Mike Loukides Journalist Profile

Articles

Technology Trends for 2025

Jan 14, 2025 | oreilly.com | Mike Loukides

Welcome to our annual report on the usage of the O’Reilly learning platform. It’s been an exciting year, dominated by a constant stream of breakthroughs and announcements in AI, and complicated by industry-wide layoffs. Generative AI gets better and better—but that trend may be at an end. Now the ball is in the application developers’ court: Where, when, and how will AI be integrated into the applications we build and use every day?
Radar Trends to Watch: January 2025

Jan 7, 2025 | oreilly.com | Mike Loukides

Despite its 31 days, December is a short month. It’s hard for announcements and happenings other than office parties to get attention. Fighting this trend, OpenAI made a series of announcements: their “12 Days of OpenAI.” Not to be upstaged, Google responded with a flurry of announcements, including their Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking model. Models appeared that could use streaming audio and video for both input and output.
Summarizing Books as Podcasts

Dec 16, 2024 | oreilly.com | Mike Loukides

Like just about everyone, we were impressed by the ability of NotebookLM to generate podcasts: Two virtual people holding a discussion. You can give it some links, and it will generate a podcast based on the links. The podcasts were interesting and engaging. But they also had some limitations. The problem with NotebookLM is that, while you can give it a prompt, it largely does what it’s going to do.
Generative Logic

Dec 10, 2024 | oreilly.com | Mike Loukides

Alibaba’s latest model, QwQ-32B-Preview, has gained some impressive reviews for its reasoning abilities. Like OpenAI’s GPT-4 o1,1 its training has emphasized reasoning rather than just reproducing language. That seemed like something worth testing out—or at least playing around with—so when I heard that it very quickly became available in Ollama and wasn’t too large to run on a moderately well-equipped laptop, I downloaded QwQ and tried it out.
Generative Logic

Dec 10, 2024 | flipboard.com | Mike Loukides

5 hours agoThe Unexpected Intelligence of Butterflies Revealed in New ResearchButterflies, with their delicate wings and tiny brains, might not seem like the sharpest creatures in the animal kingdom. However, new research from …3 hours ago"Being drawn against Madrid is something that cannot be explained"Cristhian Britos was Deportiva Minera's representative at the Copa del Rey draw.
Radar Trends to Watch: December 2024

Dec 3, 2024 | oreilly.com | Mike Loukides

It’s the end of the year for Radar! We hope all of our readers enjoy the holidays. Here’s one prediction for 2025:Is this the end of the road for improving LLM performance by scaling either the number of parameters or the training data? No one knows yet. Regardless of the answer, we expect interest to shift toward smaller models. We’ll grudgingly allow the 70B parameter model to qualify as “small,” but we really mean 20B or fewer parameters.
Blown Away

Nov 12, 2024 | oreilly.com | Mike Loukides

Between vacation, end-of-year projects, the coming holidays, and other hysteria, I haven’t come up with an article this month. So here’s a quick list of things that have amazed me recently. I’m far from the first person to find NotebookLM amazing, and I certainly won’t be the last.
Radar Trends to Watch: November 2024

Nov 5, 2024 | oreilly.com | Mike Loukides

October had many language model releases. The mid-size models, and even the small models, are catching up to frontier models like GPT-4.5o in performance. But the release that blew us all away wasn’t a language model: It was Claude’s computer use API. Computer use allows you to teach Claude how to use a computer: how to run an application, click on buttons, and use a shell or an editor. It has many problems, security not being the least of them—but it’s bound to improve.
Building the AI Workforce: Guidance for Employers and Employees

Oct 17, 2024 | dataversity.net | Mike Loukides

To successfully hire and retain AI talent, employers must start by taking a step back. What do you want to do? Do you want to retain talent because AI is the next big thing and everybody’s telling you that you need to have AI in your product? That may be true. From a sales perspective, telling prospective customers your organization doesn’t have AI built into its product is a good way to end the conversation. However, if your starting point when talking to talent is “Yes, we’re going to have AI.
Henry Ford Does AI

Oct 15, 2024 | oreilly.com | Mike Loukides

Back in August, I cavalierly said that AI couldn’t design a car if it hadn’t seen one first, and I alluded to Henry Ford’s apocryphal statement “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” I’m not backing down on any of that, but the history of technology is always richer than we imagine. Daimler and Benz get credit for the first automobile, but we forget that the “steam engine welded to a tricycle” was invented in 1769, over a hundred years earlier.