All aboard ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI!
– Crazy Train, Ozzy Osborne (with slight modifications)
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Is AI Inherently Anti-Social?
Data Is Non Rivalrous. Why Have We Enclosed It?
One of the many reasons I’m a fan of reading history is its ability to offer frameworks for understanding the present. I recently finished Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global History, a 1,300-page monument to scholarship that The New York Times praised as “generational” in its importance. I tend to agree. Its pages contain foundational truths which enliven today’s debate around the role of technology in society.
Beckert argues that over the past millennium, capitalism’s amoral ideology of “accumulation above all else” has become so deeply embedded in the global political economy that we no longer question its core assumptions.
Read MoreWhat’s Up With DOC? 2026 Program Launches Today
Today my partners and I are launching the program driving our third annual DOC summit, to be held in Sonoma, CA later this fall. When my close friend Dr. Jordan Shlain brought me his idea for a new kind of gathering back in 2023, I had no clue how much I would learn. It wasn’t just about medicine and healthcare science, but also about creating a community. It’s been a great journey so far, and in year three, it will really take off.Â
One reason is that while I’ve been the acting CEO for DOC’s early years, we now have a full-time, seasoned pro taking over: Dr. Neil Parikh, who joined us last month. Not only is Neil an entrepreneur, a physician, and an MBA, he’s also got the even temperament and quiet intelligence that commands a room through earned respect. With Neil at the helm, Jordan and I can focus on what we most love to do: bring a community together through the expression of a fantastic program.Â
Read MoreOpenAI Plans on Marketing Its Way To Glory. Bonne Chance!
Early this past Saturday morning I got an email from OpenAI titled “Update to our privacy policy and more controls.” I don’t recall ever getting email from the company – I signed up for ChatGPT when it launched, but haven’t used the service much since switching to Claude several years ago. But the email reminded me of a story I read from The Information last week, and I think it’s fair to say the two are related: OpenAI Sees $8 ChatGPT Driving Consumer Subscribers to 122 Million This Year.
I’ve written several posts about OpenAI’s jaw-dropping advertising ambitions, which I believe history will judge as the most audacious and potentially damaging expansion of the Internet’s data-driven advertising model since the invention of AdWords, Google’s original cash cow. OpenAI plans on scaling its advertising revenue from zero in 2025 to more than $100 billion by 2030. As I pointed out earlier, it took Google nearly two decades to reach that milestone.
Read MoreWhere’s My AI Shareware?!
Have you noticed all the folks bragging about the cool new tools they’ve hacked up using AI? In the last month or so, I’ve read newsletters from half a dozen or so people detailing vibe-coded apps that help them do research, organize their life, or even build entire websites. And it’s not just media types who are building things. As I wrote about earlier, my son built a custom CRM system for his company over one weekend. That kind of capability is impressive. It feels like something new and big is underway.
Which got me thinking. If we’re all hacking up these cool tools, how come we can’t share them with each other? Why are we all consigned to re-invent the wheel each time we want to build, say, a “Searchblog Query Engine“?
Read MoreYour Conversations With AI Are Now On Sale
Data-driven performance advertising built the modern internet, warts and all. Data has become the most valuable resource in our economy, and the world’s most profitable companies have all organized around enclosing, extracting, processing, refining, and exploiting this new asset class.
Yesterday, OpenAI released its first performance advertising product. Marketers can now purchase “cost per click” advertising on ChatGPT, which means they can compare how money spent on OpenAI measures up to similar platforms like Google, Meta/Instagram, Apple, and Amazon, among many, many others. And if OpenAI’s offerings fail to compete, the company will have no choice but to modify its products to drive better performance.
Read MoreOptions Destroyed
Running a startup means making hundreds of decisions a week – some of them simple – which brand of coffee to stock in the kitchen – and some of them impossibly complicated – should I replace my founding CTO? When parsing through them, I always consider a piece of advice a long-time colleague once gave me:
“There’s no value in an option destroyed.”
Read MoreThe Island Underground Radio Station
This is a bit of a departure, but I figured I’d let you all know about a piece I wrote that was just published in our local paper. It covers a quirky underground radio station I stumbled across some years back. You can find the online piece here, and below is an excerpt:
Every Islander knows the drill: stuck in a line of traffic, slowly navigating one of the inescapable left-turn-fueled bottlenecks that bedevil our Island. Bored and possibly annoyed, we turn to our radios, hoping for a distraction to help pass the time.
Read MoreThe Web We Want Vs. The Web We Have
Are you frustrated with how the internet works?
Me too. Today I’m going to think out loud about why.
Read MoreFirst Person Singularities, Epistemic Supply Chains, and Load Bearing Euphemisms: An Interview with Claude.ai
I woke this morning to news that OpenAI plans on growing its advertising business from zero to more than $100 billion in the next four years. If that sounds utterly bonkers to you, well, you’re not alone.
For OpenAI to accomplish such a monumental task, it would have to leverage the database of intentions in ways that would make the assumptions inherent to today’s internet advertising landscape seem quaintly non-intrusive.
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