road Initiative,” announced in 2013 and now reputedly the largest foreign aid project since the post-WWII Marshall Plan, has invested in well over 140 countries. Over 75% of the world’s population has been affected by BRI in one form or another. Either through loans or outright grants China has helped countries build bridges, modernize ports, and constructed railroads: these multi-billion-dollar infrastructure projects extend China’s influence in Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Italy, and Greece – not to mention large-scale projects in the Americas, in Peru (deep-water port), Ecuador, and Brazil, to name a few. The influence China gains from these foreign investments cannot be understated.

Internally China’s technology innovation thrives, not least because of significant IP theft which helped it leapfrog early mistakes (as my friend Evan Anderson has documented extensively). Countless examples of copycat technology from computers to missiles and jet aircraft exist. Taking advantage of cheap labor – at least until recently – China has flooded the West and especially the US with inexpensive goods: it is estimated between 70% and 80% of goods in Wal-Mart and Amazon are Chinese-built.

Nevertheless, there are problems: China massively overbuilt housing through the 2010s; over 20% of its workforce is still agricultural, far above other developed countries; and its surveillance-happy, repressive government keeps close tabs on its citizens. However, unlike Russia and the US, inflation remains at near zero, if we are to believe its economic reports.

United States of America

Turning inward, the US appears to be abandoning its global leadership role. While its foreign policy seemed to stabilize somewhat during the Biden administration, it is, at this writing, in flux to put it kindly; “chaotic” might be a better word. Harsh words and tariffs on its allies, kowtowing to its enemies, specifically Russia: it’s difficult to understand what America’s global vision, if any, is.

The ”America First” slogan, eerily reminiscent of the exact same words used in the 1930s as the US turned a blind eye to events in Europe and Asia – which of course led to World War II (the photo shows Charles Lindbergh addressing an America First rally) – has turned Americans against one another. As Germans were encouraged to report Jews in the early days of the Holocaust so too are Americans asked to report illegal immigrants, and to not help them by informing them of their rights. Whole government agencies are being disbanded and regulations – protections by any other name – are struck from the Federal Register.

By cutting foreign aid funding, the Trump administration has essentially opened the door to further Chinese investment worldwide. The Pacific and the Indian Ocean will become, economically, Chinese lakes.

By abandoning Ukraine, the Trump administration emboldens Putin’s imperialistic actions, risking the invasion of a host of former Soviet republics: Georgia, Moldova, perhaps even Poland. And what is after that? Germany? France? Moreover, should Russia win a victory in Ukraine, then every country in the world would recognize that American security commitments are worthless – thus driving them to other guarantors, namely China or Russia.

All that having been said, for the moment at least the American economy remains the strongest in the world. All other currencies measure themselves against the dollar. America leads the world in technological innovation, even as China and others copy it as quickly as we create it. Referring to their own stagnant economies, European investors talk about “American exceptionalism” and recommend the US stock market over their own bourses.

Both Russia and China believe the US freedoms will be its downfall – and are committed to it. Thus, both have engaged in massive covert disinformation campaigns – largely successful – to divide Americans, to stir distrust of the American government, and to elect leaders who promise to dismantle it. This is precisely what Putin and Xi desire.

The aggressive, authoritarian, even dictatorial philosophies of Russia and China are absolutely opposed to the American way of life – and are committed to its downfall. To ignore this plain-as-day truth is to accelerate our defeat.

The Tripartite World

This is now the world we live in, in which the primary competition – economically, intellectually, militarily – is between the US, Russia, and China.

Other countries and regions, bluntly, do not matter as much. They are chess pieces manipulated in the grand three-way battle.

India refused to back Ukraine and instead began purchasing oil from Russia, incurring the wrath of the West. Trump’s generally more transactional approach and in particular recent entreaties to Russia may however signal a change.

India’s foreign policy remains one of studied nonalignment (Prime Minister Modi calls it “multialignment,” which is essentially the same thing), focusing more on the more pressing regional issue of its nuclear-armed rival Pakistan – with whom armed conflict always seems imminent.

Internally, India’s internal policies remain concerning. The Indian government has ramped up repressive actions against its Muslim minority. Violence is common and increasingly the authorities turn a blind eye.

Nevertheless India remains economically tied to the US. The two countries have formed an interdependence: US industries – in particular, IT – heavily rely on the likes of Infosys, Tata, Cognizant, HCL, and others.

Europe, long stagnant, may be awakening as a consequence of America’s new isolationism. Several, recognizing the threat from Russia (and the obvious parallels with 1939), have announced increased military support for Ukraine. A wave of European rearmament appears to be on the horizon.

