Grading My 2025 Predictions

Nostradamus, so predictable.

All year long I monitor my annual predictions, taking note when events either make me a fool or a sage. 2025 marked perhaps the most unpredictable and frustrating year of them all – and that’s not nothing, given I started prognosticating in 2003. But then again, I did expect an odd one – from my 2025 post: “This isn’t going to be a normal year. 2025 will be strange, frenetic, and full of surprises.”

I titled my post “Tech Takes the Power Position.” While I didn’t make that sentiment one of my specifically numbered predictions, it did provide the context for how I was thinking about the year ahead. “We’re not accustomed to the tech industry having this much raw power. The finance industry? Sure…But this year, for the first time ever, Big Tech has leap-frogged finance in the pantheon of political influence…the subset of Big Tech bros who’ve bought their way into the Oval are evangelists for an untested and downright strange brand of magical thinking best summed up as “techno optimism.”  …for better or for worse, 2025 is going to be the year when the loudest voices in the room are all adherents of the Great Man Theory, and they all happen to have direct access to the Oval Office.”

Read More
Leave a comment on Grading My 2025 Predictions

SIGN UP FOR THE NEWSLETTER

Stay up to date on the latest from BattelleMedia.com

Two Approaches to Saving The Web. Only One Works.

Image Gareth Glaser https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/appeal-open-internet-gareth-glaser-kwnbe/

The open web – free content written by actual humans about things actual humans care about – has been in decline for more than a decade. I’ve had a front row seat throughout – first at Federated Media, which was built 20 years ago to support independent publishers, then on the Board of Sovrn, which continued Federated’s work on the programmatic/data side of the publishing business. I’ve also taught and practiced journalism for the past few decades, and started and advised countless ventures that depend on traditional media revenue streams.

In short, I know it ain’t pretty out there for advertising-supported publishing. Social media dug the grave, and now the nail gun of generative AI seems to be merrily fastening the lid over the open web’s pine box coffin.

Read More
Leave a comment on Two Approaches to Saving The Web. Only One Works.

Algorithms and Capitalism: Cleaning Up The Waze Parade

Where are we all going?!

Do you feel it? A simmering discontent with the state of capitalism in American life? I certainly do. My kids engage with social media only if they have to – never because they wish to. They believe their feeds are  manipulated by corporate interests, and they are distrustful of anyone who believes otherwise. My wife is convinced that anything she buys online – particularly the bigger ticket items like flights or hotels – is priced based on what algorithms calculate she can afford to pay – not what might be fair or offered to others. Parents in my friend group are terrified that their kids are using ChatGPT as a confidante and therapist whose motivations are unfathomable. The stock market keeps pushing ever upwards, but my colleagues are increasingly convinced a crash is around the corner.

Something just feels….off. The complex socio-economic system that we’re all a part of seems rigged. And we feel powerless to do anything about it.

Read More
2 Comments on Algorithms and Capitalism: Cleaning Up The Waze Parade

OpenAI: Code Red? More Like Code Green!

 

After writing about how OpenAI might just be the AOL of the post AI Internet, I couldn’t resist commenting on The Information’s scoop this morning about OpenAI hitting the big red panic button. It’s now a Valley ritual to call an official emergency whenever you’ve made massive management mistakes that almost kill your company. Remember Sundar’s code red back when ChatGPT launched? Seems Sam Altman is now returning the favor. He’s worried Google’s Gemini is about to lap ChatGPT, and has told his staff to drop everything and focus entirely on improving OpenAI’s core product.

Read More
2 Comments on OpenAI: Code Red? More Like Code Green!

Is OpenAI Today’s Netscape? Or Is It AOL?

As is his want, last week Fred Wilson wrote a provocative post I’ve been thinking about for the past few days. Titled “Netscape and Microsoft Redux?“, Fred notes the parallels between the browser wars of the late 1990s and the present-day battle for dominance in the consumer AI market. And he asks a prescient question: What new, world-defining product might we be missing by focusing on AI chatbots?

In the early days of the Web, everyone thought the most important new product to emerge from the Internet was the browser. Netscape, a startup with just a few months of operating history, defined the market for those browsers in 1994, then dominated it for several years thereafter. But by the late 1990s, the lumbering incumbent Microsoft had stolen Netscape’s lead by leveraging distribution and pricing advantages inherent to its massive Windows monopoly.

Read More
2 Comments on Is OpenAI Today’s Netscape? Or Is It AOL?

Target Has an OpenAI App. Is That Good News?

Hey there, it’s been a minute. I got in a nice posting rhythm earlier in the year, but preparations for DOC (which was amazing, but exhausting) and life in general got in the way for most of the late Summer / early Fall. That’s starting to change, thank goodness.

