Andrew Maddox

Category: Business

  • AI chip arms race, safety and workforce strain (Links) – Mar. 4, 2026

    AI commercialization is accelerating: massive investments, new chips and models from Nvidia, OpenAI, Amazon and xAI promise faster, cheaper inference but fuel market consolidation, competition and investor uncertainty. Simultaneously, societal risks—safety, workforce strain, environmental pollution and constitutional concerns—are prompting regulatory, legal and ethical scrutiny.

  • Jack Dorsey’s Predictions, Block and Layoffs

    Earlier this week, Block, makers of Square, Cash App, Afterpay, etc., announced layoffs of 40% of their staff while leaning into AI programming. This isn’t a small company, mind you, so 4,000 folks will be looking for jobs in the coming days.

    From the NY Times:

    Block, the financial technology company that owns Square, Cash App, and Tidal, said on Thursday that it was cutting 40 percent of its workforce as it embraced new artificial intelligence tools.

    About 4,000 employees are expected to lose their jobs, Jack Dorsey, the company’s top executive, said in a social media post.

    Dorsey writes on X:

    we’re not making this decision because we’re in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that’s accelerating rapidly.

    CNN reporting included more thoughts from Dorsey:

    “I think most companies are late. Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes. I’d rather get there honestly and on our own terms than be forced into it reactively,” he wrote.

    The reality is that Block grew way too fast in the post-pandemic era. By some reports, the company quadrupled employees in that term, a tremendous amount of growth while top-line revenue growth has stalled after the pandemic boom. Simply put, these layoffs help right-size the company.

    Source: Macrotrends. The first two charts measure $ in B.

    But Jack Dorsey is a smart man and an innovative one. Aside from the aforementioned Block holdings, he founded Twitter (serving as CEO twice), helped to establish Bluesky, acquired Vine, and was interested in purchasing the publishing platform, Medium.

    Vine presaged TikTok and its success hinged on a predictive algorithm and time to grow the platform, two things Twitter was unable to execute. This was a microcosm for Twitter, and as CEO, he never achieved consistent profitability (as opposed to Facebook). Twitter focused on product growth and thus staff growth, but it wasn’t sustainable as investors expected to make a profit. Dorsey left Twitter, replaced by other CEOs who likewise were unable to solve the revenue problems. And for Medium, I see it as the self-publishing precursor to Substack, although again, they never quite figured out the revenue component.

    I imagine that Dorsey remembers these failures (perhaps that’s too strong of a word as he’s been wildly successful by any reasonable metric), and Musk’s takeover of Twitter and subsequent staff cuts are in the forefront of his mind. Musk bought Twitter, fired a high percentage of staff, and managed to keep the platform running. My supposition is that Dorsey wants to avoid a similar fate for Block.

    But Dorsey isn’t alone among execs peering into their crystal balls regarding AI. This from the WSJ:

    Companies are also more explicitly including the backlash to AI as a potential threat to their companies. The number of S&P 500 companies that included AI as a material risk in securities filings jumped to 72% last year from 12% in 2023, according to an analysis by the Conference Board and ESGAUGE.

    So what do these layoffs at Block mean? I think it’s both a correction from overhiring AND a prediction about where the world is going. Dorsey has been on the leading edge many times before, and his track record of being in the arena and doing the work causes me to pause and consider it more deeply than if these cuts were made by private equity.

    Is it the start of the trend of massive job losses, the doom loop, that Citrini Research speculated on earlier this week? I don’t go that far, but as more than 70% of S&P 500 companies list AI as a material risk, it’s not hard to imagine the conversations happening in board rooms today. For me, I suspect that many companies will consider a 25% – 50% cut of engineering teams as preparation for future growth in AI supported development. While this may seem like a business necessity, my preference remains growth over cuts, considering what good can be done instead of how much money can be made.

  • Sunday (AI) Links: Mar. 1, 2026

  • AI Hardware Boom Meets Safety and Governance (Links) – Feb. 28, 2026

    AI is rapidly embedding into consumer hardware and agent layers—from Nvidia chips and Claude Sonnet to “Claws”—while provoking governance and societal responses: disputes over military use and safety, investor shifts to AI‑resistant stocks, and worker stress from agentic tools.

