By Peter Clarke
What’s at stake:
Rapidus Corp. is Japan’s great hope for a reentry into semiconductor manufacturing at 2nm. Such an ambitious plan is to be commended. But this must be also recognized as a high-risk project.
By Bolaji Ojo
What’s at stake:
Infineon failed once to purchase Wolfspeed, but the landscape has changed so dramatically that a retry seven years later, for more consequential reasons, should be considered by its management.
What’s at stake:
Many companies talk up their corporate missions and/or corporate cultures. But these intangible are, well … intangible. It’s hard to judge whether they really mean the corporate slogans printed on posters and tacked up on the wall. But, to veteran observers, there are clues.
Autonomous vehicle companies routinely talk about their “safety first” corporate culture. Companies in every industry spout mottos like “Quality is in our DNA.”
For an outsider, namely me, only one point — beyond platitudes and posters — is clear. They repeat these golden rules because they’re “the right things to say.”
Read More »Corporate Culture? What Corporate Culture?
By Bolaji Ojo
What’s at stake:
Microchip actively participated in the consolidation of its industry segment, but its success, rising valuation and stable business make it a target too. Can any rival dare to take it up now that it is so much bigger?
Even after the frenzied mergers and acquisition actions of the last decade, the semiconductor industry still has quite a few juicy targets but not many are as mouth wateringly appealing as Microchip Technology Inc.
The microcontroller supplier is a voracious consolidator that has gobbled up some 25 companies in the last 12 years, but it stands the risks of becoming a victim of its own success.
Read More »Microchip: Could This M&A Predator Become Prey?
What’s at stake:
Everyone’s mimicking Tesla, pioneer of the software-defined vehicle. Software will buttress next-generation vehicle architectures. But shouldn’t carmaker imagination reach further, to a vehicle defined by user experience?
The “software-defined vehicle” is a convenient and overused terminology when auto industry types discuss the architecture of future vehicles. The term implies a car whose functions and performance can be patched, fixed, and updated over the air. Such software can alter and improve control, for example, of a vehicle’s firmware and entertainment system.
But c’mon. Can’t we do better than that?
Read More »Get Ready for UX-Defined Vehicles or Not
What’s at stake:
General Motors is throwing all the sensor technologies they can scrounge at its upcoming Ultra Cruise – the company’s next-generation hands-free driving system. Will that make Ultra Cruise a better “automated vehicle” than a Tesla?
The sensor suite that comes with General Motor’s new Ultra Cruise seems quite impressive. But what jumped out to me in GM’s announcement wasn’t the gadgetry. The grabber was the new claim that GM customers will “over time” be able to “travel truly hands-free with Ultra Cruise across nearly every paved public road in the U.S. and Canada, including city streets, subdivisions and rural roads, in addition to highways.”
Read More »The Ultra Question for Ultra Cruise
We’re running into a brick wall.
By David Benjamin
“You’d be surprised how much time I spend explaining to my colleagues that the chief dangers of AI will not come from evil robots with red lasers coming out of their eyes.”
—Congressman (with a Master’s degree in AI) Jay Obernoite
At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January, the question that haunted the conventioneers, from engineers and marketing flacks to a seedy and asocial army of “influencers,” was “How do I talk to my washing machine?”
Read More »Love Has No Algorithm
By Bolaji Ojo
What’s at stake?
ChatGPT and generative artificial intelligence variants will be massively disruptive but that is no reason to react with the kind of apprehension that could stunt their use and deprive society of the benefits. Moreover, AI is here to stay, and its financial potentials are enormous.
The recent controversy over the fast adoption of ChatGPT and generative AI borders on hysteria. Having just broken into widespread use, the apprehension about how artificial intelligence will impact all aspects of economic and social lives is understandable. However, just like in the early days of the internet, we have not even begun to plumb the depths of how the technology will be applied in years to come.
Read More »ChatGPT & AI: Stop Panicking and Look at the Potentials
By Girish Mhatre
In the latest of the zombie apocalypse sagas – HBO’s “The Last of Us” – a deadly, highly infectious fungal pathogen causes most of the world’s human population to morph into hordes of walking dead.
It’s art anticipating life.
The pathogen running rampant today is OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a natural language processing system of the class known as Large Language Models (LLMs). Think of it as a chatbot that’s light years ahead of the kind you might encounter on a web site.
Read More »ChatGPT Will Eat Our Brains
