#frontier-collective — Public Fediverse posts

Weekly output: WiFi hotspots, Android 17 + Gemini Intelligence, earning trust in AI, staying IRL in an AI world, AI image generation, photonics + data centers, Bill Gross on AI

SAN JOSE, Calif.–I’m back on the West Coast only three days after returning from Web Summit Vancouver, and my excuse for yet another transcon flight involves two different events: TechEx North America at the convention center here, where I’m moderating two panels Monday, and then Google I/O a little up the peninsula in Mountain View Tuesday and Wednesday. This is my second year at the first event but will be my 12th in-person I/O.

5/11/2026: The Best Wi-Fi Hotspot, Wirecutter

This update to this guide was originally going to review the Franklin A70 hotspot that AT&T introduced last year, but as I was about to file my edits I learned that AT&T was discontinuing that model. So I took out all of the copy assessing the A70 and restored the discussion of older models, which still left plenty of new text covering, among other things, how most high-end smartphone plans now include more data than you get with hotspot-only plans.

5/12/2026: In Android 17, ‘Gemini Intelligence’ Can Automate Tasks Across Apps, PCMag

Google dumped an enormous amount of news one week before I/O, to the point that I needed almost 1,200 words to cover it without even getting into Googlebook laptops, since PCMag’s Michael Kan wrote up that part of Google’s news. I trust that Google left something else to announce onstage at I/O Tuesday.

5/12/2026: Data done right: Earning consumer trust in an AI-first world. Web Summit

This was the second year in a row I had a Web Summit Vancouver panel featuring Pamela Snively, chief data and trust officer with Telus Communications. Knowing my fellow speaker’s conversational style made this panel easy; the topic was also a good one to explore.

5/12/2026: The Analog Renaissance, Why Human Connection and IRL Is the Most Radical Innovation, Frontier Collective

I showed up 5 minutes late to this offsite panel hosted by a local tech group because my floatplane joyride ended almost 30 minutes later than scheduled, a timing failure that in retrospect seems like something I was asking for. I then had a fun discussion with my fellow speakers–Raven White, TED’s director of audience development and community; Heather Odendaal, WNORTH CEO and founder; and Johnny Rodgers, a founding principal engineer at Slack–but I feel bad about inflicting “where is Rob?” uncertainty on the organizers and forcing emcee Theodora Jean to field my position for the first few minutes.

5/13/2026: What it actually takes to train frontier models, Web Summit

This was a late addition to my schedule, leaving no time for a prep call beforehand with Black Forest Labs co-founder Tim Dockhorn. That, in turn, meant I only discovered on stage that he can answer questions exceedingly briefly–which required me to improv a bunch of new questions. This sort of thing has happened on panels before; this time, I didn’t feel like I was flailing around onstage quite so much.

5/14/2026: Can Photonics Make the AI Data Center Boom More Palatable?, PCMag

Since my research for this started at NTT Research’s Upgrade conference in mid April, I was happy I finally got this written–including quotes from my interview of the photonics firm Taara’s CEO at Web Summit Vancouver that helped this post be about more than just the expenses-comped NTT event. I was not so happy to discover that I left two errors into the copy, one about the distances that Taara’s silicon-photonics chipset can send data through the air and another about this firm’s spot in the extended Google corporate universe.

5/15/2026: Bill Gross thinks AI companies are running out of ways to avoid paying creators, Fast Company

This is the first time in a long time–maybe ever, actually–where I wrote a story from an interview as an edited transcript instead of writing a more-structured piece with selected quotes plugged in where I saw fit. I enjoyed the challenge of finding the most enlightening exchanges about the longtime Silicon Valley founder and investor’s new venture ProRata and the state of AI in general out of 6,000-plus words of AI-generated transcript from my phone’s Google Recorder app (which I then checked by playing back the original recording).