Technology
Young Americans are having less sex than earlier generations, and the data points to fewer nights out more than to any change in desire. Phones, fear of being filmed and a culture of self-optimization have made the first move harder, and I think the fix starts offline.
Marketing
Presidential candidates, authors, bank CEOs and founders now treat a three-hour conversation as their main stage. Podcasts reach more Americans than ever, and the people who need trust most have learned to show up when it counts.
Artificial Intelligence
AI is already shrinking entry-level hiring in jobs built on routine work, and more skilled people are going freelance. I think work is drifting from fixed titles to people who orchestrate AI agents across several clients, and the business models around that shift are still wide open.
Christopher Nolan's Tenet is about people moving backward through time while the world moves forward. AI models live with a similar problem, frozen at a cutoff and trained on a past that keeps disappearing, and the film offers a surprisingly useful map for fixing it.
Presidential candidates, authors, bank CEOs and founders now treat a three-hour conversation as their main stage. Podcasts reach more Americans than ever, and the people who need trust most have learned to show up when it counts.
AI is already shrinking entry-level hiring in jobs built on routine work, and more skilled people are going freelance. I think work is drifting from fixed titles to people who orchestrate AI agents across several clients, and the business models around that shift are still wide open.
WoW Forever had the biggest launch in World of Warcraft history, and GTA 6 arrives just 15 days later. GTA 6 will take the spotlight, but WoW Forever's real test is what Blizzard ships after it.
Reinventing School for the AI Era | Joe Liemandt, Gagan Biyani & Erik Torenberg on the a16z Show
Two interviews explain the shift. One startup fixes documents so agents can work. One generation dumps raw thoughts into AI and trusts it to organize. The next natives will think differently.
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WoW Forever had the biggest launch in World of Warcraft history, and GTA 6 arrives just 15 days later. GTA 6 will take the spotlight, but WoW Forever's real test is what Blizzard ships after it.
In October, hackers turned supermarket freezers in France into ovens, and a month later nobody knows who did it or why. That uncertainty is what people mean by fifth-generation warfare, and it's also the easiest part of the idea to abuse.
Democrats won the House and Senate, but they don't take over until January 3. Trump can still order strikes, veto bills and spend money already approved, so the real limits on him may be gas prices, Gulf allies and his own party.
Google and Meta have the users, but advertisers pay their bills. A personal agent needs your inbox, your calendar and your credit card, and the people with the most to lose will pay for one that answers only to them.
Meredith Whittaker helped organize a 20,000-person walkout at Google, then took charge of a nonprofit that estimated it would need $50 million a year to run. Her edge at Signal is rare for a tech executive: when she says she'll walk away, people believe her.
AI is sold by the month today, but the flat subscription is already straining. Ad platforms took decades to move from selling views to selling results, and AI is following much faster. The catch is one every advertiser knows: somebody has to decide what counts as a result.
A robot that maps your home doesn't have to film it. Lidar can handle a lot of what a home robot needs to see, but it's less blind and less private than people assume, and that gap is where the real product decision sits.
We only made code readable because people had to read it. As agents write more of it, I think they'll end up with a language of their own, and the danger is how few of us will bother to look.
Meta quietly added {{media_type}} to the Build URL parameter list. It lands exactly when a single ad becomes a container of 10 assets.
Reinventing School for the AI Era | Joe Liemandt, Gagan Biyani & Erik Torenberg on the a16z Show
CAPTCHAs fail against AI agents. Passwords fail against phishing. Platforms turn to biometrics as proof that a real human authorizes agent actions.
Meta and Google built fortunes on ads. When AI agents become the buyer, trust beats targeting. The best hedge is monetizing AI itself.