is the CRM for the AI era. and Attio instantly builds your CRM - with every company, every contact, and every interaction you've ever had, enriched and organized. You can also build AI-powered automations and use its research agent to tackle some of your most complex business processes, freeing you to focus on what matters the most: building your company. Join industry leaders like Flatfile, Replicate, Modal and more. Try the CRM that's built for the future. | | AI eats the world Twice a year, I produce a big presentation exploring macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. New in November 2025, 'AI eats the world'. LINK Writing about VR It's hard to say much about VR that we didn't say when the Vision Pro launched, and when Meta renamed itself, and indeed a decade ago or longer. It's not working yet, we don't know when it will, and we don't know how big 'working' would be. Here, my writing on the subject, back to 2016. LINK | | Assistants for Google and Apple As rumoured for months, Apple will indeed use Google's Gemini models to power the rebuilt personal digital assistant that it first demoed at WWDC in the summer of 2024, but then couldn't build. As Apple originally planned, the models will run locally on Apple devices and in the cloud on Apple-controlled compute, with all of Apple's usual privacy undertakings (Apple won't see individual user data, and Google certainly won't). Meanwhile, Google itself launched is own first run at an LLM-powered visual assistant, called 'Personal Intelligence', which connects Google's core ecosystem (Gmail, photos, Youtube and search) to analyse your activity and offer help. See this week's column. APPLE, GOOGLE OpenAI finally does ads After months of speculation, gossip and leaks, OpenAI announced an initial advertising strategy, with the free and cheapest subscriber tiers now having ads in the feed. For now, the ads will only be based on the current thread, not long-term knowledge about the user. Meanwhile, Google says it has no plans to put ads in Gemini. See this week's column. OPENAI, GOOGLE The week in AI Anthropic launched 'Cowork', in which its desktop app can try to work with apps and files on your Mac or PC. I say 'try' - it is a very rough beta. I asked it to look at a folder to see if it contained some specific data and got a macOS popup telling me I needed to install the command line dev tools before I could use 'git'. Then it did a plain text keyword search before using an LLM to summarise the first match it found. Yes, this will get better, but today we're still in demo-land. LINK Yet more AI headcount drama: two of the co-founders of Mira Murati's 'Thinking Machines' startup have left/been fired and gone back to OpenAI. Thinking Machines, as a reminder, raised $2bn at a $12bn valuation last autumn. LINK The CDN Cloudflare wants to be an AI rights gatekeeper, screening LLM bots as they try to scrape publisher websites for content and training data. It's adding to that by buying the UK startup Human Native, which is building a rights marketplace. LINK Walmart is expanding its trials of Alphabet's Wing delivery drones to another 150 stores. LINK The Information reports that Microsoft is now on track to spend $500m a year at Anthropic (it bought a $5bn stake last year). LINK Anthropic shuffles product Anthropic moved head of product (and Instagram co-founder) Mike Krieger to run an experimental 'labs' group, a step that looks very similar to OpenAI moving its own head of Product, Kevin Weil (former head of Instagram), to run an experimental science lab. Given that Anthropic has no consumer use or product, and seemingly no interest in that, he was an increasingly anomalous hire. Course correction at both, perhaps. That said, the new head of product, Ami Vora, has a background in product at Meta, most recently running product for WhatsApp. LINK DeMeta As rumoured last week, Meta cut about 10 people, or 10% of the total, from the VR hardware and 'Horizon Worlds' VR social network, as it cuts costs here (almost $20bn of burn in the last 12 months) to invest in AI. It also closed three VR content studios, and will no longer produce new content for 'Supernatural', its VR fitness experience - note that this was the $400m acquisition that the FTC tried to block on anti-competition grounds. (This illustrated the inherent dilemma for tech competition policy: you can either wait until the market is clear, but then it's too late, or try to get in early, but then you're speculating on what might happen and will probably be wrong, as here). More broadly - as I noted above, there's really nothing to say about VR and AR that we didn't say when the Vision Pro launched, and when Facebook renamed itself Meta, and indeed a decade ago when this was all super-hot. The hardware isn't good enough, it's not clear when it will be or what 'good enough' would be, and even if we had perfect hardware, it's not clear how many people will care. LAYOFFS, SUPERNATURAL | | What matters in tech? What's going on, what might it mean, and what will happen next? I've spent 25 years analysing mobile, media and technology, and worked in equity research, strategy, consulting and venture capital. I'm now an independent analyst, and I speak and consult on strategy and technology for companies around the world. | Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI