Tag: artificial intelligence

Health Takes Center Stage, Open Evidence Acquired (Predictions 2026, #5 and #4)

Yesterday The Information scooped my well laid plans for today’s health and AI-related predictions. If you’ve been following along this past week, you know I decided to write one prediction post a day for the first working week of the year. Today marks #5, which predicts that health will become a central player in society’s debate around AI, and #4, which predicts OpenEvidence will be acquired. I knew that OpenAI was working on health-related product offerings – the company said as much when it hired Fidji Simo from Instacart. But I didn’t know OpenAI would announce its health product so early in the year. Oh, and by the way, Google is expected to quickly do the same.

That said, I think there’s a lot more room to run in this story. OpenAI’s announcement is just the prelude. Health offers the perfect test case of just about every crucial limitation –  and every massive opportunity – that AI represents in society today.

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The Year Tech Gets Even Bigger (Predictions 2026, #7)

If only Nano Banana could spell, AI would be a thing.

For the past many years one prediction has proven reliably accurate: There will be no significant Federal regulation of the technology industry. At times this stalwart prognostication has been tested by major anti-trust actions – but each has proven ultimately toothless. This year, for example, we’ll learn what the DOJ managed to accomplish in its second case against Google – and it’s still possible a judge will rule that the search and AI giant must divest itself of its adtech infrastructure. But I don’t think so. And even if that ruling does come to pass, Google knows it can simply appeal, dragging out any eventual impact until it wins a war of attrition with an increasingly feckless and uninterested DOJ.

Besides, arguing about the past is playing yesterday’s game, and in 2026, the game has reverted to an even older playbook. For the past five or so years, tech giants have had to play defense when it comes to M&A and sweetheart partnerships – Meta was being sued over its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, Google over its consolidation of adtech and its domination of search distribution through deals with Apple and Samsung, among others. But in 2026, the governors are coming off.

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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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Anthropic Goes Public (Predictions 2026 #9)

According to the Financial Times (and pretty much everyone else), 2026 has the potential to be the biggest IPO year in history. SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic all could go public this year; the proceeds from those three combined “would outstrip the total haul from about 200 US IPOs in 2025.”

Were any one of the three companies to successfully complete a public offering this year, they’d not only make thousands of lawyers, investors, bankers, and employees very rich, they’d also be setting a record: Each company is already privately valued at well above the benchmark for the largest public offering in history, which was Alibaba’s 2014 debut at $170 billion.

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The Feed Declines (Predictions 2026, #10)

Evolve, or die?

At the dawn of digital, when cell phones were new and culture dominated by cable television, most of my friends and family considered me an ‘early adopter.’ I was usually the first of my crew to engage with any new digital device or service – the Mac, email, the web, search, wifi, even nascent social sites like Friendster, Orkut, and LinkedIn. I was one of the very first people on Instagram, back when it was just a photo site. I was the guy friends and family called when they had a computer problem, and later, when their smart phone acted up. It wasn’t that I was particularly adept at coding or solving IT problems. I was just the guy who everyone knew had spent the most time in the digital world. You know, the Wired guy.

For nearly three decades, I stayed current with all things digital. But about ten years ago, I started pulling back. At first it was more of a vibe – I didn’t like how the digital world was starting to feel. Insistent, needy, demanding. I’d worked for most of my life inside digital spaces, but before the web went world wide, digital was more of a solo act. You, the “user,” were in charge. You decided which applications to pay attention to, which documents to read or write, which sites to visit. That was starting to change, and it didn’t feel right.

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Grading My 2025 Predictions

Nostradamus, so predictable.

All year long I monitor my annual predictions, taking note when events either make me a fool or a sage. 2025 marked perhaps the most unpredictable and frustrating year of them all – and that’s not nothing, given I started prognosticating in 2003. But then again, I did expect an odd one – from my 2025 post: “This isn’t going to be a normal year. 2025 will be strange, frenetic, and full of surprises.”