  • AI Advancement Meets Human Augmentation and Security (Links) – Feb. 27, 2026

    AI’s rapid technical advance and massive investment—from powerful multimodal models to pervasive coding assistants—are boosting productivity and enabling new products. Simultaneously, human-centered deployment, security, and equitable oversight are essential as benefits concentrate in large firms and risks persist.

  • AI’s Economic Boom and Social Costs (Links) – Feb. 25, 2026

    AI is rapidly reshaping economies and society—from massive memory fabrication and firms rebranding to changed workplaces, relationships, and politics. Simultaneously it creates risks: income and power imbalances, cognitive/semantic erosion, authoritarian misuse, and organizational fragility, demanding coordinated technical, legal, and cultural responses.

  • AI Job Disruption Meets Enterprise Infrastructure Race (Links) – Feb. 23, 2026

    AI is rapidly automating cognitive work, threatening SaaS business models, white‑collar jobs, and software valuations.

    • Noah Smith: The Fall of the Nerds – by Noah Smith (Feb. 5, 2026)
      Software stocks plunged on fears AI will obsolete SaaS business models. ‘Vibe coding’ tools let novices build software, threatening engineers’ roles, livelihoods, and industry structures.
    • OpenAI: Introducing OpenAI Frontier | OpenAI (Feb. 3, 2026)
      OpenAI’s Frontier helps enterprises build, deploy, and manage AI coworkers by giving agents shared context, tools, feedback, and clear permissions. It integrates existing systems, supports governance, and speeds production use.
    • WSJ: The AI Stock Market Rout (Feb. 3, 2026)
      Anthropic launched an AI tool that automates legal work, prompting a broad selloff in software stocks. Investors fear AI could replace legal, financial, and auditing services, disrupting many B2B firms.
    • Ben Thompson: Microsoft and Software Survival (Feb. 3, 2026)
      Anthropic launched an AI tool that automates legal work, prompting a broad selloff in software stocks. Investors fear AI could replace legal, financial, and auditing services, disrupting many B2B firms.
    • The Atlantic: How Soon Will AI Take Your Job? (Feb. 10, 2026)
      The BLS began counting to reveal conditions, wages, and hours, and its data helped stabilize society. Generative AI is already automating many cognitive tasks—drafting, analysis, coding, creative work—creating large productivity gains and raising the plausibility of significant white‑collar displacement. But the central danger is timing: if AI drives a rapid reorganization of work (compressing years of change into months), the economic and political fallout could be severe and harder to manage than gradual adjustment.
    • TechCrunch: Intel will start making GPUs, a market dominated by Nvidia  (Feb. 3, 2026)
      Intel will start producing GPUs, hire experienced leaders, and expand beyond CPUs aiming to challenge Nvidia’s dominance.

