Thoughts on the intersection of tech, business, and society.
I ve been trying to connect with a journalist who reached out a few days ago. He s working on a story from way back in my career the early days of Wired, circa 1995. It s taken a few attempts to find a time. Despite the fact I m no longer running a company full time, my Continue reading "What s Next?"
Last week I ran into an old pal at a party who asked me what I thought of the SaaSpocalypse the AI-driven correction that hit nearly all software stocks over the past few quarters. My friend has bought and sold software companies for most of his career and is a sophisticated player in private Continue reading "AI Is Just (Currently Bad) Software"
Even though I ran a political media company for four years, I ve largely avoided writing about politics, and I m not about to make a habit of it now. But the politics around data centers has come to dominate coverage of AI, and how those politics play out over the next few months will likely determine Continue reading "The Data Center Debate Rages. Will It Change the Course of History?"
My posts here often stem from my morning ritual of reading the news which despite the rise of AI agents still revolves around roughly three dozen email newsletters of one kind or another. Sometimes a particular story will spark an urge to think out loud about the subject. 500-2500 words later, I ll hit publish Continue reading "Five Stories To Watch"
Today Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg joined the chorus of multi-billionaires who feel compelled to issue periodic manifestos about the impact of AI on society. Unlike Anthropic s Dario Amodei, who posts on his own site, or Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who recently posted a long form manifesto on X, Zuckerberg took a page from his board Continue reading The Valley Is Terrified of AI
Back in 2024 I helped to launch a new events and media series focused on the science of longevity. We called it DOC. Over the past two years, DOC has thrived, and a fascinating community of leaders in medicine, finance, policy, and entrepreneurship has flourished. This year we’re hosting our third annual DOC October 21–23 Continue reading "What’s up: DOC!"
Earlier this week I posted something of a coda for the open web, but today news broke of a small victory for how things used to be. The backstory: For decades, Google has been the beating heart of the Internet s ecosystem, pumping the oxygenated lifeblood of traffic across tens of millions of revenue-starved websites. Continue reading "Who Owns Search Results?"
Every so often the tech world appropriates a perfectly pedestrian word and imbues it with meaning well beyond its settled definition. For centuries computer was an obscure term referencing an obscure craft: people who performed mathematical calculations. And prior to the mid 1990s, anyone talking about a web was probably discussing spiders. Token has broken Continue reading "Who Controls the…
I ve always loved writing, and took to this form the thinking out loud version of blogging more than 20 years ago. I started Searchblog after I sold my first book, which focused on the impact of search on business and culture. I decided I d chronicle my reporting and build my voice by posting Continue reading "I ll Be Framing My AI Check"
Last month the FT reported that OpenAI was going all in on a super app that combines agents and coding, a move clearly designed to compete with Anthropic, which dominates the get work done market with Claude CoWork. Chat is dead as the principle interface for ChatGPT, according to OpenAI execs quoted in the FT Continue reading "Again, What About the AI Ads?"