However, the far right continues to expand across Europe, partially in reaction to wave of Syrian immigration in the mid 2010s (nearly a fifth of Syria’s pre-civil war population found their way to Europe). In Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) enjoyed unprecedented gains in recent elections. Marie le Pen’s far-right National Rally won a clear majority in the first round of last summer’s elections in France only to fall short in the second. Fidesz, Hungary’s ruling party, won on a populist and anti-immigrant platform.

Growth remains slow. GDP rises for the UK, France, and Germany are all projected at less than 1% in 2025 (compared to 5% for China).

The Middle East continues to roil with no end in sight. The damage to both Israel and Palestine from the vicious October 7th attacks and the brutal, if deserved, retaliation will linger for generations. For the US, Israel represents an outpost of Western democratic and individualistic values in a troubled region; while it continues to be in American interests to support Israel, the Jewish state has demonstrated – time and again – it is well capable of taking care of itself.

Iran remains an existential threat to both Israel and secondarily the US. By abrogating the agreement limiting Iran’s production of enriched uranium, Trump in his first term effectively allowed that country to proceed apace with nuclear weapons development. The assassination of Qasem Soleimani, effectively Iran’s number-two leader, by a US drone in 2020 (also on Trump’s order) likely eliminated any possibility of renegotiation.

Africa, South and Central America remain strategically important to the US, especially as both China (with the Belt and Road Initiative) and Russia (with the brutal Wagner Group) are making inroads.  Central Africa in particular poses a challenge to global stability: impoverished, dispossessed – and unhappy – males in their 20s comprise the majority of its population, leading to the possibility of multiple failed states in the region. The West African nation of Niger, which after a coup strengthened ties with Russia, recently expelled a US anti-terrorism military force stationed there.

Trump, under the Rasputin-like influence of South African immigrant billionaire Elon Musk, alienated that otherwise neutral country by offering its Afrikaner (white) residents asylum in the US for no particular reason. The State Department then subsequently expelled Pretoria’s ambassador for a speech in which he claimed the US was pursuing white supremacist policies – arguably correct.

Meanwhile, South Africa was the first to sign a Belt and Road partnership with China, which to date has invested some $25 billion there.

China has also invested in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama in Central America. Nicaragua, in a clear sign of Chinese influence, severed relations with Taiwan. Numerous countries in South America have benefited from the Belt and Road Initiative, including Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Peru.

Whether or not these countries ever pay China back is irrelevant. China now owns these chess pieces.

Who Will Win?

The rise of Russian and Chinese influence across the globe with the coincident decline of America on the world stage is troubling, to say the least. Americans’ polarization and self-absorption, their obsession with silly cultural issues, their distrust of their own government, and the fact that they take their freedoms for granted are all leaving the world open to other more sinister powers.

As I’ve stated, China and Russia want nothing less than the utter destruction of the American way of life. It is a top-level strategic objective for both countries.

How can we survive?

First, we must resume our leadership position in the world. Soft power is important. This means resuming generous foreign aid, investing in other countries, providing medical services around the world (in particular, Africa, to stem the tide of HIV and malaria) and assuming, again, moral leadership by calling out dictators and repressive regimes. This is a core vision that every US president from Carter to Reagan to Bush to Clinton shared.

Second, the US must invest in education at home. The confrontation between three powers will not be decided on the battlefield but by smart, clever people – on the diplomatic front, on the financial front, and on the technological front.

Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “Whenever the people are well-informed they can be trusted with their own government.” Yet, appallingly, a large percentage of the American populace cannot name the three branches of government. The federal government should assume authority over the curriculum of our public schools, not for any ideological reason, but so that our kids can compete in the world.

Third, the American budget must be reprioritized. I do not dispute the importance of hard military power — but we have overinvested. We prioritize some 66 nuclear attack submarines (at a cost approaching a half a trillion dollars) over feeding hungry children and ensuring their – and everyone’s – health and well-being. Could we get by with (say) 40 attack subs and feed and educate our kids?

A New World Order

This new world order is characterized by white-hot competition among the three superpowers. China seeks economic dominion; Russia wants to re-establish the USSR; all while the complacent United States declines and withdraws. Even worse, the US appears to be in a state of intellectual collapse, not recognizing or even wanting to recognize, the dangerous world around it.

History does not repeat itself. Yet one cannot help but compare our time to previous ones: what will be the Sudetenland or the Poland that trips the world into another cataclysm?

Posted on

The End of the World

According to the Federation of Nuclear Scientists, Russia possesses some 5,580 nuclear warheads, most of which are aimed at us.

I believe we have forgotten the terror that these end-of-the-world weapons should inspire. No nuclear war has ever happened, so no need to worry. Except that we’ve come very, very close, and more than once.

