Last week OpenAI published research with economists from Columbia, Wharton, and Duke. On the surface it was about adoption numbers for one of their agent tools. Underneath, it was the clearest signal I have seen about what happens to people like you over the next eighteen months. Here is the part that attracted my attention. Inside OpenAI, their legal team now produces thirteen times more output than it did in November. Their researchers, more than fifty times. The agent has become the...
15 days ago • 2 min read
A 30-year-old built a working product with AI last week. In an afternoon. You watched it happen and felt something tighten in your chest. The thought underneath it goes something like this. The advantage now belongs to people half your age who speak the language of the machines. I want to take that thought apart, because the research that came out this month says it has the whole thing backwards. You have spent twenty years getting good. You can walk into a room, read it in ten minutes, and...
21 days ago • 2 min read
Last week a company called Opendoor told its team it was winding down its 250-person operation in India and pulling the work back to the US. The reason was not cost. They had rebuilt the work around AI and small, AI-native teams. The CEO described what the company would become: “a much smaller company by headcount, but a much larger company by impact.” Read that line again as someone with twenty-plus years behind you. That is the labor market quietly reorganizing itself around AI, rather than...
29 days ago • 3 min read
Last week Anthropic published an essay called “When AI Builds Itself.” Three million people read it within a day. I read it twice. The argument is simple. AI research is the first field where AI is being applied to itself at a superhuman level. Anthropic’s engineers ship eight times more code per day than they did in 2024. Claude wrote more than 80% of the code Anthropic merged into its own codebase last month. The length of tasks AI can do reliably has gone from doubling every seven months...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Last week another round of reassuring notes circulated through the AI industry. Apollo's chief economist said there is zero evidence of AI-related job losses. Yale's budget lab said the broader anxiety about jobs is largely speculative for now. A handful of White House voices echoed the same line. The data, they said, shows no clear impact. I have been turning that over since I read it. Because I spend my weeks talking to executives who do not work in Silicon Valley. They sit in Fortune 500s,...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
This week I had three conversations that all started with the same sentence: "I will leave corporate next year, once things stabilize." All three were with experienced leaders in their fifties, all running divisions larger than my entire business. By the time each conversation ended, they had each said the same thing back to me without prompting. Things are not going to stabilize. The dissonance is sharp right now. Inside the company, the narrative is still about resilience, transformation,...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
When General Motors cut 600 IT roles last week, the company reached for a careful phrase. It called the move a “deliberate skills swap,” and said the plan is to replace those 600 people with a smaller number of AI-native workers. Meta ran a similar strategy the same week. It cut as many as 8,000 roles and froze another 6,000 it had been hiring for, under the internal banner of an “AI efficiency push.” If you have spent 20 or more years inside a large company, two words in there strike harder...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Last week, OpenAI launched something called The Deployment Company. A $4 billion vehicle backed by TPG and Bain Capital. The same week, Anthropic launched a $1.5 billion version of the same thing with Blackstone. Both are buying the same role at scale: forward-deployed engineers. Engineers who physically embed inside PE-backed companies for weeks or months, learn the workflows, and rebuild them around AI agents. The model is borrowed from Palantir. You do not sell software from headquarters....
2 months ago • 3 min read
In recent weeks, a senior executive has told me some version of the same thing. They cannot keep up with AI. The newsletters they are subscribed to. The articles they have not read. The tools they should know about. The people they should be following. The shape of it is always the same. They feel buried, and the harder they try to keep up, the further behind they feel. If accomplished professionals with 20+ years of corporate experience are quietly admitting they cannot keep up, you can stop...
2 months ago • 3 min read