The Valley Is Terrified of AI

Credit to the WSJ and Reddit

Today Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg joined the chorus of multi-billionaires who feel compelled to issue periodic manifestos about the impact of AI on society. Unlike Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who posts on his own site, or Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who recently posted a long form manifesto on X, Zuckerberg took a page from his board colleague Marc Andreessen and issued his proclamation in the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal.

In “The AI Future Is for Everyone,” Zuckerberg broadly aligns himself with Nadella (and by extension, Palantir CEO Alex Karp), both of whom have recently warned that the frontier labs (Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic) can not be trusted with the power they seem to be accruing.

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What’s up: DOC!

Back in 2024 I helped to launch a new events and media series focused on the science of longevity. We called it DOC. Over the past two years, DOC has thrived, and a fascinating community of leaders in medicine, finance, policy, and entrepreneurship has flourished. This year we’re hosting our third annual DOC October 21–23 at the Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn, with a focus on the intersection of medicine and AI.  

At the time we launched DOC, many of you asked me why I was involved – I’ll admit it seemed like a bit of a curveball. But beginning with the Internet Summit back in 1998 and continuing through The Standard’s rooftops, Web 2, Foursquare, Signal, and NewCo Shift, I’ve always loved curating an influential group of people in the context of a larger, high-impact narrative. It’s journalism in a live setting, and if you get it right, it can catalyze a nascent industry and drive it forward. 

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Who Owns Search Results?

 

Image SearchEngineRoundtable

Earlier this week I posted something of a coda for the open web, but today news broke of a small victory for “how things used to be.”

The backstory: For decades, Google has been the beating heart of the Internet’s ecosystem, pumping the oxygenated lifeblood of traffic across tens of millions of revenue-starved websites. That’s all changed over the past few years as Google has erected a massive set of AI-driven walls around its core search service. As I said in “Google Encloses the Web,” Google no longer views the web as a destination, but rather as “raw material” for the company’s core product, which, like so many of its peers, is attracting and retaining human attention it can sell to advertisers and, via Gemini subscriptions, to businesses and consumers.

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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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