Michael Martinez

One of the largest obstacles to plentiful and abundant wind power is not creating them, but the transportation of the components themselves — turbines and blades. We've all seen the photos of massive trucks carrying these parts on the interstate, but we must keep in mind that trucking is not the only means of transportation in the world. 

A company called Radia is building the "WindRunner" that hopes to complete the same task by air, by 2030. The need for such an oversized plane couldn't be clearer:

Any larger and the blades couldn’t be moved over land, since they wouldn’t fit through tunnels or overpasses, or be able to accommodate some of the sharper curves of roads and rails.  - IEEE Spectrum

The need for larger windmills on farmland is a task that is global. You'll need less infrastructure because, as IEEE states for the following reasons:

The turbines would be nearly twice as tall, so they’ll reach a higher, gustier part of the atmosphere. And big turbines don’t need to spin as quickly, so they would make economic sense in places with average wind speeds around 5 meters per second compared with the roughly 7 m/s needed to sustain smaller units. 

Those who care about the carbon footprint of such an enormous planes (including me) have concluded that such a transport haul would only be slightly higher than that of trucking them across countries due to the fact that wind power itself is becoming more efficient with new technologies and needing fewer of them over the lifetime of these projects. 

Battery technology in aviation is growing at a rapid acceleration when considering startups such as that of the eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) industries, but more work is needed for larger capacity aircraft, such as battery weight, distribution, and efficiencies within the entire electrical system of the craft.

The integration of these emerging technologies is expected to significantly impact the future of electric aviation. As battery technologies continue to advance, with ongoing research into higher energy densities and faster charging capabilities, the feasibility of fully electric commercial aircraft will improve.

Even as the United States has retreated from the world in the realm of renewables, the rest of the world has not. The Boulder, CO based company will likely have global customers. Such research and development must continue in this fast-growing area. Looking at new ways to solve classic problems is a sign of innovation, not stagnation.

Agentic browsers are all the rage, even I've been writing about them as of late, but Gartner (Yes, that Gartner) has issued a warning that this new technology is "too risky for most organizations to use".

AI browsers, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT Atlas, are often employed to boost efficiency by using autonomous navigation, workflows, and data collection - but they can be tricked by malicious webpages into collecting and transferring sensitive information such as bank account details, credentials, and emails. - TechRadar

As with all new technologies, risks counter equally with new opportunities — Agentic browsers are no different.

Gartner’s fears about the agentic capabilities of AI browser relate to their susceptibility to “indirect prompt-injection-induced rogue agent actions, inaccurate reasoning-driven erroneous agent actions, and further loss and abuse of credentials if the AI browser is deceived into autonomously navigating to a phishing website.” - The Register

This is new territory, thus this technology has yet to be flushed out with safeguards. The idea that a consumer or business can trust an agentic service with credit card or payment information is short sighted, at least at this point in the early adoption phase. Too many prompt injections, phishing attacks, and false positives are too risky at this juncture to warrant browsers (or even most consumers) at this phase to use it as a smart shopper.

We are at the stage of agentic browsing where every GenAI company has a 'me too' strategy when releasing these products, feeling the need to release them without any thought or security concerns in mind just to beat their closest competitors to the market.

This is not to say that it will always be this way. Gartner is telling firms to be careful at this stage of the game where this technology is too new to be time tested, and where anything can happen such as payment fraud, MCP's purchasing items that a business did not ask for, or taking initiative to make plans on a users' behalf without consultation because it assumes it's what was instructed to do.

But overall, the trio of analysts think AI browsers are just too dangerous to use without first conducting risk assessments and suggest that even after that exercise you’ll likely end up with a long list of prohibited use cases – and the job of monitoring an AI browser fleet to enforce the resulting policies. - The Register

IT departments must be more proactive and issue pushback among executives who initiate "full throttle AI plans" for the sake of having AI and assuming it's automatically positive. Gartner isn't warning business to never use this technology but rather conduct proper assessments as a firm would any other technology about to be implemented across a company.

The same rules apply with agentic browsing as they do any new technology — the early adopters must be just that — willing to take these risks in pilot programs within a small, sandboxed environment before rolling out the product to the full range of users. It's important to also realize with how quickly this technology is evolving, this sandboxed environment must be supported for an extended period of time.

Intel founder Andy Grove once said, “only the paranoid survive.” After two-decades of playing catch-up, experiencing setbacks, and not quite perfecting the manufacturing process – what’s left of the decaying PC x86 business is declining and Intel is not the leader in innovation, growing this segment, or even maintaining its market position in this segment anymore.

In a once dominant market, Intel continues to shrink its market share as it attempts to focus on creating its fabrication process for other customers including Broadcom, Qualcomm, and yes – it’s greatest rival, AMD.