Imagine: it’s a sunny day. You look up and see a streak of light heading down. Then: a blinding flash.

If you’re close to the blast, you are instantly vaporized, with no warning. One moment you’re there, the next moment every single bit of you is gone, vanished from the face of the earth; no physical trace of you exists, will ever exist again.

If you’re a little further away a horrifying phenomenon occurs: the heat of the blast carbonizes your body. When Japanese and American investigators came to Hiroshima shortly after the war’s end, they found thousands of blackened human forms. You’re turned, in effect, to charcoal.

Fire storms ignite everywhere. Touch your face and your skin peels off. The burns are unimaginable. After the Hiroshima blast, thousands jumped into the river in the center of the city to get relief from the pain. Thousands of others lost their sight and wander, aimlessly, in agony through the streets.

They have become ghosts.

Tens of thousands more will contract radiation sickness and cancer of all forms over the coming months and years.

At least three times in the nuclear age we have come close to Armageddon. Once, in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a brave Soviet officer named Vasilii Arkhipov disobeyed orders and prevented the firing of nuclear torpedoes near Florida. In 1983, Stanislav Petrov, a colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces, overrode a computer warning of an American attack (the malfunction was later traced to sunlight reflecting off clouds). Arkhipov and Petrov quite literally saved the world.

Later that same year, after hardline comments by President Ronald Reagan, NATO forces conducted military exercises, codenamed Able Archer, which were so realistic that the Soviets believed a pre-emptive attack was imminent. Only at the last minute when it became apparent that the Soviets were mobilizing (including loading their bombers with nuclear weapons) the exercise was called off.

That’s how close we’ve come. And who knows if there have been other such incidents?

The comparatively tiny Hiroshima blast killed 70,000 people.

Imagine if it were New York.

(some of this paraphrased from Stuxnet: A Worm’s Tale, a Microsoft Think Week paper, by Barry Briggs.)

Posted on

Educating Our Kids is a Matter of National Security

The state and local jurisdictions have clearly and without question done a horrible job educating our children. Nowhere is that clearer than in the South where Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana rank at the bottom.

What we need is not to dismantle the Department of Education but rather to strengthen it, by giving it the authority to institute a national, STEAM-focused (Science, Tech, Engineering, Arts, and Math) curriculum with standardized tests to measure progress. There’s no reason that kids in Alabama, or elsewhere, should be held back because their idiot legislators refused to fund schools or to teach evolution or fund programming classes.

Listen: I’ve worked in Big Tech for half a century. I have rarely seen kids from the Deep South in my industry (and having lived there I know there are a lot of smart kids); I can only conclude that it’s because their schools did not adequately prepare them for the tech job market.

This is not an issue of federal encroachment or wokeness or social engineering. This is about national competitiveness: while chaos rules our government India and China are quietly churning out hundreds of thousands of qualified engineering graduates every year.

We may indeed invest $500b in AI data centers (apparently, only in red states). But the only ones who will understand how to use them, at this rate, will be graduates of Tsinghua and Beijing Universities, and the Indian Institutes of Technology, while we sink into a morass of stupidity, idiot debates over meaningless issues, and mediocrity.

Posted on

Politics, Explained

Politics, explained in a nice 2×2 matrix.

Look carefully. The x-axis is labeled “stupid, average, smart.” The y-axis “evil” and “good.”

On the top left are the mostly good-intentioned people who, by and large, are just about getting by: people like you and me. We don’t have time for all the shenanigans that the politicians engage in – we have bills to pay, children to raise, eggs to buy at the grocery store. We don’t time to learn about the complex issues facing us (although I somewhat blame the media for this – who remembers the great documentaries of the 70s and 80s, like “CBS Reports” on “Hunger in America” and “The Defense of the United States?” These multi-hour docs were important and relevant!)

In any event it’s us, the normal people, that the other three quadrants vie for in elections, or coups, or revolutions.

On the bottom left – the Stupid-Evil are politicians who simply say they can solve everything, end of story. Leave it to us, they say. And they spread lies and disinformation (“the foreigners are taking all our jobs,” “they’re grooming our kids in school!”) to make sure we vote for them.

On the bottom right are the Smart-Evil. They’re about raw, unbridled power, pure and simple. And they get it and keep it by eliminating those who aren’t with them. It’s us and them and you better not be one of them, a kulak or a Jew or a Uighur because one night we’ll be knocking on your door! And don’t show any sympathy to those people either, because we’re coming for you too!

And on the top right are the good guys, those who recognize that progress for all the people, all of us, takes time, takes thought, and takes work. They know they might not have all the answers right now…but they ask you to have some faith in their good intentions and focus.

