Data. Is. Not. Oil. Can It Be A Public Good?

The Economist, August 2017

“Data is the new oil.”

It’s the metaphor that won’t die, though for the next little bit, I’ll do my part to advance its expiration date. Yesterday came news that Google purchased the entire data corpus of Spirit Airlines, which is selling its assets in a bankruptcy process. Google isn’t planning on launching an airline – instead, it believes Sprit’s data will help train more capable AI models. Cementing the role AI plays in reviving the “data is oil” narrative, Google won the auction over Mercor, a firm that pays contractors to train AI systems.

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What’s Next?

Artwork Rick Griffin

I’ve been trying to connect with a journalist who reached out a few days ago. He’s working on a story from way back in my career – the early days of Wired, circa 1995. It’s taken a few attempts to find a time. Despite the fact I’m no longer running a company full time, my days are still packed with meetings and obligations and new priorities. It probably doesn’t help that I keep my phone silenced, so I miss serendipitous calls, a favorite tactic of good journalists. But between various board meetings, community work, time blocked for writing, client and advisory work, investment reviews, exercise, and friends and family, squeezing in a 15-minute call feels just as hard now as it did when I had an EA, a Chief of Staff, and two full-time jobs*.

Is it strange that while I’m not “working” nearly as much as I used to, I still feel just as busy? Is that a good thing, or a problem?

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AI Is Just (Currently Bad) Software

An image from SasSpocalypse.com

Last week I ran into an old pal at a party who asked me what I thought of the “SaaSpocalypse” – the AI-driven correction that hit nearly all software stocks over the past few quarters.  My friend has bought and sold software companies for most of his career and is a sophisticated player in private equity markets. Like everyone in finance and tech, he reads just about everything he can about AI’s impact on our economy, and in particular on formerly predictable sectors like software. “Software companies are cheap right now,” he said, before adding that he wasn’t sure it made sense to buy them, because everything he was reading was saying the software party is over.

It might have been the cocktails talking, but before I had a chance to think, I said “AI is just bad software. It’ll get better, once companies figure out what to actually do with it.”

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The Data Center Debate Rages. Will It Change the Course of History?

A NYT story on data centers.

Even though I ran a political media company for four years, I’ve largely avoided writing about politics, and I’m not about to make a habit of it now. But the politics around data centers has come to dominate coverage of AI, and how those politics play out over the next few months will likely determine not only the course of Trump’s final two years in office, but who inherits the Presidency in 2028.

Until we can see the monster, we tend to ignore the monster. With their massive appetites for energy, land, capital, and water, data centers have become tangible manifestations of Big Tech’s otherwise incorporeal impact on society. Data centers give the monster a body, a tractable container through which to air out a dog’s breakfast of grievances against not only the tech industry, but also the corporations, politicians, and financiers profiting from its concentrated power.

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Five Stories To Watch

Artwork from Anthropic’s announcement

My posts here often stem from my morning ritual of reading the news – which despite the rise of AI agents still revolves around roughly three dozen email newsletters of one kind or another. Sometimes a particular story will spark an urge to “think out loud” about the subject. 500-2500 words later, I’ll hit publish and move on with my day.

But this morning proved a particularly chewy mix of stories, each of which felt noteworthy in their own right. So today I’m giving up on the idea of writing just one post on just one topic. Instead, here’s a rundown of five I think worthy of consideration:

  • The lead story for most of my tech-related newsletters was Anthropic’s somewhat thirsty announcement that, just like OpenAI earlier this week, its models have also broke containment and hacked several unnamed companies (WSJ coverage here). My favorite response to this news comes from Reddit:
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The Valley Is Terrified of AI

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 … Continue reading “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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