Hardcore Software by Steven Sinofsky

I was (super) excited to pick up my Mac Neo today. Got the Citrus/512GB. I am completely blown away by it. It is a paradigm shifting computer. But I also have to say it made me a bit melancholy, and I’ll explain why. This is an indulgent post but it has been a decade in the making and it just took today’s Neo to put it all in perspective. Consider this my “review”. I set it up via migration and was up and running quickly.

Too much of what is going on with AI is a race to get to a theoretical end state of a whole new world of business and technology. Many pushing this were around for the tail end of the transition to an internet-based economy and are struggling with what appears to be a “compressed timeline,” much the way people record disruption as a “moment” versus a journey.

CES is a trade show and not a broad consumer event. It just so happens that it attracts so many in the industry that it has often been covered as a broad interest news event. My sense is the coverage was somewhat muted this year (judging by the extremes of X and CNN) but I have a theory as to why. The show had on display extremes of innovation.

This post was originally published for the Windows team (and extended audience) on my Microsoft SharePoint site and shared with key people at the Gates Foundation. It is reproduced as originally posted.

What a year it has been. It has also been a year where I chose to read books from a wide range of topics, some well outside the technology and innovation non-fiction I almost exclusively read. With books on Apple, Nvidia, China, and AI there was plenty in my traditional wheelhouse—some very good and some not so much IMO. Like many hot topics there were often multiple books from different perspectives so I was glad to find the one I might recommend to someone looking for one.

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At a technical level, the paper asks important questions and answers them in super interesting ways. The paper was written by Apple researchers including an intern, The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity by Parshin Shojaee†, Iman Mirzadeh, Keivan Alizadeh, Maxwell Horton, Samy Bengio, Mehrdad Farajtabar († was an intern).

AI is a tool-driven revolution. That’s why it unnerves people. Freeman Dyson said in 1993, “Scientific revolutions are more often driven by new tools than by new concepts.” That’s AI. For those deep in tech, AI is clearly a new paradigm—a sweeping theorem of software. Most paradigm shifts precede new tools. But with AI, we fast-forwarded: from paradigm to tools in under a decade, now used by hundreds of millions.

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If you don’t know MCP—Model Context Protocol—is the hot, new, open source software layer promising to make connecting LLMs and domain specific software a snap.