I titled my post “Tech Takes the Power Position.” While I didn’t make that sentiment one of my specifically numbered predictions, it did provide the context for how I was thinking about the year ahead. “We’re not accustomed to the tech industry having this much raw power. The finance industry? Sure…But this year, for the first time ever, Big Tech has leap-frogged finance in the pantheon of political influence…the subset of Big Tech bros who’ve bought their way into the Oval are evangelists for an untested and downright strange brand of magical thinking best summed up as “techno optimism.”  …for better or for worse, 2025 is going to be the year when the loudest voices in the room are all adherents of the Great Man Theory, and they all happen to have direct access to the Oval Office.”

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Two Approaches to Saving The Web. Only One Works.

Image Gareth Glaser https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/appeal-open-internet-gareth-glaser-kwnbe/

The open web – free content written by actual humans about things actual humans care about – has been in decline for more than a decade. I’ve had a front row seat throughout – first at Federated Media, which was built 20 years ago to support independent publishers, then on the Board of Sovrn, which continued Federated’s work on the programmatic/data side of the publishing business. I’ve also taught and practiced journalism for the past few decades, and started and advised countless ventures that depend on traditional media revenue streams.

In short, I know it ain’t pretty out there for advertising-supported publishing. Social media dug the grave, and now the nail gun of generative AI seems to be merrily fastening the lid over the open web’s pine box coffin.

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Algorithms and Capitalism: Cleaning Up The Waze Parade

Where are we all going?!

Do you feel it? A simmering discontent with the state of capitalism in American life? I certainly do. My kids engage with social media only if they have to – never because they wish to. They believe their feeds are  manipulated by corporate interests, and they are distrustful of anyone who believes otherwise. My wife is convinced that anything she buys online – particularly the bigger ticket items like flights or hotels – is priced based on what algorithms calculate she can afford to pay – not what might be fair or offered to others. Parents in my friend group are terrified that their kids are using ChatGPT as a confidante and therapist whose motivations are unfathomable. The stock market keeps pushing ever upwards, but my colleagues are increasingly convinced a crash is around the corner.

Something just feels….off. The complex socio-economic system that we’re all a part of seems rigged. And we feel powerless to do anything about it.

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Is OpenAI Today’s Netscape? Or Is It AOL?

As is his want, last week Fred Wilson wrote a provocative post I’ve been thinking about for the past few days. Titled “Netscape and Microsoft Redux?“, Fred notes the parallels between the browser wars of the late 1990s and the present-day battle for dominance in the consumer AI market. And he asks a prescient question: What new, world-defining product might we be missing by focusing on AI chatbots?

In the early days of the Web, everyone thought the most important new product to emerge from the Internet was the browser. Netscape, a startup with just a few months of operating history, defined the market for those browsers in 1994, then dominated it for several years thereafter. But by the late 1990s, the lumbering incumbent Microsoft had stolen Netscape’s lead by leveraging distribution and pricing advantages inherent to its massive Windows monopoly.

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Will AI Replace Doctors?

DOC 2025 Debaters: Reid Hoffman, Eric Verdin, Anitha Kannan, and Mike Krieger

At the inaugural DOC gathering last year, famed Valley VC Vinod Khosla made a bold prediction: AI will soon make medical care “essential free,” while at the same time enabling human doctors to scale their knowledge and caregiving five to ten fold. Bill Gates has made similar claims – and gone even further, saying that AI will “replace many doctors” with 10 years.

As we all contemplate a future of “AI everywhere,” perhaps no question is more polarizing than this: Will AI make human work obsolete? And if so, what happens to all of us? It’s the defining question of Mustafa Suleyman’s 2023 book “The Coming Wave,” in which Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, argues that AI will have “hugely destabilizing” impact on the workforce. “Godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton strikes a darker tone, warning “What’s actually going to happen is rich people are going to use AI to replace workers. It’s going to create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits. It will make a few people much richer and most people poorer.”

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