If you’re a regular reader you know I’ve been somewhat obsessed with how AI will impact society and business – kind of like I was obsessed with how Search would impact society and business over the past two decades. An item about Target and OpenAI caught my attention this morning, news that, in more normal times, I’d have already written about in detail. Here’s the TLDR:

Read More
Leave a comment on Target Has an OpenAI App. Is That Good News?

Wired’s Backbone Stiffens

Wired’s current issue

We didn’t have much money when we launched Wired back in January of 1993, but we needed to get the word out somehow. We couldn’t spend our way into brand recognition, so we orchestrated a guerilla campaign: The week Wired hit newsstands, day-glo posters with just two words were plastered on construction sites, vacant wall space, and buses all over San Francisco, New York, and a few other tech-heavy cities. “GET WIRED!” the ads  proclaimed. Never mind that no one knew what Wired was. The point was to get people’s attention, and judging from the newsstand sales, it worked.

(If you want part of the history of that period, read my piece “Get Wired,” which I published earlier this year.)

Read More
Leave a comment on Wired’s Backbone Stiffens

Will AI Replace Doctors?

DOC 2025 Debaters: Reid Hoffman, Eric Verdin, Anitha Kannan, and Mike Krieger

At the inaugural DOC gathering last year, famed Valley VC Vinod Khosla made a bold prediction: AI will soon make medical care “essential free,” while at the same time enabling human doctors to scale their knowledge and caregiving five to ten fold. Bill Gates has made similar claims – and gone even further, saying that AI will “replace many doctors” with 10 years.

As we all contemplate a future of “AI everywhere,” perhaps no question is more polarizing than this: Will AI make human work obsolete? And if so, what happens to all of us? It’s the defining question of Mustafa Suleyman’s 2023 book “The Coming Wave,” in which Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, argues that AI will have “hugely destabilizing” impact on the workforce. “Godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton strikes a darker tone, warning “What’s actually going to happen is rich people are going to use AI to replace workers. It’s going to create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits. It will make a few people much richer and most people poorer.”

Read More
Leave a comment on Will AI Replace Doctors?

Is AI In The Trough of Disillusionment Yet?

These two things can be true at the same time:

  • AI is a world changing technological innovation that will ultimately live up to its hype; and
  • AI is an utterly overblown technology that will fail to live up to its hype, leaving millions in financial ruin along the way.

After all, those two statements pretty much sum up the World Wide Web from the period between roughly 1996 and 2006. At the moment, it feels to me if we’re crossing the peak of AI’s hype cycle, and about to enter “the trough of disillusionment,” a period where a vaunted technology fails to live up to its early promises.

Read More
Leave a comment on Is AI In The Trough of Disillusionment Yet?

Google (and Apple) Get a Slap on The Wrist

Back in the day when I was covering Google on a daily basis, I’d have spent hours poring over yesterday’s news that the judge in Google’s landmark antitrust case essentially blinked. But twenty-odd years of experience leaves me with very little to say about how Google’s first anti-trust case has been resolved, other than this: It’s a nothing burger, with a side of same-as-it-ever-was.

Over the course of nearly four years since the government brought its case, a lot has changed:

  • The United States has veered away from liberal democracy toward illiberal autocracy, and the current administration is no longer interested in grand antitrust remedies that serve the public. Today, everything is seen through the lens of whether a given action or decision furthers the President’s power. Preserving the status quo gives him leverage over powerful actors – he can continue to threaten and bully, ensuring fealty and tribute. In this administration, as in Moscow, Pyongyang and Beijing, no one is allowed to have more power than the Dear Leader.
  • As I laid out in my predictions nine months ago, the tech industry is now the most powerful force in politics outside the President, and its two most muscular companies – Apple and Google – did not want their duopoly upended. We’ll likely never know what soft-power backroom deals were cut to avoid what nearly every legal scholar felt was justified action by the government, but to think those dynamics didn’t impact this decision is to ignore the reality of my first point above.
  • OpenAI’s existence became a convenient foil. The emergence of generative AI has given Google (and the judge in this case) the ability to argue that the DOJ was fighting yesterday’s war. Sure, Google might have been a search monopolist, but look – OpenAI is proof that the market is always smarter than government regulators! Never mind the fact that search literally built the foundation for generative AI, or that generative AI is the natural evolution of search – a product that Google will continue to dominate now that government remedies have been rendered toothless.

Google – and its $20 billion partner Apple – are likely doing cartwheels today. Wall Street certainly is.

Read More
1 Comment on Google (and Apple) Get a Slap on The Wrist