Who Controls the Tokens?

Every so often the tech world appropriates a perfectly pedestrian word and imbues it with meaning well beyond its settled definition. For centuries “computer” was an obscure term referencing an obscure craft: people who performed mathematical calculations. And prior to the mid 1990s, anyone talking about a “web” was probably discussing spiders.

“Token” has broken out as technology’s latest etymological adaptation. The word has a long history in the tech world, and even richer origins in early English and Germanic languages. But as AI has ascended to primacy in tech,  “token” has become a way for executives, financiers, and journalists to grasp the maddeningly opaque workings of an industry that seems to be swallowing our economy whole.

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I’ll Be Framing My AI Check

This is a fake check!

I’ve always loved writing, and took to this form – the “thinking out loud” version of blogging – more than 20 years ago. I started Searchblog after I sold my first book, which focused on the impact of search on business and culture.  I decided I’d chronicle my reporting and build my voice by posting as often as I could, and the experience proved to be a watershed moment in my career. I built an audience that numbered in the hundreds of thousands, noticed scores of others doing the same, then launched a new company (Federated Media) based on insights from the experience.

The early 2000s marked the apex of what is now called “the open web,” and today two stories may as well be considered obituaries for the era.  The first, by Kate Conger at the NYT, lays out the mechanism for the open web’s demise: “Google Is Building an A.I. Fence Around the Internet It Once Championed.” The second brings news of a $1.5 billion settlement in a massive copyright infringement lawsuit targeting the AI industry. As an author, I’m a party to that suit – and at some point in the next year, a check from Anthropic will wend its way through the mail to me. A coda, of sorts, for an era already passed.

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Again, What About the AI Ads?

Last month the FT reported that OpenAI was going all in on a “super app” that combines agents and coding, a move clearly designed to compete with Anthropic, which dominates the “get work done” market with Claude CoWork. “Chat is dead” as the principle interface for ChatGPT, according to OpenAI execs quoted in the FT piece.

At the time, I wondered out loud: If “chat is dead,” what happens to OpenAI’s promises of $100 billion in advertising revenue by 2030? Given the “surface” for that revenue was supposed to be chat, it seems contradictory to fold it into a paid subscription product focused on white collar workers.

A version of the super app (called “ChatGPT Work”) launched this week and early reviews are mixed: chat has been demoted, the UI is messy and confusing, but the “work” portion of the app is cheaper than Claude and quite good overall.  I’m sure the app will quickly address those UI issues, but I’m still left scratching my head: What about the ads? If I were considering investing in OpenAI’s ads, I’d certainly want an answer to that question.

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The Rhymes of Tech History

Big Brother, indeed.

It seems ridiculous now, but when I was a cub reporter covering the tech industry, our publication had an entire beat focused on word processing – and it was one of the most sought after assignments in the newsroom. We had another reporter who focused on spreadsheets. Because I was the new kid, I covered databases – databases! – and other reporters covered desktop publishing software and utilities. At just one publication, that’s a half a dozen full-time reporters tracking and analyzing applications that have mostly faded into the background noise of today’s tech industry. At the time (late 1980s), there were at least a dozen outlets doing the same thing.

Think about that – nearly one hundred journalists covering workplace software!

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Who Stole My Alpha?

Have you seen Alex Karp’s rant on CNBC? I fielded this question about a dozen times over the past week. If you’ve not yet watched, it’s well worth your time. In a conspiratorial diatribe against the evils of monopoly-crazed frontier labs, the founder of defense-tech giant Palantir asserts that OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are ruining our economy by “stealing our alpha” (more on that in a second). And because he’s a founding member of the Valley’s newly emboldened MAGA elite, Karp manages to toss in a few unhinged political dog whistles, implicating both UC Berkeley and “wealth taxes” as complicit in the downfall of civilization as we know it.

Despite obviously talking his own book – Palantir sells an application layer that sits above frontier models and ensures clients will not have their “alpha” stolen – Karp makes a point that has resonated deeply across not only tech, but the entire economy. “He’s not wrong…” is how several of the emails I’ve received have begun. “He’s got a point,” they continue, “even if he is kind of toxic.”

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The Economics of AI Are Shifting

CNBC chart

One of the best ways to find signal in the noise of a major technological shift is through the time-tested journalistic tactic of following the money. Back in January I predicted that in B2B markets, AI Can’t Cost This Much. I argued that “pricing the future based on the cost of the present is a losing bet … However many trillions will be spent on AI over the course of the next decade, one thing will remain constant: There are huge opportunities to be exploited in finding more efficient and less expensive ways to deliver technology to both consumers and businesses.”

Nearly three years before writing that post, I made another prediction, this time in consumer markets: It would soon be normal for consumers to pay as much as $200 a month for AI services. Combined, we pay more than that for mobile phone, cable, and internet services, after all.

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Have We Lost The Plot?

Detail from Wired’s photo-Illustration: Jobanny Cabrera

“Our lives have become dematerialized.”

That phrase – from author Ian Bogost in a short piece in Wired – struck at the center of something I’ve been trying to verbalize for years. Bogost argues that technologies of convenience and efficiency have destroyed our connection to the physical world. His primary example is the automobile – first the automatic transmission replaced our physical connection to the road, then the EV made gears obsolete. Now driving itself is retreating into a digital interface – Waymo, Uber, and Tesla are seeing to that.

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Remembering Om Malik

Om Malik.

It seems almost quaint now, but there was once a version of the Internet ruled by influencers that were honest, high integrity folks who genuinely cared about the impact of their words.

Perhaps the most thoughtful of these was Om Malik, who passed away last week at the age of 59. Om was a colleague and a contemporary, and his site GigaOm was one of the earliest and most important partners at Federated Media, an early “record label” for bloggers that I launched in 2005.

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How Can You Trust the News?

The single most essential ingredient of good journalism is trust. By that measure, journalism is in a very bad way: According to The Reuters Institute’s annual survey, only 37 percent of the global public trusts the news industry, down nearly 20 points from ten years ago. In the US, that figure stands at 25 percent.

Reuters also reported that for the first time, more than half of respondents get their news primarily from algorithmically driven platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. And the fastest growing new “surface” for news consumption? AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude.

The central story of journalism in the digital age is one of collapse. Platforms and their algorithms have cleaved audience from traditional news brands. The industrial-scale AI that runs sites like Instagram and YouTube are tuned for engagement and advertising sales, not trust or truth. Personalized AI of chatbots like Gemini or ChatGPT seem destined for a similar fate.

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Quitting A Digital Habit

Amongst friends and family, I’m known as something of a digital curmudgeon. I’m usually the one person in group chats who does not use an iPhone, a habit I gave up in 2012 when I sensed that Apple was enclosing the entire mobile space. I stopped visiting Facebook and Instagram a decade ago, and I left Twitter in 2022, the year Musk took over. I refuse to employ AI chatbots as therapists, friends, or any kind of replacement for human engagement. I turned off all notifications on my phone – even for calls – 15 years ago.

Given my early bona fides in all things digital, I take a bit of pride in my heterodoxy, though in practice it creates friction, both for me and my friends and colleagues. Silencing notifications forced me into a new habit of checking my phone proactively, which one could argue has its own downsides. My Google phone breaks group chats, my absence from Meta’s products means I miss updates from friends and family, my aversion to AI therapy could mean I’m out of touch with how technology is changing society (though my adult children do keep me somewhat in the know on this count).

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