Sometimes we get tired or impatient with how long it takes and with the setbacks that inevitably occur. Frustrated, we allow someone on the bottom to take power, and shame on us for doing so.

You may not agree with the names I’ve put in the matrix (it’s my matrix and I’ll put in whomever I want.) Feel free to do your own.

But that’s it. That’s the grand cycle. Like it or not.

Posted on

Is China’s DeepSeek a Threat to Microsoft’s AI Strategy?

All the tech world continues to be abuzz as it woke yesterday morning to the release of the DeepSeek-R1 family of AI language models, funded and created in China. At one point during the day yesterday tech stocks had plummeted – only to return to more or less normalcy (whatever that means) today.

Has the AI bubble burst, as many (including me) have predicted? Is Microsoft’s AI strategy in jeopardy?

I don’t think so. But let’s dive into the details to fully understand its ramifications.  

Planning and Reasoning

DeepSeek rivals the most advanced AI models (such as OpenAI’s o1) in its ability to plan and reason in order to solve a problem.

Consider this problem. Notice that DeepSeek begins with a <think> step in which it plans its attack on the problem:

>>> what is 2*10 divided 4 with pi added to it?
<think>
First, I need to calculate the product of 2 and 10.
Next, I will divide that result by 4.

Finally, I’ll add the value of π (pi) to the quotient obtained from the division.
</think>

Then it executes its plan:

1. **Multiply 2 and 10:**
   2 \times 10 = 20

2. **Divide the result by 4:**
   20 \div 4 = 5

 3. **Add π (pi) to the quotient:**
  5 + \pi

Since π is approximately 3.1416, we have:
   5 + 3.1416 = 8.1416

**Final Answer:**
 {8.14}

At first blush it seems remarkable; DeepSeek’s methodical thinking process at least appears to closely mimic how humans think (very similar to how OpenAI’s o1 model functions).

But it’s worth pointing out that DeepSeek is not a from-scratch LLM – it’s a distillation of other foundation models (Meta’s Llama and Alibaba’s QWEN). Essentially DeepSeek was “taught” by them – meaning DeepSeek did not need the vast resources that their pedagogues required.

DeepSeek is Open-Source

Importantly, DeepSeek’s models – there are six of them varying by number of parameters – are freely downloadable; all but the largest fit comfortably on a decent-size desktop (the 14 billion parameter model occupies about 9GB on my machine).

Moreover, DeepSeek is offered under the permissive MIT License (“…without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software…” ) which means that developers can use it in applications pretty much any way they want. Purportedly, even the model weights are available, although I haven’t found them yet (DeepSeek’s GitHub repo, created yesterday, is here.) And finally, the DeepSeek team has published a comprehensive paper outlining their technical methodology – meaning that anyone, in theory, can reproduce their work (apparently there is work in progress to do just that).

Microsoft and DeepSeek (and Other LLMs Generally)

But how does it affect Microsoft and its strategy?

It’s no secret that LLMs in their short lifetime have become commoditized, a fact Microsoft has wisely recognized. Since ChatGPT was announced just a little over two years ago, dozens of foundation and frontier models have appeared; the LLM repo HuggingFace now offers well over 1 million fine-tuned large and small language models.

In fact, models form just one part of Microsoft’s overall strategy, which comprises a far more expansive and inclusive view of AI in the enterprise. For Microsoft, the true value of AI lies in the myriad applications it can power – and that developers can build using it.

Microsoft’s vision for the AI-powered enterprise includes providing user interfaces to LLMs connected to corporate data (Copilot); offering a wide assortment of LLMs for developers to make use of; deep set of AI-focused tools for developers to use (AI Builder, AI Foundry, and ML Studio); and lastly, providing access to the ”fuel” that powers enterprise AI applications, data, including productivity data (Microsoft 365), analytical data (Fabric), and corporate applications through connectors.

Political Ramifications of DeepSeek: Another TikTok?

It’s unlikely that the current US administration will, or can, block the use of DeepSeek as it nearly did with TikTok. By now DeepSeek has been downloaded to millions of computers (including, as you’ve seen, mine); blocking it as a purely technical matter will be close to impossible.

Nevertheless, because DeepSeek originates in China, geopolitics cannot be ignored. I asked it point-blank if China’s ruler Xi Jinping is a dictator; after an over-600-word dissertation, it replied (note that, as mentioned, I am using a downloaded version of DeepSeek; evidently the online version, hosted in China, is more circumspect):

Labeling Xi Jinping as a dictator depends on one’s perspective of China’s political system and the definition of dictatorship applied. Considering the unique governance structure and collective leadership within the CCP, it is complex to apply traditional Western definitions of dictatorship to China’s context.

