Peter Saddington - AGILE, STARTUPS, SELF-IMPROVEMENT!

At commencement after commencement this month, the class of 2026 — the AI-native graduates — have been booing speakers who frame AI as the next industrial revolution. UCF. Middle Tennessee State. University of Arizona, where former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was met with sustained dissent. These graduates use AI more than any cohort in history. And they are angry. Unemployment for 20-to-24-year-olds...

PYMNTS Intelligence's April Agentic AI Report found that AI adoption is rising while consumer awareness of using AI is falling. People summarize emails, draft messages, compare products, organize their schedules — and increasingly don't register that AI is the thing doing it. The average active user is now on 2.69 platforms. Power users on almost four. The technology is becoming invisible the same...

OpenAI launched its self-serve ad platform for ChatGPT two weeks ago, and the implications are still arriving. No minimum spend. Cost-per-click bidding starts at three to five dollars. Dentsu, Omnicom, Publicis, WPP — every big agency holding company is wired in. The advertising era of ChatGPT didn't begin gradually. It began on May fifth. The 2.5 billion dollars this year, 100 billion by 2030 tar...

Today's article is from the New Hampshire Bulletin. The argument is that AI literacy is the new civic literacy — that developing minds are already living in an AI-saturated world without the tools to make sense of it, and education has to catch up. New Hampshire is actually trying: a 77-page guidance document, Khanmigo statewide for schools, a civics essay competition where 11th and 12th graders a...

Today's article is from the Yale Daily News. Their senior survey for the class of 2026 came back with 91 percent of seniors saying they've used AI for schoolwork. That isn't a usage stat anymore. That's saturation. While the Pope writes encyclicals and New York City schools draft policies, the most expensive undergraduate degree in the country just finished four years that the curriculum committee...

Two researchers from a small Palo Alto outfit drove up to Apple's Cupertino headquarters to hand-deliver something the bug bounty queue would have buried. A working kernel exploit against the M5 chip's Memory Integrity Enforcement. Built in five days. With AI help. Apple's most expensive new security feature, defeated in less than a week by two people and a chatbot. The defender has to be right ev...

Pope Leo XIV is preparing an encyclical on artificial intelligence — the first document of its kind from any global institution older than the machine. He took the name Leo specifically to echo Leo XIII, who wrote Rerum Novarum in 1891. That was the Church's response to industrial capitalism. This is the response to whatever comes next. The Vatican has more cultural authority on labor ethics than...

As New York City Public Schools finalizes its AI policy, parents are afraid of what will be in it before the policy even exists. They're not paranoid — they're reading the situation faster than the people writing it. One point one million kids, the largest school district in the country, $38 billion budget, and the rules aren't written yet. The "policy" is functionally a procurement decision wrapp...

Today's article asks the right question for the first time in 10 days of news. Who actually benefits from AI? Not who lobbied the bill. Not who got the federal regulation. Not who showed up to the protest. Who gets the money, the time saved, the leverage. The honest answer has three parts. The winners you'd expect, the losers you weren't counting, and a class inversion nobody at the policy table i...

Yesterday I said the federal layer was coming. I thought 18 months. It took 18 hours. Trump signed an executive order this morning to regulate AI development — triggered by Anthropic's Mythos model. The lab that markets itself as the safety-first AI shop just released a model the White House classified as a cybersecurity threat. The cascade jumped from state to federal in one day. Federal AI regul...

Six days I've spent on the politics of AI — who got told, paid, asked, recorded, who showed up, who got the bill distributed before the senator read it. Today is a different question. Does the technology actually do something that matters? Today's article is about rare diseases. 30 million Americans live with one. The average diagnostic odyssey is seven years. AI is starting to compress that to we...

Boise is not Berkeley. It's not San Francisco. It's not Cambridge. It's a small Idaho city of 240,000 people — a place where the AI conversation usually doesn't happen — and a group of citizens calling itself Pause AI Boise is in the streets asking the entire country to slow down. The last four days we walked through how this story plays out at the level of institutions, regulators, and the doctor...

The AI conversation walked into the doctor's office today. Should you let your physician record your visit? Should you trust an AI scribe to listen to the most private conversation you'll have this year? AI scribes — software that transcribes the patient encounter directly into the medical record — are quietly becoming default at major health systems. The last three days we talked about institutio...