  • AI consolidation (Links) – Feb. 20, 2026

  • AI capability surge meets worker, governance crisis (Links) – Feb. 18, 2026

    • Simon Willison: A quote from Boris Cherny (Feb. 14, 2026)
      “Someone has to prompt the Claudes, talk to customers, coordinate with other teams, decide what to build next. Engineering is changing and great engineers are more important than ever.” Boris Cherny
    • Steve Yegge: The AI Vampire (Feb. 10, 2026)
      AI acts like an energy vampire, boosting productivity, creating unrealistic expectations, and draining people with fatigue. That creates a value-capture dilemma, where companies siphon gains and workers burn out, so culture must slow down, set limits, and resist runaway acceleration.”But if you haven’t used specifically Opus 4.5/4.6 with specifically Claude Code for at least an hour, then you’re in for a real shock. Because all your complaining about AI not being useful for real-world tasks is obsolete. AI coding hit an event horizon on November 24th, 2025. It’s the real deal. And unfortunately, all your other tools and models are pretty terrible in comparison.”
    • Simon Willison: The evolution of OpenAI’s mission statement (Feb. 13, 2026)
      OpenAI’s IRS mission statements from 2016–2024 show changes from “advance digital intelligence” to “ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.” They removed community openness, shifted to building AGI themselves, added “safely”, and in 2024 dropped safety and most detail.
    • Dwarkesh Patel: Dario Amodei — “We are near the end of the exponential” (Feb. 13, 2026)
      Dario Amodei argues AI’s exponential progress is nearing its end, with pre-training and reinforcement learning showing similar scaling, and urges urgency.
    • Google: Gemini 3 Deep Think: AI model update designed for science (Feb. 12, 2026)
      Gemini 3 Deep Think is a major upgrade to solve science, research, and engineering problems and is available within Google AI Ultra. Select researchers, engineers, and enterprises can seek early API access.
    • OpenAI: Introducing GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark (Feb. 2, 2026)
      GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark is a smaller, ultra-fast Codex for real-time coding on Cerebras hardware, offering 128k context and over 1,000 tokens per second.
    • WSJ: Workers Are Afraid AI Will Take Their Jobs. They’re Missing the Bigger Danger. (Feb. 15, 2026)
      Enterprise AI captures prompts, documents, and workflows, turning personal expertise into company-owned assets that can train replacements.
    • Simon Willison: Three months of OpenClaw (Feb. 15, 2026)
      AI.com promises an easy, secure OpenClaw for non-technical users, but only handle reservations exist, suggesting vaporware.
    • The New Yorker: What Is Claude? Anthropic Doesn’t Know, Either (Feb. 9, 2026)
      People respond to large language models as believers, skeptics, or with uncertainty, while researchers study how these opaque systems work. Scholar Ellie Pavlick urges a third reaction to LLMs beyond hype and dismissal: admit “not knowing.”
    • ChinaTalk: Seedance, Kling and the Chinese AI Video Ecosystem (Feb. 13, 2026)
      China requires visible labels and metadata for AI-generated video, but platforms and competing tools often evade them, so enforcement is patchy.
    • Noah Smith: How technology has already changed the world in my lifetime (Feb. 14, 2026)
      “AI is changing how we think, learn, and work, but the internet already wreaked deep, lasting, confusing changes on how we socialize with each other and how we present ourselves to the world. “

  • Boom and Bust in AI (Links) – Feb. 17, 2026

    The boom: AI is boosting productivity at work. The bust: bottlenecks, shortages, and questions of mental fatigue for users of the tools.

    • Simon Willison: Deep Blue (Feb. 15, 2026)
      “Deep Blue” is a term for the ennui, existential dread, and anxiety many software developers feel as generative AI automates coding.
    • WSJ: Should I Trust AI Chatbots for Financial Advice? (Feb. 9, 2026)
      Critics claim that current large language models are unsuited for financial advice because they lack empathy, ethical grounding, and reliable math. The chief source, Andrew Lo, interestingly enough is developing a fiduciary AI tool.
    • WSJ: With a Frugal AI Strategy, India Offers Blueprint for Developing World (Feb. 16, 2026)
      India is promoting local, low-cost AI to ease court backlogs and boost productivity, exemplified by Adalat AI, a frugal, Indian-language tool that transcribes hearings.
    • Fleming Rutledge : Serious Warnings about AI (Feb. 15, 2026)
      “In the past 10 days, I have read a number of serious warnings that AI is moving more swiftly and with more facility than we can keep up with. What will serious Christian thinkers have to say, and how fast can we say it? What is a theology of AI? Can it create a humanity?”
    • Financial Times: The AI productivity take-off is finally visible (Feb. 15, 2026)
      “While initial reports suggested a year of steady labour expansion in the US, the new figures reveal that total payroll growth was revised downward by approximately 403,000 jobs. Crucially, this downward revision occurred while real GDP remained robust, including a 3.7 per cent growth rate in the fourth quarter. This decoupling — maintaining high output with significantly lower labour input — is the hallmark of productivity growth.”
    • Yahoo Finance: Rampant AI Demand for Memory Is Fueling a Growing Chip Crisis (Feb. 15, 2026)
      Tech leaders warn a global DRAM shortage is cutting production, squeezing profits, and driving big price spikes on electronics, cars, and data centers.
    • Adam Ozimek: AI and the Economics of the Human Touch (A Reason for Optimism) (Feb. 9, 2026)
      Fears that AI will either crash the economy or wipe out jobs ignore that many roles survive because people value the human touch, even where automation exists.
    • WSJ: The Break Is Over. Companies Are Jacking Up Prices Again. (Feb. 15, 2026)
      Companies from Levi Strauss to McCormick are raising prices on blue jeans, spices, housewares, and industrial goods after a holiday pause. My take: Coke prices are up 10% since late last year, so I think there’s something here.