AI is going to destroy a lot of jobs. Let’s just start there. White collar jobs. Desk jobs. The kind of jobs where your primary output is information, analysis, or words on a screen. This isn’t speculation — it’s already happening. But here’s the thing: the world has survived every major technological disruption in history. When the power loom arrived in the early 1800s, hand weavers rioted — literally smashed the machines — because they were certain it was the end of work. It wasn’t the end of work. It was the end of that work. New work emerged that no one could have predicted, like, oh say, the commercial mass-produced clothing industry, which had even more jobs on the…
Category
AI
MattBot: My First Agent
In May 2023, Fred Wilson wrote a post about being approached by a company that had trained a large language model on all 9,059 of his AVC blog posts. They wanted to offer a chatbot called “Ask Fred.” He said no thanks. His reasoning was sharp. He’s fine with anyone using his content to train AI. He put a Creative Commons license on his blog from the start. But he didn’t want a bot pretending to be him. The whole point of his blog is the humanity — the daily conversation, the thinking out loud, the relationship with readers. A chatbot that mimics Fred Wilson isn’t Fred Wilson. It’s a parlor trick. I read that post and agreed with Fred…
Meet Chatgipity: a Unified AI Platform for Our Company
A little over a year ago, my friend Dan Shapiro, CEO of Glowforge, showed me what his team had built internally with AI tools. Not one-off ChatGPT experiments. Not an AI pilot program. A real, unified infrastructure where the whole company was using AI through a common platform with shared agents, shared memory, and shared integrations. I walked away from that conversation knowing we needed to do the same thing. A few weeks later, our VP of Technical Operations, Martin Hempstock, stood up an instance of LibreChat — an open-source AI platform that brings together all the major LLMs into a single, customizable interface. Martin had it provisioned under a new subdomain within days. It’s changed the way we work….
HBR article: Preparing Your Brand for Agentic AI
We’ve been sounding the alarm on this at Markup AI for months, and now the data is catching up. A recent Harvard Business Review audit of major LLMs just validated a critical shift: Machines are distorting brand reality. When Pernod Ricard ran the numbers, they found models miscategorizing Ballantine’s – very much a mass-market staple (and a decent scotch whiskey, though not my personal favorite, and not a high end one like Talisker or Oban) – as a prestige product. Why is this an issue CEOs or even board members should care about? Because the “customer journey” has fundamentally changed. With two-thirds of Gen Z and half of Millennials now using LLMs for product research, we’re witnessing the death of…