Technology & innovation
Beyond the First Order
Exploring how technological innovation reshapes economies, competitive advantage, organisations, markets and life.
- Technology
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- AI & infrastructure
I also publish AI-generated discussions of selected articles, offering another way to explore the ideas.
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Articles & essays.
Post-Quantum Resilience: The Problem Isn’t Just the Algorithm
Why quantum-resistant cryptography is also a test of how organisations build, govern and change their digital infrastructure.
NVIDIA’s Strategy: Adapting to Stay Essential
What happens when a company’s customers develop alternatives to its most valuable product?
Digital Infrastructure Is Becoming One System and Resilience is Now the Unifying Challenge
The attack surface is expanding, threats are intensifying, and the protection horizon is lengthening. This is the clear pattern
The Agentic Enterprise: Three forces rewriting connectivity and security
In the first part of this series, I argued that AI is not simply another workload. It changes where computation happens, how data moves and the latency enterprises must support. Its effects reach across connectivity, security, governance, resilience and accountability.
The New Era of Enterprise Connectivity and Security Convergence
This article is the first in a broader series exploring how enterprise connectivity, security, and operating models are being reshaped by AI, distributed architectures, and rising complexity. I begin here with the strategic shift itself before moving, in the articles that follow, into the main challenges facing…
The Complement Trap in Platforms
Platforms thrive when the things around them get better: payments make a marketplace usable, identity makes a SaaS deployable, and games make a console worth buying. The hard part of building platforms isn’t the core, it’s managing the complements. They set adoption, pricing power, and who captures value.
The Hidden Coordination Layer: Why Network Costs Shape Platform Evolution
I was reading an ACG Research’s report on how application-driven traffic is reshaping the economics of mobile and fixed networks. A small set of applications drives almost all delivery cost: seven apps account for roughly 96% of mobile network costs. While nine account for about 92% on fixed. Most of that bill…
What Platform to Build in the Age of Cheap Answers
A practical guide for platform builders, executives, and investors
How Platforms Earn Premium Valuation Multiples — A Practical Framework for Founders, Operators, and Investors.
I’ve sat through dozens of product reviews this year. One recurring theme: “platform” is used as shorthand for ambition, while the valuation mechanics get blurred. Here’s a practical way to define a platform, and why the distinction changes what you build and how you’re valued. To make it concrete, here’s a composite…
Inside Lightmatter’s Passage M1000 Photonic Superchip
Lightmatter, a company focused on photonic supercomputing, recently announced the Passage M1000, a 3D-stacked active photonic interposer designed to deliver unprecedented bandwidth for next-generation AI and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. Engineered for xPUs such as GPUs, AI accelerators, and switches,…
Hype as a Coordination Tool and the Trap of “Irreversible Standards” in AI
Early last week, I read an excellent article by Sangeet Paul Choudary that discussed the strategic role hype plays in coordinating fragmented markets such as AI. The article drew an interesting parallel with Renaissance-era Florence, a city lacking the typical medieval moats of its neighbors but instead protected by…
NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra: Powering the AI Factory Vision
NVIDIA just announced the Blackwell Ultra AI Factory Platform and the Dynamo Inference Software at GTC 2025. Built on the Blackwell architecture introduced last year, this latest iteration ramps up both training and test-time scaling inference, meeting the needs of increasingly complex AI workloads. It also targets…
Zeus GPU: Bolt’s Bet on the Long Game
(Initially published on LinkedIn)
Addressing Technical Debt in LLM-Powered Applications: Risks, Challenges and Strategies
In previous articles, Lessons from Building Scalable LLM-Powered Applications and Mastering Evaluations as a Strategy, I explored the core components of successful LLM-powered applications. We examined the core components of LLM-based applications and also discussed the design choices and trade offs to achieve scale,…
The Silent Shift: Is AI Really Gradually Eroding Human Control?
This weekend, I came across a recently published paper: Gradual Disempowerment: Systemic Existential Risks from Incremental AI Development (Kulveit et al., 2025). The study is largely theoretical, relying on historical parallels rather than empirical data. However, it makes a compelling argument for an overlooked…
Beyond Cost Efficiency: DeepSeek and the Global AI Shakeup
The release of DeepSeek’s R1 model has ignited intense discussion across the AI industry. DeepSeek claims to have trained a high-performance model for just $5.6 million, a fraction of OpenAI and Google’s estimated spending.
