While GenAI has revolutionised production speed and cost, its impact on actual performance has remained a subject of intense debate. The new study, titled “AI Ads That Work: How AI Creative Stacks Up Against Humans,” analysed hundreds of thousands of live ads running on Realize, Taboola’s performance advertising platform, totalling more than 500 million impressions and 3 million clicks.  — Read More

#strategy

At Davos 2026, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told a room full of the world’s most influential investors that AI would replace “most, maybe all” of what software engineers do within six to twelve months. A few hours later, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis took the same stage and said current AI systems are “nowhere near” human-level intelligence, and that we probably need “one or two more breakthroughs” before AGI arrives.

Both men run frontier AI labs. Both have access to roughly the same benchmarks, papers, and internal capabilities data. Yet their public forecasts diverge so dramatically that at least one of them must be either wrong or strategically misleading. The interesting question is which, and why. — Read More

You’ve probably seen the headlines: AI might be killing jobs for the young. A widely-shared academic paper – the “canaries in the coal mine” paper by Stanford colleagues – found a 16% employment decline for young workers (ages 22-25) in AI-exposed occupations since ChatGPT launched in November 2022. The implication seems clear: AI is already eliminating the first rung of the career ladder, and we’re witnessing the beginning of a massive technological displacement.

It’s a compelling narrative, and it matches our fears. After all, if AI can write code and answer customer queries, why would companies hire junior people to do those things?

But a new paper from the Economic Innovation Group looks more carefully at the data. And when you do, the story becomes a lot less clear. The paper is by Zanna Iscenko (AI & Economy Lead, Chief Economist’s Team), and Fabien Curto Millet (Chief Economist), both at Google. — Read More

Here we go again, the tech press is having another AI doom cycle.

I’ve primarily written this as a response to an NYT analyst painting a completely unsubstantiated, baseless, speculative, outrageous, EGREGIOUS, preposterous “grim picture” on OpenAI going bust.

Mate come on. OpenAI is not dying, they’re not running out of money. Yes, they’re creating possibly the craziest circular economy and defying every economics law since Adam Smith published ‘The Wealth of Nations’. $1T in commitments is genuinely insane. But I doubt they’re looking to be acquired; honestly by who? you don’t raise $40 BILLION at $260 BILLION VALUATION to get acquired. It’s all for the $1T IPO. — Read More

The last generation of enterprise software became trillion-dollar platforms by owning what happened. Salesforce owns the customer record. Workday owns the employee record. SAP owns the operational record.

The next trillion-dollar opportunity? Owning what the vibe was when it happened.

We call this the vibes graph: a living record of ambient organizational sentiment, stitched across entities and time, so that vibe becomes queryable. — Read More

And once they take our jobs, will we be able to find new ones? Will AI take those too?

Seb Krier recently wrote an unusually good take on that, which will center this post.

I believe that Seb is being too optimistic on several fronts, but in a considered and highly reasonable way. The key is to understand the assumptions being made, and also to understand that he is only predicting that the era of employment optimism will last for 10-20 years. — Read More

The number one question I get from my friends, acquaintances, and mentees in the technology industry these days is, by far, variations on the basic theme of, “what the hell are we supposed to do now?”

There have been mass layoffs that leave more tech workers than ever looking for new roles in the worst market we’ve ever seen. Many of the most talented, thoughtful and experienced people in the industry are feeling worried, confused, and ungrounded in a field that no longer looks familiar.

If you’re outside the industry, you may be confused — isn’t there an AI boom that’s getting hundreds of billions of dollars in investments? Doesn’t that mean the tech bros are doing great? What you may have missed is that half a million tech workers have been laid off in the years since ChatGPT was released; the same attacks on marginalized workers and DEI and “woke” that the tech robber barons launched against the rest of society were aimed at their own companies first. — Read More

If you still think the AI revolution is a story about progress and saving humanity, think again.

OpenAI is burning $11–12 billion per quarter, and its perverse appetite keeps growing. Until the end of last year, this could have been considered a problem for Sam Altman and OpenAI’s shareholders, but now everything has changed.

OpenAI no longer wants to go down alone. It’s dragging down the leaders of the AI and financial industries with it. The bill will run not just into the hundreds of billions of dollars set to go up in smoke over the next three years, but ultimately into the trillions. — Read More