According to Mercury Research & Tom’s Hardware:

AMD achieved two important milestones: it now commands shipments of over 25% of all x86 CPUs, and it now ships over 33% (one-third) of desktop x86 CPUs.

As early as a year prior, Intel controlled more than 90 percent of the x86 market, and the share only went higher as we move back time.

AMD’s unit share of all x86 client and server CPUs shipped exceeded 25% and now stands at 25.6%, up from 24.2% in the prior quarter and up from 24% in the same quarter a year ago. Intel still commands 74.4%, but it lost some share in certain segments, allowing AMD to hit an important milestone amid a market shrink.

This means nothing in a decaying market, but it is worth noting that AMD is better positioned to take on leaders such as Nvidia, and not those in a concentrated market such as Intel. Where Intel has failed to diversify, AMD has created a formattable position to today’s leading chip companies.

Intel has gone through many CEO changes over the years including a 10 percent stake from the U.S. government, converting the CHIPS Act grant funds into equity. Mass layoffs have plagued the firm as it attempts to shed its legacy businesses in favor of becoming more of a semiconductor manufacturing company with customers outside of itself.

AMD hit another all-time high, as the mix shifted heavily toward its latest and more expensive EPYC 9005-series platform. The combination of flat unit shipments and rising prices meant that AMD’s server revenue continues to grow significantly faster than its unit share, while Intel’s revenue gains were more limited due to modest declines in its overall shipment mix.

For many years, Intel has struggled on its former dominant server-side products, completely missed mobile, and sold off its networking and other niche businesses to competition. At this point, Intel is letting inertia take it the rest of the way as it buys time to reinvent itself.

Apple and Netflix have had success in cannibalizing their own successful markets to maintain relevance and grow in the face of new customer demands. While business conditions are bleak at Intel, it’s never wise to rule them out – even if they decide a “sum of the parts” strategy is the way to go through divesture. There are still a lot of great assets at the company.

🔔 It’s worth noting that AI is not the entire hashtag#economy. While that is the main focus and likely holding the U.S. out of hashtag#recession — for the moment, we must consider other aspects of a diversified flow of goods and services.

📊 Individuals and businesses must consider contingency plans for when GenAI undergoes a “reversion to the mean” in its journey.

⛴️ The CEO of FreightWaves, a logistics data firm, suggests that the goods economy is already in a recession:

“The U.S. economy is entrenched in a goods recession. While consumer spending on services might be holding steady, the movement of physical goods—the lifeblood of manufacturing, retail, and industrial sectors—has ground to a halt.”

With agentic browsers all the rage, it’s understandable that in these early days – it’s still confusing for the average consumer to unpack. in The Verge’s test with Opera’s Neon browser, the increased friction between tools makes such a product a burden for users. This isn’t to say that the technology is flawed, but early design and early days are its biggest issue.

As with other AI browsers, doing things with Do was also slower than doing it ourselves, though it hinted at what outsourcing the general mundanity of web surfing could look like. And using Do doesn’t mean you can completely check out just yet. Sometimes it encountered obstacles that only a human can handle. When it did, the Do tab at the top of the screen flashed in an easily missed shade of red letting us know we needed to step in and help the bot on its way.

The idea of handholding a tool through a process of thought or stream of tasks can still seem daunting. The consumer is often told that the browser can self-deal without much interaction from the user. We are not to this point as of yet, however, what better time than now to trial and error what this may look like in real-world practicality.

At times, using Neon felt a bit like working with a hapless intern we’d never asked for rather than a sophisticated, timesaving piece of technology. Often, one of its AI systems would ask for feedback, then just launch into a task without waiting for a response. Given its ability to use the browser, it’s all too easy to imagine where this proactivity could go very wrong, such as sending out a load of LinkedIn requests to people you had just wanted to anonymously stalk in a professional capacity.

In many cases, utilizing Generative AI in the workplace takes more time and tweaking than the user completing the task themselves. This is counterintuitive to the narrative that AI makes workflows and completing tasks easy and interoperable. What makes this even more an uphill sell for Opera, is that the Neon browsing product currently costs $20 per month – in its current shipping state.

Given many real world business applications, the jury is still out as to whether GenAI is becoming useful in the workplace, i.e. having to take more time to backtrack to check for accuracy, the proper workflow stream, and the correct results. Until that changes, as I’ve always believed, time and cost savings will not be realized for the everyday user and/or business productivity.

The Verge article concluded the following:

Neon feeling more like an AI browser we need to adapt to than a browser that’s smart enough to adapt to us.

Shoving tools into a browser creates overcomplication, slowdowns, and redundant features that can hinder use. It’s down to the fact that agentic browsing products still do not quite know what to do with themselves, but the fact they are present does not automatically mean cost and time savings are realized.

This is something important to watch as these products either evolve, or whether the browser goes away completely in favor of a new medium that directly puts user in touch with GenAI logic and reasoning.