Innovation: America Has That Process Nailed
April 27, 2025
No AI. Just a dinobaby who gets revved up with buzzwords and baloney.
Has innovation slowed? In smart software, I read about clever uses of AI and ML (artificial intelligence and machine learning). But in my tests of various systems I find the outputs occasionally useful. Yesterday, I wanted information about a writer who produced an article about a security issue involving the US government. I tried five systems; none located the individual. I finally tracked the person down using manual methods. The smart software was clueless.
An example of American innovation caught my attention this morning (April 27, 2025 at 520 am US Eastern time to be exact). I noted the article “Khloé Kardashian Announces Protein Popcorn.” The write up explains:
For anyone khounting their makhros, reality star and entrepreneur Khloé Kardashian unveiled her new product this week: Khloud Protein Popcorn. The new snack boasts 7 grams of protein per serving—two more grams than an entire Jack Links Beef Stick—aligning with consumers’ recent obsession with protein-packed food and drinks. The popcorn isn’t covered in burnt ends—its protein boost comes from a proprietary blend of seasonings and milk protein powder called “Khloud dust” that’s sprinkled over the air-popped kernels.
My thought is that smart software may have contributed to the name of the product: Khloud Protein Popcorn, but I don’t know. The idea that enhanced popcorn has more protein than “an entire Jack Links Beef Stick” is quite innovative I think. Samuel Franklin, author of The Cult of Creativity, may have a different view. Creativity, he asserts, did not become a thing until 1875. I think Khloud Protein Popcorn demonstrates that ingenuity, cleverness, imagination, and artistry are definitely alive and thriving in the Kardashian’s idea laboratory.
I wonder if this type of innovation is going to resolve some of the problems which appear to beset daily life in April 2025. I doubt it unless one needs some fortification delivered via popcorn.
Without being too creative or innovative in my thinking, is AL/ML emulating Khloé Kardashian’s protein popcorn. We have a flawed by useful service: Web search. That functionality has been degrading for many reasons. To make it possible to find information germane to a particular topic, innovators have jumped on one horse and started riding it to the future. But the horse is getting tired. In fact, after a couple of years of riding around the barn, the innovations in large language models seems to be getting tired, slowing down, and in some cases limping along.
The big announcements from Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI focus on the number of users each has. I think the Google said it had 1.5 billion users of its smart software. Can Google “prove” it? Probably but is that number verifiable? Sure, just like the amount of protein in the Khloud dust sprinkled on the aforementioned popcorn. OpenAI’s ChatGPT on April 26, 2025, output a smarmy message about a system issue. The new service Venice was similarly uncooperative, unable in fact to locate information about a particular Telegram topic related to its discontinuing its Bridge service. Poor Perplexity was very wordy and very confident that its explanation about why it could not locate an item of information was hardly a confidence builder.
Here’s my hypothesis: AI/ML, LLMs, and the rest of the smart software jargon have embraced Ms. Kardashian’s protein popcorn approach to doing something new, fresh, creative, and exciting. Imagine AI/ML solutions having more value than an “entire Jack Links Beef Stick.” Next up, smart protein popcorn.
Innovative indeed.
Stephen E Arnold, April 27, 2025
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