I then asked Microsoft’s homegrown Phi4 model the same question and received more or less the same diplomatic, noncommittal answer:

Ultimately, whether one views Xi Jinping as a dictator may depend on their interpretation of political systems, definitions of democracy and authoritarianism, and perspectives on governance in different cultural contexts.

DeepSeek also (somewhat surprisingly) provided relatively objective answers on topics controversial in China, such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre; however it refused to answer a question about the state of the Chinese housing market, saying it only provides “helpful and harmless responses.” Hmmm.

Microsoft, OpenAI, and DeepSeek

The interactions above raise some important questions. Although DeepSeek appears to have achieved a new level of LLM transparency, we do not yet know to what extent bias and harmful content are filtered or guardrails have been applied – whereas Microsoft and OpenAI scrupulously follow Responsible AI methodologies. Additionally, not much is known about the Chinese startup that created it, which might raise concerns about using DeepSeek in mission-critical applications.

It’s not perfect by any means. DeepSeek’s knowledge stops at July 2023 and it doesn’t appear to have scoured every available internet source (for example, it didn’t know that I worked at Microsoft so hadn’t seen either my personal website or LinkedIn).

Nevertheless, it’s possible, likely even, that DeepSeek models could show up in Azure’s stable of LLMs, to be evaluated, compared, tested, and perhaps deployed within applications on Azure. So at least in one way DeepSeek could complement Azure.

But, when asked how DeepSeek could impact Microsoft, the LLM itself had a slightly more ominous answer:

…in the fast-evolving tech landscape, companies like DeepSeek could potentially compete with Microsoft in areas such as AI-powered search engines, enterprise software solutions, or cloud services. For example, if DeepSeek develops advanced AI tools that rival Microsoft’s offerings (like Copilot for Office), it could influence market dynamics. Similarly, partnerships or collaborations between the two companies could also emerge in the future.

Well, I doubt either will happen; it’s hard to see a DeepSeek-based Copilot as it’s so tightly integrated into Microsoft 365. My view is rather that DeepSeek – just one component of the overall AI stack – will prove generally beneficial to the overall AI ecosystem and Microsoft in particular.

But we’ll see.

Posted on

Barry’s Holiday Wish List for Windows

Now as you all know, I love Microsoft Windows. I have used it and its predecessor DOS since the early 1980s (yes, I’m old); its evolution over the years has been little short of amazing. And of course I worked for Microsoft here in the Pacific Northwest for a decade and a half.

That said.

I have a number of everyday gripes that I just wish Microsoft would fix for once and for all. None of these are, in my view as a software developer of fifty years’ standing (wow) appear very difficult – so please, team, just fix them!

In no particular order:

Make Authenticator Work With Apple Watch

Unlike my younger comrades, my iPhone is not an appendage to my body. Often (real often) I’m at my PC and some account times out, I have to type in the magic number and…where did I leave my phone?

I imagine there’s some Bluetooth security issue with making it work on the watch, but why can’t we fix it?

Let Outlook and Teams Share Identities

How many times have you had to sign into your email account (using Authenticator) and moments later had to repeat the process with Teams?

This feels like the relevant engineering groups have to have a meeting. Just saying.

Settings and Control Panel

Just this morning I was attempting to move the default location of Windows Update from C: to D:. It’s not clear this is even possible, but searching for answers yields any number of inconsistent results – because with nearly every release of Windows some Settings move, change, are deleted, or move from Control Panel to Settings, or whatever.

Dear Microsoft: rid of Control Panel for once and for all. Or Settings. Whatever. And then don’t change the UI. Ever.

Sound: Part 1

Save the last volume setting and don’t reset it to the super-loud default for no apparent reason. Every time I load Teams or YouTube Windows blasts my ears.

Sound: Part 2

This one’s a bit esoteric but applies, I imagine to any musician attempting to use Windows. I play the pipe organ (badly) and use Hauptwerk. There’s a known issue with the Windows Audio subsystem in which input from MIDI keyboards is batched – which means when you press a key there’s noticeable latency. It makes Windows essentially unusable for MIDI (music) devices unless you buy external hardware (I use an inexpensive Presonus AudioBox).

This works with no issue on a Mac – should be easy to fix on Windows.

Clean Up the C: Drive

I’ve complained about this before. Microsoft installs apps on C:\Program Files, C:\Program Files (x86), C:\Users\You\AppData (and three folders within)…why? (And \AppData is hidden!)  Macs just have /Applications. It’s a mess.

Moreover: there’s so much junk on the C: drive, some of it from Microsoft, a lot of it from vendors – like the 13GB (!) installer for my keyboard and mouse from Razer. There are .DMP files, log files that never get purged or deleted but rather grow forever, literally occupying tens of gigabytes of space. Microsoft should develop and enforce rules about how the C: drive is used. It’s the Wild West now.

