“Welcome to the AGI era.” Greg Brockman closed OpenAI’s September 3, 2026, Astra briefing with those words. Nvidia Chief Jensen Huang doubled down saying “AGI has arrived.” —> So has it? I view it less as a milestone marker and more as an invitation. With this incredible new technology, how much more would we attempt? That is where my mind goes when I hear a declaration like this. Of course, there are fascinating questions about whether Astra qualifies as artificial general i

At the AI startup Valon, a new policy requires most new hires to learn their jobs the old-fashioned way, i.e., without AI. A few takeaways stand out: 1\ AI can create an “illusion of competence.” If a new employee asks AI for the answer immediately, they may complete the task without developing the mental model needed to recognize when that answer is wrong. 2\ The policy targets critical thinking, not productivity. Valon allows engineers to use AI because their code goes thro

TL;DR: The gap between the heaviest enterprise AI users and everyone else more than tripled in five months. During the same period, thousands of companies learned how much productive capacity can disappear when a critical AI vendor goes offline. The risk is that companies may become AI-dependent faster than they develop the human and institutional capability to govern that dependence. The companies that close that gap will own one of the defining advantages of the next decade

GPT-6 Astra has launched, OpenAI describes it as a “generational leap,” particularly in coding, cybersecurity, professional work, science, and computer use. 1\ OpenAI says it may mark the beginning of the AGI era. President Greg Brockman said he personally believes “we’re there,” though this is OpenAI’s characterization rather than an independently established fact. And, there are no widely accepted definitinos of AGI. 2\ It is significantly more "agentic". Astra can reported

Why do professional firms call themselves practices? The word is centuries old. It comes from putting knowledge into action AND, importantly, from the repeated doing through which skill is acquired. A practitioner was someone who learned through practice. Which raises an interesting question for the AI era: What happens to practice when AI does the practicing? EY is putting $100 million behind part of the answer. This fiscal year, EY US is rewarding employees for adaptabilit

OpenAI’s ChatGPT Ads business has reportedly reached a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate in fewer than 200 days. $1B run rate ≠ $1B earned. It means the current pace of advertising revenue, if sustained for a full year, would equal roughly $1 billion. Still, the speed is extraordinary. Earlier in 2026, ChatGPT Ads was reportedly at roughly $100 million annually. OpenAI now says tens of thousands of advertisers use the platform, which is available in more than 40 countrie

People do not want to delegate their life to an AI agent. They want individual irritations to disappear. A new group of AI companies is betting that this is how agents finally escape programming environments and reach ordinary people. Town and Instinct are two of the buzziest examples. Town gives users a personalized AI assistant that can connect to email, calendar, Slack, documents, WhatsApp, and the web. It learns a user’s context and helps with the detritus of everyday wor

NVIDIA has reportedly agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, a deal that could be one of its most strategically important acquisitions. NVIDIA of course already dominates AI chips. Hugging Face would strengthen its position further up the stack, at the model and developer layers. Hugging Face generates about $150 million in annualized revenue, so this is not fundamentally a revenue deal. Its value is that developers use it to discover, download, fine-tune, evaluate

In 1770, a machine appeared to do something extraordinary: it could play chess against humans. It was called the Mechanical Turk. Crowds watched as the wooden machine defeated skilled players. Of course this was a trick. The chess-playing machine was operated by a human chess master hidden inside its cabinet. More than 200 years later, Amazon borrowed the name for Mechanical Turk. Amazon's MTurk platform put human intelligence behind computers, paying people to perform the sm