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9.14.2025

The Census survey of AI adoption is US businesses suggests AI adoption rates are falling. That might not actually be happening - Paul Kedrosky shows how slicing / dicing the data differently shows different results.

9.9.2025

95% of Gen AI programs generate zero ROI per a new study by MIT.

"Adoption is high, but transformation is rare" -MIT State of AI in Business 2025

CIO's cite several patterns including Failure to Scale, misplaced spend and soft attrition vs measurable cuts. The MIT report itself also noted that Gen AI projects struggle when they to tackle highly complex business rules and processes:

"Struggling categories were often those involving complex internal logic, opaque decision support, or optimization based on proprietary heuristics. These tools frequently hit adoption friction due to deep enterprise specificity."

🫧 Increased talk of an AI Bubble

"The entire U.S. economy is being propped up by the promise of productivity gains that seem very far from materializing" says The Atlantic.

The Economist notes a euphoric hubris coming from the usual suspects in Silicon Valley with references a transformation that will be "bigger than the Industrial Revolution", will create a "digital god" and be worth "hundreds of trillions." Of course many of these players have by now already had their payday, so the exuberance makes sense.

⚠️ "It will be a miracle if, in a decade or so, all of the “magnificent seven” listed tech firms, and the biggest AI startups, still exist." - The Economist

But the companies and investors still waiting for their ROI do not share the exuberance. UBS bank says revenue generation so far has been disappointing. This is an understatement: Revenues are currently less than 2% of the 2.9T being poured into data centers between now and 2028...this is just the cost of building the datacenters - not operating and providing them with electricity.

The bigger risk says Fade_Dance (Hacker News thread) that would overshadow any AI downturn is the stock concentration bubble: the "index concentration and the reflexive feedback loop which drives more and more passive dollars to the biggest companies."

Job growth for the period of March 2024 to March 2025 was revised downward by 911,000 - a curious figure for the week of 9/11. This means that job creation figures were overstated significantly for much of 2024.

S3T readers are not surprised by the size of this downward revision: The June 14 2024 Edition of S3T explained the problem with the way the government measures jobs and quoted Economist Anna Wong who said at the time that job growth was being overstated by about a million jobs a year.

(If you don’t like surprises, subscribe to S3T).

9.8.2025

Banks expect another downward revision in jobs: say job numbers earlier in the year were inflated by 800k to 1M.

Job search confidence lowest ever: New York Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Expectations for August indicated a 44.9% probability of finding another job - the lowest since the survey began in 2013.

9.2.2025

Vibe Coding has a bad security vibe...Investors (and customers) beware.

8.31.2025

How to make your job AI-Proof per Gizmodo:

"focus on fields where human judgment, creativity, and emotional intelligence remain crucial. Data shows that roles combining AI literacy with personal, physical expertise—like healthcare, technical educators, and consultants—tend to be more resilient."
"Healthcare has seen a slow adoption due to the scarcity of accessible datasets, because less than 10% of surgical data is publicly available, hampered by strict regulations and data fragmentation."

Watch Item: How will end of the de minimis tariff exemption impact the US economy? On August 29 the "de minimis" tariff exemption (allowing packages valued at $800 or less to enter the US without tariffs) expired. This means the cost of orders from international merchants will rise, and shipping firms like UPS and Fedex will have to shoulder the additional work of tracking and collecting tariffs on all packages rather than jus the ones valued at $800 or more. Last year 1.4 billion packages worth a total of $64B entered the US. See Fedex guide to tariffs.

Core inflation hit 2.9% in July, highest since Feb. And in the latest data, consumer spending outpaced income - a sign households are dipping into savings.

CEO turnover rates are highest since tracking began in 2002

Preorder your flying car from Alef, the Silicon Valley company that started limited flight operations in the Bay Area this week.

"Universal High Income" is a meme getting attention this week: see this X search result set for a rundown of the different quotes and reactions.

This seems to be part of a set of more optimistic outlooks (see End State 2030) that run counter to MIT's 1970's "limits to growth" theory that predicts societal collapse by 2040.

7.26.2025

Venture capital funding rounds for digital health startups have hit a 5 year low, per CBInsights Q2 Digital Health report.

4.1.2025

Voice to Voice AI Agents are gaining momentum. Chatgpt's Advanced Voice mode and Hume.AI are 2 early examples. A16z recently noted rising prospects of Voice AI and they're a now new theme in Y-combinator's startup cohorts.

3.29.2025

Section's AI Proficiency Report: Teaching employees effective GenAI prompting skills is more important than picking the perfect LLM or platform. Per this report, less than 10% of employees are competent in today's workforce.

3.28.2025

Azeem Azar and Niall Ferguson - on the AI Cold War and what might make it turn hot.

Can robots fill the economic gap left by falling birth rates? EV discusses with Kevin Kelly founder of Wired. To put this in context, see Growth in a Shrinking World.

3.26.2025

Recycling minerals will be a challenging but necessary part of 21st century energy and economic growth. What to do with all those worn out EV batteries.

OpenAI, Google and Meta want to extend fair use to include AI training. "National security hinges on unfettered access to AI training data" claims OpenAI. Does "fair use" result in a model simply learning good word patterns vs. gaining the ability to fully replace authors?

3.25.2025

Essay: If we train an LLM on government data, will it run the country better than current institutions? Henry Farrell smells magical thinking.

Consumer Confidence fell again in March - confidence about future employment is at a 12 year low.

Harvard P&G study: Individuals using AI matched the performance of teams without AI. Teams using AI are more likely to think and communicate cross-functionally rather than default to language/frameworks of their disciplinary silos. Key insight: AI is a team member not a tool. See also: Move people out of the middle - How AI will reshape the workforce 2025-2035

China to launches state backed robotics and emerging tech VC fund - hopes to attract $1T Yuan ($138B) in funding from private and local government entities.

3.24.2025

DeepSeek V3 0324 is free open source, can run locally in a high end Mac, and outperforms its closed source competitors (OpenAI, Claude Sonnet etc). Time to re-read: The 2023 "No Moat" leaked memo from an unnamed Google AI engineer who saw this coming. AND The Cathedral and the Bazaar - the original realization that open source projects have advantages closed source projects can't replicate. (See also Wikipedia notes on how this impacted software.)

Alibaba Chair Joe Tsai warns of a Data Center bubble - and EU firms look for ways to abandon US cloud services.

Economist's visual guide to critical minerals and rare earths - and why they are the focus of 21st century geopolitics, like fossil fuels were to 20th century geopolitics.

23andme files for bankruptcy - a case study in SPAC disfunction.

Quantum startups are making headlines PsiQuantum raises $750m in a round led by BlackRock. NVIDIA is building a Quantum research center in Boston.

3.20.2025

CB Insights has assembled an excellent index of where Generative AI Agents are failing to meet the expectations of their customers: Reliability, proprietary semantic layers, and lack of interoperability were frequently cited concerns.

3.19. 2025

Intuicell claims it has innovated a "Digital nervous system" that makes robots capable of realtime learning. See the robot dog Luna in action (Youtube video), and the white paper describing the approach. (my sense is: this needs peer review and independent confirmation).