I think it is time to start worrying about OpenAI a little. In this video, I discuss a number of warning signs and risk factors like...
1 commodification of LLM
2 erosion of scientific leadership
3 lack of product identity
4 financial sustainability
5 limitations from irregular corporate governance
6 powerful enemies like Elon Musk waiting in the wings to attack 4 and 5
Subtle but important is that these are not parallel risks but risks that are interacting destructively.
It may be you can access a lot of value right now simply by taking a closer look at what your employees are already doing with #ArtificialIntelligence. These days, #LLM is likely oozing out of software you've long been using perhaps even including your operating system. There will be good in this you want to accentuate and risk in it you want to regulate with intention.
I also discuss related reasons why #DataGovernance and #DataPrivacy expertise can be important #AI to the extent they allow you to adopt new technologies with intention.
Protectionist and interventionist policies are often brutal for small business in particular because they don't attract enough attention for bespoke treatment. The risks looking forward are ferocious.
Vibe coding! What is it? What are people saying about it? Who cares? I provide some basic background on vibe coding before analyzing how it fits into longer economic and labor market trends.
What impact might #tariffs, and international trade more broadly, have on #ArtificialIntelligence? In this video, I approach this question by examining the history of social media, another widget with a lot of economies of scale and natural monopoly, in Europe vs. China.
There's a story circulating today about SoftBank's investment in OpenAI and their requirement that OpenAI reincorporate quickly, in pursuit of an IPO, or lose half the investment. In this video, I recap the broader story here of OpenAI's unusual corporate governance situation as a not-for-profit with a for-profit subsidiary. It could turn out to be very impactful if OpenAI gets bogged down in related lawsuits that delay its potential IPO, and it is not so fanciful as people like Elon Musk have already demonstrated the will (and at least a little bit of the standing) to bring this kind of litigation.
#ArtificialIntelligence, as an industry, is likely to prove unusually sensitive to #macroeconomics for some time. The stakes could be high: it is certainly possible, if not likely, we could have a third #AI winter in which investment and credibility collapse. In this video, I discuss two major avenues by which economic conditions are likely to make an important impact...
1) the well-established effect of interest rates, and indirectly of #inflation and growth, on technology investment
2) the new frontier of economies of scale in #LLM, natural monopoly, and how #tariffs, trade, and geopolitics determine what kind of scale is possible
You may have heard OpenAI is rolling out ChatGPT 4.5 and more generally there is always a new model out. I digest some of the prelim reviews on 4.5 for you before arguing that this release is in some ways probably not "good enough" for the business optics around it. It's a great conversation piece for a broader examination of what we should all make of this drip of new models and what kind of curve different companies are implicitly being graded on when they release them.
In this video, I outline why NVIDIA's earning call tomorrow is so anticipated. Specifically, it provides a hard data point about how #ArtificialIntelligence is going to impact society (or not) and provides a canary in the coal mine for a number of important geopolitical and financial trends.
You've probably read that Elon Musk is leading a group of investors in an attempt at buying out OpenAI. In this video, I cover the basic facts, dive deep on why this adventure is a little bit weird beyond what is reflected in the headline, and point out to my own enjoyment that #ArtificialIntelligence seems oddly hell-bent on producing dramas that highlight the importance of corporate governance.
It may be that the best ROI you can get out of #ArtificialIntelligence right now comes from providing a nurturing, sensibly-guardrailed environment for the bottom-up innovation your organization is already doing (with or without you). I have often observed that many individuals live in the turbo-productivity #AI future already but their organizations do not precisely because there is really nowhere for the added productivity to go. What a waste!
Here I share some meditations on strategy and risk management with reference to DeepSeek, #ArtificialIntelligence broadly, Mike Tyson, and musty tomes on generalship both forgotten and remembered.
DeepSeek is a pretty big deal in #ArtificialIntelligence and an earthquake with proto-tsunami for the geopolitics and economics of #AI.
In this video, I provide basic facts and rapid analysis on the $500 billion "Stargate" #ArtificialIntelligence infrastructure venture backed by OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank among others. Less common analysis includes...
- the significance of convoluted governance and allegiance in #AI
- the brewing backlash against ubiquitous data centers
- the surprisingly international sourcing of funding
Apple has a bit of an egg on its face after pulling an #ArtificialIntelligence-powered news notification feature. In this video, I cover the basic facts of this story before using it as a conversation piece to discuss the importance of quality control (and probably a human-in-the-loop) for doing #AI well in publicly visible, practical settings. I provide a little intuition for the possibility that the hallucination problem (when your AI makes stuff up) is probably not going to get all the way solved by newer and fancier models alone. More advanced AI is even likely to have more subtle and unexpected ways of embarrassing us...
With a #CPI print and #inflation generally in the news I thought I would walk through how these data points can be useful tea leaves for predicting the future of investment-dependent companies like OpenAI, the broader arc of #ArtificialIntelligence to come, and the risk of another #AI winter.
In this video, I share some roundabout employee feedback on the typical corporate #CenterOfExcellence and beat my drum begging you to get a handle on the spontaneous, bottom-up #ArtificialIntelligence innovation that is likely already occurring in your organization.
Warning: imminently practical #ArtificialIntelligence advice for medium-sized businesses.
In this video, I revisit my thesis that it is plausibly high-impact to take a careful look at what your employees are doing with #GenerativeAI on their own initiative, and note why this advice is likely most relevant to businesses that are not too big and not too small.
If you are a business leader of any sort it's likely that the most important action you can take apropos of #ArtificialIntelligence is to get a handle on what people in your organization are doing already on their own initiative. I'm blessed to talk to all sorts of people about #AI and the world is doing amazing work right now that is both under-utilized and under-regulated. The remedy is not rare chips or rocket science algorithms but knowledge sharing, training, and just asking around the office. It's not glamorous, but if you ask me the most valuable revelations around running a business never are.
If I am making sense here, please get in touch with me. Now is the time to get started right.
Amazon and Anthropic announcement about their "Ultracluster" supercomputer got me thinking about how #ArtificialIntelligence might be standing at a bit of a crossroads...
How centralized will the high-powered #AI of the future be? Does it require the most unique of hardware? Or will people be able to run it on a bunch of old gaming PCs chained together? The technology will determine a lot about the business, and then the business will in turn shape a lot about what technology researchers pursue.
More detail on my (admittedly speculative) perspective in this video...