What Changed?

Because I have a relatively small C: drive (256GB SSD) I keep an eye on free space (I wrote my own df command-line app to report free space.)

One day I have 13GB free. Another 8GB. Then 4GB, 2GB. Then 10GB. Why? What changed? (It wasn’t a Windows Update.)

I use the invaluable Wiztree to report on disk usage but it doesn’t show what changed from one day to the next. And I would like to know – and control – when and where the downloads happen.

Why Is It Slow?

Recently on my machine (an i9 with 64GB RAM with up to date antivirus) that old reliable Ctrl-Alt-Del app Task Manager takes forever to load. And sometimes (like right now) it displays the white “(Not responding” title bar).

Why? Not even Bing Chat or ChatGPT can help, other than to give some banal and useless advice.

Ultimately I’d really like to know What My Machine Is Doing, and have the tools to (easily) dive down to the bit level. I fear, however, that’s a whole new OS rewritten from scratch.

Posted on

Did Trump Give Iran the Bomb?

In 2018 Trump withdrew the US from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), otherwise known as the “Iran nuclear deal.” Under the terms Iran limited its nuclear activities in return for the lifting of various economic sanctions and opening of some markets.

As is well known, the International Atomic Energy Agency regularly conducted inspections concluding that Iran was complying with the deal. The US (including the Trump administration) regularly certified Iran’s compliance.

Trump canceled it. And what was the result? Unsurprisingly, the (odious) Iranian regime immediately redoubled its efforts to manufacture highly enriched uranium (U235). By most accounts they are weeks or even days away from nuclear breakout — an event which will destabilize Israel, the Middle East, and the world, for years.

In other words, Trump gave Iran the bomb.

In my opinion this action, largely ignored by both parties and by the media, represents the single greatest betrayal by the United States of any ally — in this case one of our closest and most valued allies. To be clear: an Iranian bomb is an existential threat to Israel, and, for that matter, to the US and the West as a whole. Even a successful test — i.e., an explosion — of an Iranian nuclear weapon will send shock waves through the word: militaries will mobilize, stock markets will crash, and the world will have become a far more dangerous place.

Instead, conservatives change the topic: they laud the move of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem — incidentally one of the few foreign policy decisions by the Trump administration that I agree with — but purely symbolic and largely meaningless in terms of the larger policy goal of bringing stability to the region.

Allowing Iran nuclear capability is a shameful and thoughtless action that, frankly, epitomizes Trump and his ilk: no regard for consequences, no real understanding of world affairs, just a big dumb angry male stomping about the world.

Posted on

Barry’s Law of Breakthroughs

By Barry Briggs

My management coach, a number of years ago, impressed upon me the notion of breakthrough results. If we were planning on 5% growth, then why not achieve 30% growth? 100%? Why limit your thinking to the conventional, to the expected, to the sensible? One might object: that’s hard, would take a ton more work.

What if it doesn’t?

Instead, he suggested, organizations should set themselves goals they might otherwise have thought unrealistic – and then figure out how to achieve them.

Breakthroughs.

We’ve all seen such results: the internet, the iPhone, artificial intelligence. These all represent huge steps forward. The iPhone, for example, did not build on previous mobile phones like the Blackberry or the (godawful) Windows Phone; instead, Apple completely reimagined the product space and invented a whole ecosystem of apps, developers, and marketplace.

Should you swing for the fences?

Well, why not?

Check out the diagram. Basically, it says that for any initiative, you can either take the incremental route or the breakthrough route.

The incremental route means you carefully plan safe, predictable updates. In software, that means you do point releases: 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, and so on. Each release has a small amount of improvements, they’re very predictable in terms of schedule, cost, and time, and, as the chart says, everyone is guaranteed a decent performance review. It’s highly unlikely that any step along the way will fail. (Apple could have made a Blackberry clone and achieved some modest success; but they didn’t.)

The breakthrough route is riskier but yields greater – sometimes much greater – rewards. Breakthroughs “knock over the poker table,” as a friend memorably put it. In a breakthrough-oriented organization, you design nirvana, and then figure out what it will take to get there. There are often many unknowns, problems whose solution is not immediately apparent. You might not understand the market need, or you might even be inventing a new market category; you might not have the resources human or otherwise immediately available; and so on. However, as the iPhone proved, a breakthrough innovation, if you can sleep at night with the risk, can be very rewarding indeed!  

But look again at the chart. I’m asserting that breakthroughs and incremental progress can take roughly the same amount of time and effort. It’s really just a question of how much risk and how many unknowns you and your organization can tolerate.

So why not always go for the breakthrough?  