is getting close to court, and the disclosures are coming. Amongst other things, apparently Elon Musk wanted control. And a $80bn nest egg to fund a city on Mars. Oh, and he wanted his children to control 'AGI' (that could actually be a pretty large and varied committee, to be fair). Given that many of the participants are distinguished by a talent for intrigue and somewhat economical attitudes to the truth, this should be entertaining, but it's not clear to me whether all this will really change very much. LINK Bloomberg has a long piece on the new (very bubbly) concept of AI datacentres in orbit. TLDR: there's no law of physics against it (free 24-hour solar power, while radiators to get rid of heat are feasible) but there would be enormous cost and engineering challenges. Back in the dotcom boom, people talked about building data connections in space (Teledesic), and that took 20 years: sometimes history rhymes? LINK A bunch of people in Bay Area tech are up in arms about a proposed California state ballot initiative that would impose a one-off 5% wealth tax. I have some sympathy with the idea that the USA does not tax billionaires enough (though few of my peers seem to share that view), but one-off taxes are almost always bad governance. The real problem here, though, is the fine print, which says this applies to your share of voting rights. So, Larry Page owns ~3.5% of Google, but those are a special class of shares with 10x votes, so he would be levied at 5% of 30%, which is half his stake… except that to pay, he'd have to sell, paying state and capital gains tax at ~45%, meaning this supposed 5% tax would cost him 90% of his stake. This proposal probably won't pass, but if nothing else, this kind of thing helps explain why people in Silicon Valley often seem to feel such contempt for governments. LINK Another take on the question of how AI is affecting entry-level employment points out that the change in employment started far too early to be triggered by ChatGPT. LINK This is what happens when graphic designers do interaction design - a continuing series. LINK | | Congestion pricing in New York is working well. LINK China appears to have built a system that can position thousands of fishing boats (big ones) into vast barriers in the middle of the ocean. LINK Why do police in America kill so many more people than those in other countries? Data and analysis suggest, mostly, on one side (obviously) that there are far more guns, but on the other, that there aren't enough cops and they get far less training than is normal elsewhere. LINK | | | JLL's data centre outlook. LINK The US Census has been asking companies 'do you use AI to produce goods and services', which is useless for at least three reasons. First, their definition of 'AI' included things that have been around for a decade (machine learning) or longer ('voice recognition'). Second, 'use' could mean anything from 'rebuilt your company' to 'the CEO has a ChatGPT account'. And third, most use cases are not 'producing goods and services' - if a bank uses LLMs to write code, power customer support, or rework their marketing, that would not be included. This month, it has tried to improve 1 and 3, but not 2, and the data remains pretty useless, but still very widely reported, for lack of much better data. LINK The 2025 CB Insights report on venture capital. LINK News publishers expect search traffic to drop 43% by 2029… LINK And the Press Gazette says that search traffic to news publishers dropped by a third in 2025. LINK Nat Bullard's 2025 electricity, EV, decarbonisation, and energy use report. LINK Luminate's 2025 global music industry report. LINK Sensor Tower released a report claiming that Amazon sessions using the Rufus chatbot had 3.5x higher conversion. I can think of a lot of ways to be sceptical of this, but… LINK | | Preview from the Premium edition | | Distribution OpenAI still sets the agenda for new models, mostly. It has 8-900m weekly active users, it has the mind-share, and it has the consumer brand. But none of that is based on any fundamental, structural, competitive advantage. Half a dozen to a dozen companies regularly ship SOTA models now, and there are no network effects in LLMs, at least not yet. Only 5% of those 800m users pay, and 80% post less than three messages per day. That usage is a mile wide and an inch deep - which is to say, people can move very easily. So, how can it turn that position into something durable? It has to make itself a daily habit, and it has to close the 'capability gap' - the fact that most people who use ChatGPT don't find it very useful. Anthropic has gone for the developers and the enterprise API market, but Sam Altman wants OpenAI to be the new Google, Microsoft, and Apple all rolled into one. That makes ads an interesting choice. On one hand, ChatGPT has marginal cost, and most users aren't paying yet, so ads are a way to close that gap on those less engaged users (and perhaps tempt them to upgrade). It also makes it easier to give free users more features that have more marginal cost. | | You're getting the Free edition. Subscribers to the Premium edition got this two days ago on Sunday evening, together with an exclusive column, complete access to the archive of over 600 issues, and more. | | | |
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