DeepSeek: Rethinking AI Scaling
The past few weeks have been wild in the AI space. If you’ve been following the specialized press, you’ve probably heard about DeepSeek’s R1 model. It has shocked the industry, wiping $1 trillion in market value and now is forcing everyone to rethink how we build and scale AI. Instead of relying on massive compute…
Mastering LLM Inference: Cost-Efficiency and Performance
Just a couple of weeks ago, I kicked off a series of articles examining lessons learned from organizations generating ROI from their LLM-powered applications at scale in the enterprise. In the first article, we broke down the foundational components of these applications, key design choices, and the economic factors…
Mastering Evaluations as a Strategy: The Path to ROI in LLM-Powered Applications
In my previous article, I explored the core components of LLM-powered applications, highlighting strategic and design choices based on lessons from teams that have succeeded at building LLM-powered applications at scale. This follow-up focuses on another critical element shared by these teams: a strong emphasis on…
Lessons from Building Scalable LLM-Powered Applications
Implementing LLMs in the enterprise is no longer a futuristic dream. It’s the reality for many forward-thinking companies today. From startups revolutionizing customer support to industry giants enhancing user engagement, numerous organizations have achieved remarkable returns by integrating LLMs and generative AI…
AI: Beyond Experimentation and Into Long-Term Strategy
We know that AI is set to redefine our lives on a scale far greater than the internet ever did. During a recent event I participated, I had an engaging conversation with few other participants about how enterprises should approach AI strategy. You might be wondering, “Is that even a consideration?” Not quite. One of…
The Impact of AI’s Rising Costs: What It Means for Innovation and Strategy
The trajectory of AI in the last few years has been wild. Back in 2017, training the most advanced AI models cost around $600,000, a huge sum, sure, but nothing compared to where we are today. Fast forward to 2023, and training GPT-4 set back OpenAI by a staggering $40 million. If the current trend holds, the biggest…
AI Agents: A Practical Component in Shaping Enterprise AI Strategies.
In my previous article, we explored why organizations might need to rethink their AI strategies in response to several pressing challenges: the diminishing returns from scaling large language models (LLMs), the commoditization of LLM capabilities, and the increasing complexity and costs tied to deploying these…
Breaking Through the Performance Plateau: Rethinking LLM Strategies for Enterprises
You might be wondering: “Why does it feel like progress in Generative AI has slowed down?” Well, you’re not alone. There’s growing concern in the industry about what’s being called the “Stagnation Thesis”, which is the notion that building bigger and bigger AI models is delivering diminishing returns. Improvements in…
Overcoming Innovation Barriers: How Anduril’s Crucible Tackles Scale, Collaboration, and Data Sharing
Innovation is essential for driving growth and competitive advantage, with abundant research establishing a clear linkage between innovation investments and growth. Yet, despite its importance, innovation faces age-old and well documented challenges. Issues like data availability, cross-functional R&D coordination…
Untether AI’s speedAI 240 Slim: Advancing Energy-Efficient AI Solutions for Edge Applications
A few days ago Untether AI announced the availability for shipping of its speedAI 240 Slim AI inference accelerator cards, which they claim is the world’s fastest and most energy-efficient for applications ranging from cloud to edge. This assertion is backed by achieving industry-leading performance in the MLPerf…
The Challenges of Calculating ROI for AI Initiatives
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is emerging as a critical driver of innovation and competitive advantage for the enterprise. Organizations are experimenting and, in some cases, have fully deployed into production a broad variety of use cases: from automating routine tasks to enabling advanced data analytics and…
The Emerging Threat of AI-Powered Cybercrime
In a previous article, I explored the risks posed by malicious actors’ attacks on AI systems or leveraging AI in cyber operations to disrupt systems and critical infrastructure, potentially leading to economic and social instability.
AI Power Demands: Chiplets & the Future Beyond Moore’s Law
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is driving unprecedented innovations across industries, from healthcare and finance to autonomous systems. However, as AI continues to evolve, its demand for computational power and energy is growing exponentially. This surge in energy consumption, combined with slowing advancements in…
Adversarial Attacks on AI: Navigating Emerging Cybersecurity Threats
In my previous article, “Autonomous AI Agents: Redefining Economic Actors in the Digital Age”, we explored how AI agents are transforming industries by autonomously executing complex tasks and significantly impacting the digital economy. As AI agents evolve, their integration into critical infrastructures brings…
Autonomous AI Agents: Redefining Economic Actors in the Digital Age
Artificial Intelligence is entering a new era where it goes beyond performing isolated tasks and optimizes more than just narrow processes. Traditionally, AI systems were built to automate specific, well-defined functions, analyzing data, optimizing logistics, or handling routine tasks. However, recent advancements…
NVIDIA’s CUDA: The Winning Strategy for AI and Computing Innovation
CUDA turned NVIDIA’s GPUs into a programmable computing platform and became the foundation of its advantage in AI. This article examines how sustained investment in software, developer tools and ecosystem growth created powerful network effects and accelerated innovation across industries.
Accelerated Computing in AI-Powered Business Transformation
The transformative power of digital technologies is reshaping the landscape of modern business. With the advent of these technologies, a new type of organization has emerged — one that leverages data, analytics, AI, and automation to thrive in today’s competitive environment. You might think, “This isn’t new. What…
NVIDIA’s Strategy: From GPUs to AI Industry Dominance
How NVIDIA moved beyond graphics hardware to build a full computing platform around GPUs, CUDA, networking and application-specific systems, creating powerful ecosystem effects across the AI industry.