Independent analysis of economics, technology, business, and public policy. Original essays informed by academic research, historical evidence, and data-driven reasoning.
Information Systems
A language model asked the same factual question three times gave three confident, wrong answers. The real culprit isn't broken software — it's benchmarks that reward bluffing over honesty, a flaw retrieval-augmented generation can narrow but never actually cure.
The trade press defines a hyperscaler by server counts and square footage. But the word's root — scale — was always about how gracefully a system grows, not how big it is. Trace the slippage and you find an industry that named its firms for the one thing they made look effortless.
Everyone frames local versus cloud AI as privacy versus convenience. The real variable deciding which one bankrupts you is how many tokens you actually push through hardware you've already paid for.
A chatbot with a million-token window can still lose the one fact you need, because attention isn't storage—it's a spotlight with a U-shaped blind spot in the middle.