Good question. If you had asked me a decade or so ago, I would have said, “right, why not? Swing for the fences! Every time!”  

But I am older and wiser now. Organizations – and people – are not always ready for breakthroughs. Caution, even fear, are understandable when individuals are presented with big ideas.

So before you aim for the stars, you’ll have to enroll your team in your vision. They’ll have to buy into it as much as you do and be as invested as you are. Otherwise you’ll just be that wild-eyed revolutionary in the corner – even if you’re 100% right.

That can be hard. Here are some things to think about:

  • What’s in it for them? Paint a picture of what life would be like for your stakeholders if they could achieve the breakthrough. If you can get 50% revenue lift instead of 5% how great would that be? You could hire more people, give bigger bonuses, give everyone a company car, perhaps! In other words: enroll your team in your vision.
  • Your track record counts. If you’re the new guy with two months on the job, you might not be as successful persuading others as the woman down the hall with ten years’ experience and multiple big-time successes under her belt. What to do in that case? Convince her and let her be the champion.
  • Be honest with your team. Lack of honesty or authenticity can kill any initiative, not just the big ones. If at the end of the day it’s really just all about you, sit down. And remember, communication is everything: as breakthroughs are hard, there will be temptations to slow or stop; you’ll need to continuously remind your team of the road they’re traveling. And listen to what they say to you: in a breakthrough project there will be lots of unexpected problems, midcourse corrections, and sudden opportunities. Be a servant leader.
  • Be honest with yourself. Are you satisfied that your breakthrough goals are really feasible? Have you done your homework? After all, warp drive or transporters would be wonderful breakthroughs but maybe not possible, at least in our lifetimes. You may not know the answers to all the problems, but you have to have faith in yourself and in your team that the problems can indeed be solved.
  • Your organization just might not be ready, for a variety of reasons. Maybe they just came off of a death-march project. Or they’ve had one too many “breakthrough” projects and are suffering from breakthrough “hangovers.” Human nature dictates only so many paradigm shifts per year, or at a time. Change management is hard, time-consuming, and stressful.

So what that means is you need to have your ear to the ground: understand what your team and your organization could be ready for – and perhaps what it’s not.

But at the end of the day: wouldn’t it be better to be standing on the mountaintop, rather than thinking how hard the next day’s climb will be?

Posted on

AI: What’s Wrong and How to Fix It

Want to know how generative AI works?

Imagine a newborn child. Now, just for fun, imagine that this child – we’ll call him Karl – is born with the ability to read. I know, no way, but suspend your disbelief for just a second.

So Karl can read. And by the way, he can read really, really fast.

Now, just for fun, let’s give poor Karl the entire contents of the internet to read. All of it.

Task done, everything Karl knows is from the internet.

Most infants learn basic, foundational things as they grow up. “Hey look, I’ve got hands! Oh wow, feet too! The dog’s got four legs… and a tail…and it barks!”

But Karl never learned these things. Karl only knows what he read on the internet. So if we ask Karl to write an RFP (Request for Proposal, a common business document) that’s like others our company has written, he’ll probably do a fantastic job. Why? Because he’s read zillions of them, knows what they look like, and can replicate the pattern.

However, Karl can’t get common-sense relationships, as Gary Marcus elegantly pointed out in this blog post. As he notes, Karl may know that Joe’s mother is Mary, but is unable to deduce from that fact that (therefore) Mary’s son is Joe.

Nor can Karl do math: ask him to calculate 105 divided by 7 and unless he finds that exact example somewhere in the vast corpus of the internet, he’ll get it wrong.

Worse, he’ll very authoritatively return that wrong answer to you.

That’s a loose analogy of how Large Language Models (LLMs) work. LLMs scrape huge quantities of data from the internet and apply statistics to analyze queries and return answers. It’s a ton of math…but it’s just math.

In generating an answer, LLMs like ChatGPT will typically create multiple possible responses and score them “adversarially” using mathematical and statistical algorithms. Does this look right? How about that? Which one’s better?” These answers, however, are tested against patterns it finds – where else? –  in the internet.

What’s missing, in this writer’s humble opinion, is an underlying, core set of common-sense relationships – ontologies to use the technical term. “A mammal is a lifeform that gives live birth and has hair. A dog is a form of animal. A horse is a form of animal. Dogs and horses have four legs and tails.” And so on.

LLMs need what is called a “ground truth” – a set of indisputable facts and relationships against which it can validate its responses, so that it can – the word “instinctively” comes to mind – know that the mother of a son is also the son’s mother.

Microsoft claims that Bing Chat leverages Bing’s internal “knowledge graph,” which is a set of facts – biographies of famous people, facts about cities and countries, and so on, and this is a start, for sure. More interestingly, Cycorp, which has been around for decades, has built enormous such knowledge bases. And there are undoubtedly others.

