Ben Goertzel has been running the annual Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) conference since 2008, and the 15th edition was back in person this year. It was held over four days in August in Seattle, and I was lucky enough to be able to attend. It was a blast. A particular highlight was the workshop on AGI in fintech, and especially the discussion on the use of Deep Reinforcement Learning in portfolio management. Given the very natural reward signal, what could an AlphaZero/MuZero-type system do there? Perhaps one day the world will be prepared to know. Ben coined the term Artificial [...]

You may have seen some articles doing the rounds about the 13 key API metrics that teams should track. But going back to the challenge we have with how we describe API consumers, the needs of the 'team' in this context are vague. The API metrics performance section lists uptime (or does it?), CPU usage, and Memory usage.Then they talk about adoption and use metrics – which are important. But why the narrow technical view of API performance? Why ignore the fact that as an API Dependent (a consumer, a solution business owner, a customer success provider, sourcing, and MANY [...]

In my lifetime, there have been lots of “you’ll always remember where you were” moments. The Challenger disaster and September 11, 2001, are the first two that always come to mind for me. But I think this will be the first time that the thing I will remember most is that I mostly stayed at home. It has been a challenging year for everybody as I can tell from the many, many Zoom/Teams/WebEx sessions with clients, team members, and partners – whether it is the loss of family and friends, of which there has been so much, or the challenge [...]

Overlooked API monitoring problems To understand how API monitoring problems get overlooked, there's an old story that goes something like this: You come across a person standing under a street light looking around. You ask if you can help. "I've lost my car keys," they say without looking up. So you start to look around to help them. After a few minutes you ask, "where did you last see them?" They stop, look up, and point at the woods to the side of the road. "I dropped them over there," they say. "So why are we looking here?" They look [...]

When I’ve thought about monitoring tool (s), especially in the context of API monitoring  tools recently, I’ve been reminded of this famous phrase from The Lord of the Rings saga: […]