A former NBC Boston reporter, Eli Rosenberg, has come out with new AI product that scrapes dozens of public sources for data and potential news-story ideas, the Globe reports. It’s a very simple and clever idea. Give Rosenberg full entrepreneurial credit for developing the journalist AI research tool. …. But the now innovative product, I hate to say, will probably be outdated in six months or so, similar to how early dot.com-era ideas initially sounded so cutting-edge and cool, only to sound humdrum within a short while. … We’re at a similar early stage with AI technologies and products. Everything seems so shiny and new. … But, again, hats off to Rosenberg. He may well be laughing all the way to the bank if he ends up selling the product to a larger firm.

Ah, the Hub Blog mind drifts off to a time long ago when a group of journalists and I worked together on a then cutting-edge “computer-assisted reporting” investigation  (oooooh) that used an actual IBM 486 personal computer to help sort and tabulate reams of information (double oooooh). It all sounds so innocent and silly now, the technology that is. But it did lead to our winning a George Polk Award (scroll down to Political Reporting). I guess you can say that was our equivalent of laughing all the way to the bank.

More dazzling HB train of thoughts: Charles Ferguson’s mini-classic “High Stakes, No Prisoners: A Winner’s Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars,” about a tech startup he founded in Cambridge in the early years of the Internet.

Below: A vintage IBM 486 personal computer. … Ooooh. …She’s a beaut, ain’t she?