Inside Out and Upside Down
It’s another week when someone predicts the big tear-down. This time, it’s BigTech vs. BigFour.
In a modern-day version of the gilded-age, NYTimes announced a licensing deal with Amazon for an estimated $20–25 million per year to feed the AI beast. Much better than the ‘put it all out in front of the firewall’ move mid-1990s with the advent of the web, that just about tanked the entire news industry. Still though, it’s a tiny percent of NYT annual revenue and it makes me wonder about the Washington Post — Mr. Bezos and all that. Where are they in the line up? Here we are.
And in this era of accelerated change the coming week will bring us another wave with the launch of ChatGPT-5. Love Mr. Masinga’s take on what this means.
I keep wondering how this ends for humankind — our planet — our children and am reflecting on a thoughtful note exchanged between a colleague and a client yesterday expressing genuine concern about ethics, anarchy, job-loss, unrestricted access to a technology with little training, no training wheels, and certainly no guardrails.
Around us we see lay-offs, slow-hiring, a dearth of jobs for new graduates, and now daresay — complaints of AI devaluing the Stanford MBA now in need of a make-over. Just today, Intel announced 25,000 layoffs. It’s starting or maybe continuing.
I wish we could slow-down to speed up. But FOMO rules the day. I don’t have a good feeling about where this ends up. History has a funny way of repeating itself when the gaps get too big. Life feels inside out and upside down. Corporate offices are becoming the next war zone; CEOs the next target. Like our schools — innocent people are locked up or locked down, to protect them from the bad guys.
Maybe Mother Nature was once again having the last laugh with her earthquake in Russia and threat of a tsunami. The west coast is thankfully fine. I am beginning to sound like my dad who thought the Beatles represented the end of civilization as he knew it. But hey the economy is growing, the stock market is up, big tech is happy, and the fed thinks steady as we go is the order of the day. The world goes merrily around while it spins out of control. Go big on AI or go bust.