Josh Kolm

Toronto, Windsor

Editor at Read the Peak

Business and tech reporter. I don't tweet much anymore.

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Articles

Parliamentary pause puts tech bills in limbo

Jan 9, 2025 | readthepeak.com | Josh Kolm

Regulations that have taken a really long time to hit parliament may have to start from scratch. What happened: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau prorogued parliament alongside his resignation announcement, putting the future of several pieces of legislation relevant to the tech industry up in the air. Similar to when parliament is dissolved ahead of an election, any legislation that has not yet received royal assent dies when parliament is prorogued, and all committee activity ceases.
Ransomware gets more destructive

Dec 4, 2024 | readthepeak.com | Josh Kolm

Hackers are changing their playbook to cause as much chaos as possible. Driving the news: Ransomware hackers are increasingly targeting tech and software vendors that count big companies among their customers in a “kill multiple birds with one hack” situation. Unit 42, Palo Alto Networks’ threat intelligence team, says this more destructive approach will be a major thread in 2025.
Canadian news outlets get in the AI copyright fight

Nov 29, 2024 | dailyhive.com | Josh Kolm

Nov 29 2024, 10:02 pmRival news organizations are banding together for a noble cause: protecting their copyrighted materials from ChatGPT. What happened:Â A coalition of Canadian news companiesÂ is suing OpenAI, claiming the company illegally trained its AI models on their news stories. The group wants $20,000 per article used by OpenAI, which could put the total damages in the billions. The group includes Torstar,Â The Globe and Mail,Â Postmedia, Canadian Press, and CBC.
Everything is a data source for AI developers

Nov 27, 2024 | readthepeak.com | Josh Kolm

No one’s jokes, memes, or Pokémon are safe from the relentless pursuit of AI training data. What happened: Someone pulled one million Bluesky posts together and turned them into a dataset for machine learning and AI training.
Okay, here’s what’s going on with Bluesky

Nov 20, 2024 | readthepeak.com | Josh Kolm

“Is Bluesky the new Twitter” is a question that’s been asked a lot this year, but this most recent burst of momentum could be what gets it there. Driving the news: Bluesky is nearing 21 million users as a surge of sign-ups that began after the U.S. election continues. But the important stat is daily active users — people who actually use the app after making an account — which data firm Similarweb estimates now matches Meta’s Threads in the U.S. and narrowed the gap everywhere else.
New AI models are struggling to evolve

Nov 15, 2024 | readthepeak.com | Josh Kolm

AI companies are starting to find out that bigger isn’t always better. Driving the news: The likes of OpenAI and Google are reportedly seeing diminishing returns on work creating their next, more powerful AI models. Developers assumed throwing computing power, chips, and talent at their models would keep the rate of improvement going steady, but their next models aren’t yet seeing as big of a step up in performance.
Militaries are trying to recruit Big Tech’s AI

Nov 13, 2024 | readthepeak.com | Josh Kolm

More AI developers are willing to navigate the ethical battleground of letting militaries put their models to use. Driving the news: Tech companies have changed their policies and struck deals in recent week that could let militaries integrate more AI into what they do.
Big Tech wants AI glasses to be the next hot gadget

Nov 6, 2024 | readthepeak.com | Josh Kolm

Do you rarely use the growing number of AI features being built into your phone? Would you use them more if you were wearing them on your face? What happened: Caitlin Kalinowski — who has been working on hardware at Meta for nine years and led the team that made the head-turning Orion AR glasses prototype — jumped ship to OpenAI as the startup builds out its hardware and robotics teams.
AI search is heating up

Nov 1, 2024 | readthepeak.com | Josh Kolm

OpenAI wants to make ChatGPT the new place you turn when you want to Google something. What happened: OpenAI launched its long-rumoured version of AI-powered search. Integrated into ChatGPT, the chatbot will detect when a question requires info from the web and pull up-to-date info like news stories, stock prices, maps, and more — instead of only using data it was trained on.
Some experts are cool on the promise of AGI

Oct 30, 2024 | readthepeak.com | Josh Kolm

Depending on who you ask, artificial general intelligence might not be the looming game-changer some companies have made it out to be. What happened: Nick Frosst, co-founder of Canadian AI company Cohere, said the money being thrown at developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) doesn’t “make a ton of sense.” As a scientist, Frosst believes developers and companies need to be honest about what AI is actually capable of.