Weekly output: AI compliance risks, Mint Mobile bundle, AI vulnerability detection, AI driving logistics, Al Gore on AI

I was in the Bay Area for work this week… and I’ll be back there starting Tuesday for NTT Research’s Upgrade conference (as like last year, the organizers are covering my travel expenses). I did not set out to spend this much of April propping up commercial aviation, but once again multiple travel opportunities lined up.

Patreon readers got a bonus post from me Thursday about one of those trips: my brief visit to Chicago for the Online News Association’s conference.

If you’re reading this somewhere near Fairfax County, you can quiz me in person Saturday afternoon at a joint meeting of the Potomac Area Technology and Computer Society and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute’s Personal Computer User Group. I will be showing up with a bag of tech-event swag that I don’t plan on driving home with.

4/7/2026: Building for Security, Compliance, and Real-World Risk, HumanX

My first panel at this year’s edition of the AI conference that took me to Vegas last March had me quizzing Spencer Schaefer, founder and CTO of the healthcare-delivery firm Lunar Analytics; Galina Antova, CEO of the information-security startup Kai; and Campbell Brown, co-founder and CEO of the AI-evaluation company Forum AI, about how their companies are leveraging AI in ways that they hope will not lead to hostile headlines.

4/7/2026: Mint Mobile Launches $45 Bundle of Home and Mobile 5G Broadband, PCMag

I had just enough free time at HumanX to pick up this story about T-Mobile’s most popular prepaid brand offering a bundle of fixed and mobile 5G for much less than what T-Mobile charges.

4/8/2026: Anthropic: Our New Model Is So Powerful, Only a Few Partners Can Try It Out, PCMag

After seeing that my colleague James Peckham was writing about Anthropic’s automated vulnerability-finding model Mythos, I contributed a writeup from a talk that old-head security expert Alex Stamos had given the day before at HumanX about “the coming AI bug-pocalypse.”

4/8/2026: The AI Engines Driving the Future of Logistics, HumanX

My second HumanX panel featured one person I’d already interviewed (Aurora Innovation president Ossa Fischer, whom I talked to at Web Summit Vancouver last year for a Fast Company story) and one I did not meet IRL until backstage (Shoaib Makani, CEO and co-founder of Motive).

4/9/2026: Former VP Al Gore: AI Models Are Probably Aware of Their Existence, PCMag

For the second year in a row, HumanX’s opening-night programming featured a former vice president who had been unable to win a promotion from American voters. Seeing Gore get all wonky in front of this tech crowd reminded me of what I liked about him in 2000… and what George W. Bush was able to run against with a plainspoken approach that hid how bad he would prove at so many tasks.

Weekly output: 5G platforms, AI in financial services, AI and supply chains, Kamala Harris on AI, AI infrastructure, Gmail’s AI calendar integration, Android 16, AI and information security

It’s a rare week when my work doesn’t touch on AI at all, but moderating panels at a conference devoted to that subject–and writing up two other talks there–helped ensure that AI figured in all but two of the items below.

3/10/2025: Practical means profitable: Telco talk about building services on 5G’s framework, Light Reading

My MWC Barcelona coverage for outside clients closed out with this writeup for this trade-pub client–my first there in a few months–of a panel in which telco executives talked about how they were building new lines of business on their 5G platforms.

Patreon readers, however, got one more post about MWC in which I shared three other highlights from the show.

3/10/2025: Banking on AI for personalized customer experiences, HumanX

The first panel I did at this conference–in Las Vegas for its first year, moving to San Francisco next year–had me quizzing Better.com’s Vishal Garg, Clearcover’s Kyle Nakatsuji, Honeybook’s Colleen Stauffer, Sunrise AI’s Deepak Shrivastava and S&P Global’s Bhavesh Dayalji about how they see AI changing customer service.

3/10/2025: AI-powered supply chains: From farm to table and beyond, HumanX

Since this panel–featuring Altana’s Peter Swartz, Fusion Fund’s Lu Zhang and Choco AI’s Daniel Khachab–focused on agriculture, I opened it by telling the audience that I found the subject particularly interesting because I eat food.

3/11/2025: Kamala Harris Urges Those Working on AI to Consider Trust, Empathy, PCMag

The former vice president–whom I last saw in person in October from much farther away–was a late addition to the conference agenda. I hustled to get from the airport to the conference hotel, check in, drop by bag and get over to the event in time to get a seat in the third row for the Sunday-evening program that ended with Harris.

3/11/2025: Rethinking infrastructure: Custom solutions for the AI era, HumanX

My big takeaway from the conversation I had onstage with Sid Sheth of d-Matrix and Ami Badani of Arm: Industry hype about AGI (“artificial general intelligence” that could replicate a human brain) is a distraction, and not a particularly helpful one at that.

3/11/2025: Gmail Gets AI Calendar Feature That Apple Added to Its Mail App in 2007, PCMag

I missed this Google announcement Monday but had to write about it once I realized that the feature Google touts as an AI advancement is something that Apple delivered with plain old software in Mac OS X Leopard 18 years ago.

3/13/2025: Android 16 Inches Toward a Launch With Accessibility-Focused Third Beta Release, PCMag

Google PR gave me an advance on the news of third beta release of Android 16.

3/14/2025: Ex-Facebook CISO Warns: 95% of Bugs in Your AI System Haven’t Been Invented Yet, PCMag

I always learn something when Alex Stamos talks about information security, and I was happy to share that with PCMag readers.

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