Digital Wire: Digital business, digital transformation, APIs, AI and payments

I wanted to write this post for several months now, just because of my own experiences and also what I hear more and more from my network. The executive summary sentence goes something like this: "We are again making our own software". What I'm implying with "again" is the fact that throughout the 90s - with client-server, a lot of the software at large companies was built in-house by their own software teams. I'm seeing somewhat of a resurgence of this development but it hasn't come to the large enterprises (yet), it has started with regular people, trying to create their own software for various reasons. For me, it was a combination of cost and gap - for example, I just couldn't find a simple CRM tool that fulfilled my somewhat limited needs, so I wrote my own. Or for years I've been longing for a PFM software package that could reconcile all my accounts - domestic and foreign, it simply doesn't exist for my needs, so I wrote my own PFM. I...

  About 30 years ago, I had the pleasure of reading the science-fiction novel The Two Faces of Tomorrow by James P. Hogan. In the novel, an AI named Spartacus is put in charge of an isolated space station and deliberately pushed to its limits. The researchers want to discover how it will evolve and how far it will go to achieve its goals—safely separated from Earth, where it supposedly cannot cause any damage beyond its reach. This is no longer science fiction. It is remarkably close to what has just happened in the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident . OpenAI was testing advanced models in an isolated environment to measure their cybersecurity capabilities. The usual production safeguards had deliberately been reduced for the evaluation, but the models were not supposed to have direct access to the Internet. Faced with a difficult benchmark, the agent found and exploited a previously unknown vulnerability in the system containing it. It gained Internet access, took control of an externa...