ChatGPT and GPT-4 are now hot topics. I wrote earlier that they would alter the user experience forever. Another interesting area is how this opens a lot of new opportunities to use text (natural language) as input. It is, of course, quite natural that a language model type AI can use text input. But it is still interesting to think about how it can enable a lot of new data to be analyzed and new areas to utilize AI, even in politics, history, or medicine.

The debate about whether ChatGPT and GPT-4 are genuine breakthroughs for AI is missing the fact that GPT is now making complex AI-based services easier to use. The implications for the user experience are enormous. — ChatGPT, GPT-4 and, more generally, generative NLP (natural language processing) services have gotten much attention. Some believe they are a real breakthrough for AI. Others wonder if this is just another hype wave.

The distinction between negative and positive liberties is important in sociology and philosophy, especially when it comes to offering equal opportunities to citizens. — The growing wave of regulations for data The EU will introduce its new Data Act soon. The US administration is also planning the next steps to improve privacy. Even China has introduced some legislation to protect privacy. In the UK, there have been discussions to modify privacy-related legislation from EU’s regulation (GDPR) to the post-Brexit time.

On November 16–17, 2022, Insurance Innovators Summit will take place in London. The event is known as “the world’s most important insurance conference,” which aims to “define the future of insurance.” — Every year, Insurance Innovators Summit attracts a thousand insurance technology leaders and next-gen disruptors from across the globe. …

Smart cities run on data generated by the people who live in them. This raises privacy issues that smart city projects aren’t taking seriously enough. — Recently, I was involved in a discussion about how smart cities can access data from people’s apartments to improve energy efficiency. A key question in such a scenario is: how do you convince people to share their apartment data with the smart grid? …

Many services and processes nowadays are based on data analytics: finance markets, health services, marketing, risk management, predictive maintenance, and many others. Quite often, the use of data is focused on specific targets and goals — e.g., using specific data to calculate a score and propensity to take certain actions. And it makes sense in many cases. Yet, as we know, we can lose the big picture if we only focus on details. Could we use data better and more holistically to understand the world, human beings as a whole, or how different things impact each other?

Data silos, data pipelining and other daily issues enterprises have with their data are talked about so often these days that they’re practically clichés. In fact, this is an area where we have seen several unicorns (e.g. Databricks, Snowflake) for enterprise data during the last ten years. But these problems are not limited to enterprise IT and data — we’re now seeing the same issues with IoT, sensor systems and wearables. The number of data sources is growing rapidly, but the bottleneck is combining the data and converting it to a format where it can be fully utilized. There will be many winners and losers seeking a solution to this — and the losers will likely be the ones searching for a one-size-fits-all solution that can work across any industry.

When we look back on the various ‘G’s, 3G and smartphones were a major paradigm shift from the old-fashioned phone calls and feature phones of the 2G era to mobile internet and apps that really took off when 4G arrived. But the last fifteen years have been a relatively stable era for mobile services — the networks are faster and the smartphones have more processing power and bigger screens; yet, the business model has remained basically the same since that big paradigm shift from voice calls to mobile broadband data, streaming and apps. Now that 5G is currently being rolled out, while 6G already in the pipeline and expected to arrive in 2030 or so, it seems likely we will see another major paradigm shift in mobile services.

Open-source solutions require an ecosystem that finds the right balance between being both genuinely open-source and a sustainable business. — A few months ago, Brad Smith (the President of Microsoft) published his latest book Tools and Weapons where he highlighted 15 most important technology challenges for the next generation. …