What's in a name?

One thing I've noticed about technological shifts is that their names often arise organically, capturing something essential about their nature. The name "Bits of Brilliance" works on multiple levels, each revealing something important about both AI and how we process information these days.

The first level is purely practical. Nobody has time anymore. The typical knowledge worker is drowning in information while starving for insight. These pieces try to be discussions and information in concentrated form, like AI vitamins you can absorb in two minutes. Like a good API, they hide complexity while exposing exactly what you need to know.

The second level is about the nature of AI itself. The current crop of AI systems isn't what science fiction promised. They don't produce sustained, human-like intelligence. Instead, they give us brilliant fragments – startling insights mixed with obvious mistakes. They're like savants who can write poetry one minute and can't tie their shoes the next. When you understand this, you stop expecting AIs to be omniscient oracles and start seeing them as sources of occasional brilliant insights. Bits of brilliance, if you will.

The third level is about what's actually happening at a deeper technical level. We're living through a fundamental shift in what can be transmitted over a network. For most of computing history, we transmitted dumb bits – just ones and zeros that became text, images, or programs. Now we're transmitting something qualitatively different: bits that think. When GPT responds to you, those packets aren't just data; they're little fragments of cognitive capability coming across the wire. They're literally bits of brilliance being transmitted, like some kind of cognitive electricity.

So the title of our little thing has practical and deeper aspects to it. Like how "personal computer" captured both the literal fact that computers were becoming personal possessions and the deeper transformation of computing from institutional to individual “Bits of Brilliance” serves our purposes as a description of the newsletter's format, an admission about AI's current capabilities, and a metaphor for what's actually happening at a technical level. I hope that makes sense.

Why should I read these posts?

Because you want to understand the architectural breakthrough that changed AI forever

Because you're skeptical when people say AI has "solved" speech recognition

Because you need to understand why one-size-fits-all AI models aren't enough

Because you don't want to waste millions on the wrong AI infrastructure

Because you should understand the hardware bottleneck driving the AI economy

Because you wonder what neural nets are really doing when they seem to "think"

Because you want to see how AI is revolutionizing research discovery

Because smaller, focused AI models often outperform their giant cousins

Because historical archives are being transformed by AI vision

Because limitations often lead to the most creative solutions

Because understanding the hardware evolution explains why AI suddenly works

Because AI-generated code is changing how we think about code review