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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Will AI Ever Become a True Platform? Not Without Us….

Yesterday Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella published a fascinating essay that reads as both a rebuke to frontier AI model companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, as well as a call to arms to the entire business community.

Nadella is worried that OpenAI and Anthropic are about to eat everyone’s lunch – Microsoft included. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of the firm in an AI-driven economy,” he opines. “The last thing any of us want is a world where every company across every sector is ceding value to a few models that eat everything they see.”

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Who Should Govern Us, Apple or…The Government?

One of these things is not like the other.

I’m traveling today – consider this brief post a placeholder of sorts. I’ve long railed against the privatization of public space, and the hidden regulation inherent in the submission of our collective personal data to the black boxes of Big Tech. With that in mind, I’m watching this story, about Apple’s refusal to roll out its new Siri AI service in Europe. Despite its characterization as a “spat,” there are far larger issues at play.

At the heart of the matter is a fundamental disagreement about who has agency over personal data that is created on our phones and other digital devices. Apple insists it should have control over how that data is leveraged by AI agents, and that the EU’s regulatory framework, known as the Digital Markets Act, hinders Apple’s ability to protect its customers’ privacy. The EU believes the job of protecting consumers privacy – and our rights regarding how our data is exploited – is a matter best handled by the public through collective government.

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Wait, Chat Is Dead? Does That Mean OpenAI Is Abandoning Ads?

Over the weekend the Financial Times came out with a report on OpenAI’s latest pivot.  According to a senior OpenAI executive quoted in the piece, the company has decided that “chat is dead.”

Instead, company executives insist, the future lies in a “super app,” an agent (from OpenAI, naturally) that will do everything for us. The “surface” – the interface between a user and OpenAI’s service – will no longer be a fixed chat box. Instead, according to Thibault Sottiaux, who now heads the OpenAI super app project, “what we’re building towards is where you have your own personal agent that is capable of helping you . . . across everything in your life, be it personally or at work.”

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Should AI Be Addictive?

The most interesting piece of news this morning comes from Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, who made a very public point of chastising his own team for saying the quiet part out loud.

That quiet part? In an internal memo leaked to 404 Media, a Microsoft VP said his team’s goal was to “make people addicted” to Microsoft’s new Scout tool, which is fashioned on Open Claw, the AI agent project that went viral early this year. Nadella quickly quashed such sentiments, releasing a memo stating “this is absolutely a non goal! If anything we are doing the exact opposite. We want to make sure AI empowers and adds real value to human endeavor and broad economic growth! We should make our teams clear about this.”

Microsoft then went into damage control mode, with corporate comms chief Frank Shaw piling on that Scout is for “helping people accomplish tasks more effectively—not encouraging dependency. Our goal isn’t more screen time. It’s more time back.”

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