I might just have to make a weekly news roundup part of the regular rotation here, as once again the noteworthy stories crowding my inbox are so numerous this morning I feel compelled to comment on each of them in turn. If you hate roundups, skip this post – but here are the top stories … Continue reading "AI Data Dustups, Bond Market Tremors, and Whatever Muse Is"

Watching OpenAI promote its ads business puts me in something of a nostalgic mood. When I saw OpenAI’s thirsty announcement this week proclaiming a billion-dollar revenue run rate in its advertising business, I had myself something of a chuckle. We’ve seen this movie before – I wrote an early script for it in The Search, which … Continue reading "Comparing OpenAI’s Ad Platform to Early Google and Facebook Growth"

A week ago I knocked my phone – a Google Pixel 8 Pro – off the table and watched helplessly as it bounced awkwardly onto the stone floor of our favorite restaurant. After retrieving it I noticed a splotch of dead pixels in the top right corner. This was a new phenomenon – I was … Continue reading "Inadvertent Time Travel"

August is often dismissed as a lost month in the business world – nothing gets done because everyone is on vacation. But where I live, August is the apex of the year. A heady mix of artists, financiers, philanthropists, business leaders and politicians converge on our little island for the month. The ensuing deluge of … Continue reading "The Essential Question: Can We Control AI?"

“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 … Continue reading "Data. Is. Not. Oil. Can It Be A Public Good?"

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 … Continue reading "What’s Next?"

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 … Continue reading "AI Is Just (Currently Bad) Software"

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 … Continue reading "The Data Center Debate Rages. Will It Change the Course of History?"

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 … Continue reading "Five Stories To Watch"

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"

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 … Continue reading "What’s up: DOC!"

  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. … Continue reading "Who Owns Search Results?"

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 … Continue reading "Who Controls the Tokens?"

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 … Continue reading "I’ll Be Framing My AI Check"

Last month the FT reported that OpenAI was going all in on a “super app” that combines agents and coding, a move clearly designed to compete with Anthropic, which dominates the “get work done” market with Claude CoWork. “Chat is dead” as the principle interface for ChatGPT, according to OpenAI execs quoted in the FT … Continue reading "Again, What About the AI Ads?"

It seems ridiculous now, but when I was a cub reporter covering the tech industry, our publication had an entire beat focused on word processing – and it was one of the most sought after assignments in the newsroom. We had another reporter who focused on spreadsheets. Because I was the new kid, I covered … Continue reading "The Rhymes of Tech History"

Have you seen Alex Karp’s rant on CNBC? I fielded this question about a dozen times over the past week. If you’ve not yet watched, it’s well worth your time. In a conspiratorial diatribe against the evils of monopoly-crazed frontier labs, the founder of defense-tech giant Palantir asserts that OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are ruining … Continue reading "Who Stole My Alpha?"

One of the best ways to find signal in the noise of a major technological shift is through the time-tested journalistic tactic of following the money. Back in January I predicted that in B2B markets, AI Can’t Cost This Much. I argued that “pricing the future based on the cost of the present is a … Continue reading "The Economics of AI Are Shifting"

“Our lives have become dematerialized.” That phrase – from author Ian Bogost in a short piece in Wired – struck at the center of something I’ve been trying to verbalize for years. Bogost argues that technologies of convenience and efficiency have destroyed our connection to the physical world. His primary example is the automobile – … Continue reading "Have We Lost The Plot?"

It seems almost quaint now, but there was once a version of the Internet ruled by influencers that were honest, high integrity folks who genuinely cared about the impact of their words. Perhaps the most thoughtful of these was Om Malik, who passed away last week at the age of 59. Om was a colleague … Continue reading "Remembering Om Malik"

The single most essential ingredient of good journalism is trust. By that measure, journalism is in a very bad way: According to The Reuters Institute’s annual survey, only 37 percent of the global public trusts the news industry, down nearly 20 points from ten years ago. In the US, that figure stands at 25 percent. … Continue reading "How Can You Trust the News?"

Amongst friends and family, I’m known as something of a digital curmudgeon. I’m usually the one person in group chats who does not use an iPhone, a habit I gave up in 2012 when I sensed that Apple was enclosing the entire mobile space. I stopped visiting Facebook and Instagram a decade ago, and I … Continue reading "Quitting A Digital Habit"

Yesterday Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella published a fascinating essay that reads as both a rebuke to frontier AI model companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, as well as a call to arms to the entire business community. Nadella is worried that OpenAI and Anthropic are about to eat everyone’s lunch – Microsoft included. “I’ve been thinking … Continue reading "Will AI Ever Become a True Platform? Not Without Us…."

I’m traveling today – consider this brief post a placeholder of sorts. I’ve long railed against the privatization of public space, and the hidden regulation inherent in the submission of our collective personal data to the black boxes of Big Tech. With that in mind, I’m watching this story, about Apple’s refusal to roll out … Continue reading "Who Should Govern Us, Apple or…The Government?"

Over the weekend the Financial Times came out with a report on OpenAI’s latest pivot.  According to a senior OpenAI executive quoted in the piece, the company has decided that “chat is dead.” Instead, company executives insist, the future lies in a “super app,” an agent (from OpenAI, naturally) that will do everything for us. The … Continue reading "Wait, Chat Is Dead? Does That Mean OpenAI Is Abandoning Ads?"

The most interesting piece of news this morning comes from Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, who made a very public point of chastising his own team for saying the quiet part out loud. That quiet part? In an internal memo leaked to 404 Media, a Microsoft VP said his team’s goal was to “make people addicted” to … Continue reading "Should AI Be Addictive?"

“Hey Google, how are the Giants doing this year?”  I was standing at my bathroom sink, finishing up my daily ablutions, when a random thought popped into my head. It’s been a minute since I checked in on my favorite baseball team – ever since I moved East, they’ve been in a slump. Maybe they’re … Continue reading "Where’s All the AI Magic?"