What I’m advocating is that such knowledge bases – facts, properties, relationships, maybe even other things (like Asimov’s Three Laws) underly LLMs. In the adversarial process of generating answers, such knowledge bases could, in theory, not only make LLMs more accurate and reliable but also – dare I say it – ethical.

(This post was inspired, in part, by this marvelous paper by the late Doug Lenat and Gary Marcus.)

Posted on

AI, Skynet, and the Destruction of the Human Race (Really)

At 2:14 a.m. Eastern time on August 29th, 1997, Skynet became self-aware.
— The Terminator (1991)

When ChatGPT first arrived on the scene last November, any number of scare-mongering articles appeared almost instantly, all sensationally proclaiming that a crazed, self-aware AI unleashed on the unsuspecting world could, at a stroke, wipe out humanity.

Then, a month or so later, another set of pundits (and tech executives) leaped up to say, no, RELAX, that’s simply not possible, ChatGPT is not self-aware.

Folks, Skynet is possible. Today. Right now.

Remember, AI is Really Just About Math

While there are lots of ways to “do AI,” the most common approach relies on the neural network, a software technology that emulates how neurons work in the human brain. Through a process called training, the program learns how to do tasks.

Here’s a simple example. Pay attention, this is important. Let’s say you have 10 hand-scrawled numerals, zero through nine, each on a 28×28 grid of pixels, like this (AI professionals and those in the know will recognize the industry-standard National Institute of Standards MNIST dataset):

A neural network to recognize these numerals uses “neurons,” which use a set of mathematical equations to determine which number is represented by a particular set of pixels.

The details are more complicated but think of it like this: the training results in a huge mathematical equation; think of y= w1x1 + w2x2+ w3x3+…+ b.

Remember high school algebra? The result y (the number it thinks the pixel pattern is) is calculated by multiplying the inputs (that is, the pixel values: x1, x2, x3) by a set of weights (w1, w2, w3) and then corrected by a bias (“b” in the equation, just an arbitrary number to make the answer come out right).

Weights and biases. Hang on to that thought.

Now, a very simple neural network that recognizes just these ten scribbled numbers requires 13,000 weights and biases which of course no human could ever come up with independently: which is why we have automated training to calculate them. (At its core, the concept is trivial: pick some numbers for the weights, see if they work, if they don’t adjust them. How you figure out the adjustment is the subject of immense amounts of math.)

ChatGPT’s neural networks use something like 175 billion weights and biases.

But it’s still just math.

But If It’s Just Math, How Does Skynet “Achieve Self-Awareness?”

Who needs self-awareness?

Well, we do, obviously, and a rather depressingly large number of us lack it.

But modern AI technology does not require self-awareness to destroy the human race.

The war in Ukraine, fought largely by drones, provides a hint of what could go wrong. Let’s assume that the drones have enough intelligence (that is, trained AI programs) to follow GPS coordinates to a location, to stay on course despite weather, avoid obstacles and perhaps even electronic interference. In other words, each drone is an independent AI machine.

Now this is different from the Skynet scenario in which the bad robots are centrally controlled by an uber-intelligent supercomputer. Instead, drones and cruise missiles and other sorts of autonomous weapons are completely independent once launched. Skynet is decentralized.

Let’s say that somebody somewhere programs a drone to attack soldiers wearing a particular sort of uniform – pretty easy to do. You train the AI with ten or twenty thousand images of people in different sorts of clothing until it accurately recognizes those uniforms. Then you install that trained AI (now just a small piece of software) into your drones.

But…

What if There’s a Bug?  Or Worse…

We know this can happen. There are numerous examples of facial recognition and other sorts of AIs that fail because they were not trained on different ethnicities, or women, or (in speech recognition) accents.

So it’s easy to imagine the poorly trained drones attacking anybody in any uniform, or anybody wearing a green shirt. Or anybody.

Or…

What if someone futzes with those weights and biases we talked about before? That is, hacks the neural network at the heart of the AI? Now predicting the results of such a hack would be pretty hard…but almost certainly would lead to the wrong things being attacked; maybe instead of “soldiers” simply “people.”  Or anything moving. Or – you get the idea.

Just Make This One a Zero and See What Happens

Of course, it’s pretty hard to imagine someone knowing exactly which of the 175 billion parameters need tweaking. (On the other hand, not impossible either, and maybe not at all hard for software.) But less unlikely are simply random changes that produce unexpected, unwanted, and possibly catastrophic results.

Whether it be via poor training or malicious hacking, it’s clear that “bad” AIs unleashed upon the world could have some pretty scary consequences.

Enjoy your Judgment Day.