Category: venture capital

AI Can’t Cost This Much (Predictions 2026, #8)

That’s some Big Iron you got there, Mister!

Some of you gave disagreed with my last prediction, that Anthropic would file for an IPO, stating, accurately, that OpenAI has a far more pressing need for fresh capital, given its commitments to various partnerships totaling  more than $1.4 trillion and counting. That’s a good point, but I don’t think OpenAI will ever really spend that money, and my next prediction explains why: I think the costs involved with delivering AI will come down significantly in 2026.

I’m not either an economist nor a supply chain expert, so what I’m about to write is informed more by historical rhyming than quantitative analysis. But when I see eye-watering numbers about the cost of data centers, compute, and chips, I start to wonder if innovation has been factored into the calculations. When trillions of dollars are projected to be spent, trillions that would require trillions more in revenue (and profit) to justify, a lot of butterflies start to flap their wings.

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The Trouble With Bees

This is not a honey bee.

There’s this throwaway conceit in the current season of Black Mirror that keeps tugging at me, and it’s Friday, so I thought I’d think out loud about it.

In Episode 1, “Common People,” the protagonist, a school teacher, is lecturing her young pupils about pollination. She casually explains how robotic bees have taken over for their organic ancestors, buzzing from flower to flower and, one presumes, keeping the world’s agricultural ecosystem from crashing. The exchange is meant to contextualize the episode as happening sometime in the near future – most of us know that the bee population is crashing, and the concept of autonomous insect drones doesn’t feel that far off. It’s also an elegant reference consistent with one of tech’s most fundamental beliefs – don’t worry, kids, technology can and will save us from ourselves!

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Can Bluesky Do Advertising Right? Yes.

Chart compiled based on various web sources for both early Twitter and recent Bluesky growth.

I’ve been in the business of making new kinds of media companies, media platforms, and media technologies since before the Web was born, and in every case I’ve partnered with the advertising industry to make it happen – an industry often reviled as the driver of “surveillance capitalism,” the attention-mining, data-driven monster supposedly at the center of the Internet’s enshittification. 

So I wasn’t shocked when Bluesky CEO Jay Graber acknowledged last week that advertising might be in the company’s future. The company is growing at a blistering pace, adding tens of millions of users in a matter of months. It costs dearly to service that kind of growth, and the company has investors to appease. Bluesky’s growth mirrors Twitter in 2008 – 9009 – the year that Twitter first raised capital at a billion-dollar-plus valuation. Twitter proceeded to introduce advertising as its core business model one year later, in 2010.

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Asking The Stupid Questions of GenAI

I recently caught up with a pal who happens to be working at the center of the AI storm. This person is one of the very few folks in this industry whose point of view I explicitly trust: They’ve been working in the space for decades, and possess both a seasoned eye for product as well as the extraordinary gift of interpretation.

This gave me a chance to ask one of my biggest “stupid questions” about how we all might use chatbots. When I first grokked LLM-driven tools like ChatGPT, it struck me that one of its most valuable uses would be to focus its abilities on a bounded data set. For example, I’d love to ask a chatbot like Google Bard to ingest the entire corpus of Searchblog posts, then answer questions I might have about, say, the topics I’ve written about the most. (I’ve been writing here for 20 years, and I’ve forgotten more of it than I care to admit).  This of course only scratches the surface of what I’d want from a tool like Bard when combined with a data set like the Searchblog archives, but it’s a start.

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The Recount Joins The News Movement

Four years ago this past summer my family and I decided to move to New York, and as I prepared, I called my best friend in Manhattan, the journalist John Heilemann. If anyone could present me with the key to our new city, it was John – he was connected to everything and everyone worth knowing in New York.

But much to my surprise John had something different in mind when I rang to pick his brain. In short, he had an idea for a new kind of company, one he’d been bouncing off of our mutual friend Fred Wilson. John wanted to totally rethink video-based news for what we came to call the “post-linear” information ecosystem – in other words, for a world dominated by Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, and of course the emerging world of streaming.

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