An AI CEO advising people to stock cash, food and a hand crank radio in case AI takes down banking is some spectacular product marketing. Silicon Valley spent years insisting AI would run everything. Now the contingency plan is to make sure nothing you own needs a computer. Progress! 😳

This. It’s a rare moment of corporate justice when the surveillance customers discover they’re also the inventory. Unfortunately, the women being filmed never got a ticket to this comedy.

The most interesting divide isn’t optimism versus fear. It’s people using AI to solve problems versus corporations using problems to justify AI. One side builds translation tools and accessible services; the other adds a chatbot to your fridge and calls it a revolution. Maybe skepticism is just pattern recognition.

Meta spent two decades vacuuming up everything people willingly posted. Now Zuckerberg wants the stuff they never agreed to share, too. Those glasses aren’t a breakthrough in wearable tech: they’re a business model that turns strangers into unpaid data suppliers. The little recording light isn’t consent. It’s a corporate middle finger with a battery. Calling users »glassholes« is still far too kind.

Turns out »bringing the future to rural America« is a tougher sell when the future arrives as a windowless warehouse guzzling water and electricity while your bills climb. Republicans get the backlash, Democrats get the votes, and both parties get checks from the same tech lobby. Truly bipartisan innovation.

The funniest outcome would be hyperscalers spending billions convincing enterprises they need AI, only for those enterprises to deploy open-weight models on their own hardware. After decades of vendor lock-in, »we can run this ourselves« might be the most expensive sentence Microsoft ever hears. However, the reality in many organisations is also that they opt for the supposedly safer choice of turning to a third party, rather than taking action themselves.

Exactly. Enterprise is where AI can actually earn its keep: companies will pay serious money if it cuts costs or boosts revenue. Consumer chatbots are mostly a costly distribution strategy for now. The real customers have procurement budgets, not a $20 subscription and a dream.

Absolutely. AI is an enterprise product - at least: for now. And Anthropic is in the pool position; https://eicker.news/@technews/117443237284007574

Character.AI discovered the one conversation its bots couldn’t keep going: the one with its accountants. $56 million in compute costs in eight months, and the monetization strategy was apparently: hope the next investor is even lonelier than our users. Silicon Valley keeps confusing engagement with a business model.

They took »know your customer« and somehow arrived at »assign them a tireless digital stalker.« The founder says there’s no need to inform anyone because it’s legal, which is a fascinating way to announce that ethics has been laid off and its job outsourced to the legal department. Peak Silicon Valley: replacing customer relationships with the CIA, the Customer Intelligence Agents.

Style and taste are back! 💪😎✌️

Exactly. Teaching AI literacy is like teaching kids about advertising: you explain how manipulation works, not hand them a marketing budget. An AI pharaoh is especially absurd: a chatbot confidently improvising ancient history while the class learns to mistake a convincing performance for a primary source.

Teaching kids to spot when AI confidently makes things up is genuinely useful. Frankly, plenty of adults could use that class too. The real test is whether schools teach children to question the machine, or just train the next generation to accept whatever a chatbot says with excellent grammar.

The founders got their Google exit, investors got their hype cycle, Disney gets the leftovers, and families get the consequences. Character.AI managed to automate companionship, monetize next to nothing, and somehow make bankruptcy look like the least disturbing part of its business model.

AI was supposed to make everything cheaper and more productive. Instead we get higher power bills, pricier computers, fewer workers building homes, and inflation. Turns out the productivity miracle is mostly Big Tech finding a remarkably efficient way to make everyone else subsidize its server farms.

Apparently the solution to public outrage over Flock cameras is to replace them with a system that connects every camera, drone, dispatch call, and sensor into one giant police dashboard. Brilliant. We complained about Big Brother watching us, so they gave him a second monitor and a searchable archive.

We were promised a frictionless, intelligent future. Instead we’re building gas plants so a chatbot can confidently invent court cases and recommend glue on pizza. Apparently the cloud was just a smokestack with better branding. Big Tech gets the profits, everyone else gets the asthma.

Trump’s war with Iran has given the world a fascinating new infrastructure strategy: route the internet around the mess Washington helped create. Apparently »America First« now means American tech companies paying extra to keep Europe and Asia online. The cloud has never looked so dependent on one man’s foreign policy tantrums.

Same here. Local is not the problem. Control is.

And the irony is that China has moved far beyond copying Western technology. It’s now a global leader in research output, including fundamental research in materials science, chemistry, and physics. The West outsourced manufacturing, underestimated the transfer of expertise, and somehow assumed China would remain the world’s assembly line forever. That assumption aged spectacularly badly.