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

Michael Burry called the subprime mortgage crisis when everyone else was buying in. Now he’s watching trillions pour into AI infrastructure, and he’s skeptical. Jack Clark is the co-founder of Anthropic, one of the leading AI labs racing to build the future. Dwarkesh Patel has interviewed everyone from Mark Zuckerberg to Tyler Cowen about where this is all headed. We put them in a Google doc with Patrick McKenzie moderating and asked: Is AI the real deal, or are we watching a historic misallocation of capital unfold in real time? — Read More

#strategy

When Google locked AlphaFold 3 behind commercial restrictions, three MIT PhD students rebuilt it in four months. Now Boltz has $28M, a Pfizer partnership, and a bet that open-source can capture drug discovery infrastructure. — Read More

Leaders of many organizations are urging their teams to adopt agentic AI to improve efficiency, but are finding it hard to achieve any benefit. Managers attempting to add AI agents to existing human teams may find that bots fail to faithfully follow their instructions, return pointless or obvious results or burn precious time and resources spinning on tasks that older, simpler systems could have accomplished just as well.

The technical innovators getting the most out of AI are finding that the technology can be remarkably human in its behavior. And the more groups of AI agents are given tasks that require cooperation and collaboration, the more those human-like dynamics emerge.

Our research suggests that, because of how directly they seem to apply to hybrid teams of human and digital workers, the most effective leaders in the coming years may still be those who excel at understanding the timeworn principles of human management.

We have spent years studying the risks and opportunities for organizations adopting AI. Our 2025 book, Rewiring Democracy, examines lessons from AI adoption in government institutions and civil society worldwide. In it, we identify where the technology has made the biggest impact and where it fails to make a difference. Today, we see many of the organizations we’ve studied taking another shot at AI adoption—this time, with agentic tools. While generative AI generates, agentic AI acts and achieves goals such as automating supply chain processes, making data-driven investment decisions or managing complex project workflows. The cutting edge of AI development research is starting to reveal what works best in this new paradigm. — Read More

This is the third in my annual series reviewing everything that happened in the LLM space over the past 12 months. For previous years see Stuff we figured out about AI in 2023 and Things we learned about LLMs in 2024.

It’s been a year filled with a lot of different trends. — Read More

… The talent shortage is brutal. Every company needs AI PMs. Few people have the skills.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Meta all have open AI PM roles. They can’t fill them fast enough.

The hiring bar is high. You need product sense, technical depth, and hands-on AI experience. Most PMs have one or two. You need all three.

… The gap between supply and demand means comp packages keep climbing. Base salary plus equity plus signing bonuses. $500K is common. $700K+ for senior roles.

The AI PM job market dynamics show why this won’t change soon. — Read More