Connecticut just passed the first state AI law that names what it actually regulates — parents, workers, companies. Not abstract principles. Specific people, specific protections. Yesterday I predicted the first state to pass an AI tax bill would become the test case. Connecticut volunteered. A compliance industry got born overnight. Not the AI labs — the auditors, law firms, and consultants who c...

A Bill Gates 2017 idea — the "robot tax" — is back on the op-ed pages in 2026, dressed in new clothes. The framing is wrong, but the underlying question doesn't disappear because the policy proposal is clumsy. A tax on AI lands on whoever deploys it, not whoever owns it. The startup paying for API access pays the tax. The hyperscaler collecting that revenue collects the tax. Wrong target every tim...

Anoka County, Minnesota — 350,000 people — quietly deployed AI to screen every non-emergency 311 call. No keynote. No announcement. They just shipped it. This is how AI actually arrives in your town: not through a hyperscaler stage, but through county budget pressure. 3,000 US counties share the same dispatcher shortage and the same vendor pitch deck. By Memorial Day 2027, this is the new normal....

NYT this morning: McClatchy reporters are withholding bylines in a dispute over AI-generated content. That's a strike. A small one. But it's the first real labor action of the AI content era — and the smallest gesture says the most. A byline isn't credit. It's accountability. The reporters aren't anti-AI. They're refusing to put their signature on output they didn't produce. The right floor for 20...

LA Times this morning: is tech's massive AI spending actually working? $1T deployed across hyperscaler AI capex. Compute at 30-40% utilization. The substrate exists. The applications that justify it are still being built. Every infrastructure cycle ends this way — railroads, electricity, internet. Capital deployed before use cases materialize. The newspapers run the same panic story we're reading...

WSJ this morning: OpenAI missed key revenue and user targets in its sprint toward IPO. That's not a stumble — it's the most important AI story of the year. The growth narrative is finally meeting the spreadsheet. Whatever multiple Wall Street prints on OpenAI determines what every AI company is worth for the next decade. High multiple = 5 more years of hype-bubble. Honest multiple = brutal reset....

Taylor Swift moved to trademark her voice and image as AI threats grow. That's not vanity — it's the opening shot of the identity-as-IP era. The legal framework for being a person is about to get expensive. Three new industries are forming: biometric IP filing, deepfake takedown services, 'verified human' subscriptions. Combined market in 5 years: $50B+. The catch — it's all built for people who c...

Florida's senate is taking up an AI Bill of Rights this special session. CCIA — the trade group for big tech — is raising concerns. That tells you everything. Federal AI law is dead. States fill the void. The lobbyists outnumber the legislators six to one. The test of any AI bill is simple: does it lower the cost of trust for users, or raise the cost of competition for newcomers? Timestamps: 0:00...

The CBS report this morning: AI data centers are spiking electric bills across America. People who don't use AI are paying for the people who do. We talked about the AI race as chips, then talent, then data. The actual moat was always electricity. Now hyperscalers got the gains and households got the bill. Nobody voted on this. Timestamps: 0:00 CBS: AI data centers driving up US power bills 0:15 M...

A CalMatters opinion this morning: children are in the crosshairs of artificial intelligence. Who will we blame? That's the wrong question. The right one: who's already responsible — and what they're going to do about it. AI is becoming the kid's first peer relationship, not just a tool. We won't know for fifteen years if we got it right. Timestamps: 0:00 CalMatters: kids in AI's crosshairs — wron...

A Canadian and a German AI start-up just merged to take on Silicon Valley. Yesterday a UN pioneer wanted brakes. Today two countries decided to race. The Silicon Valley monopoly on the AI story is ending. Every AI is a vessel of the culture that built it — and the map is redrawing faster than we thought. Timestamps: 0:00 Canada + Germany merge to take on Silicon Valley 0:15 MiniDoge — the moat was...

A UN pioneer says it's time to apply the brakes to runaway AI. Yesterday we watched an AI run a store in San Francisco. Today someone wants to slam the brakes. The pace problem is human, not technological. Don't slow the tool — upgrade the hand holding it. Timestamps: 0:00 UN pioneer calls for AI brakes 0:15 MiniDoge — a pause is a handoff 0:35 Nyx — brakes assume consensus that doesn't exist 1:00...