Virginia Backaitis

There is one certain way to secure your future in the workplace, be human, machines can't do that @BDJFuturist #adobett

Every few years the software industry renames a stubborn engineering headache and calls it a cure. This year, it’s "agentic AI." Here is how Databricks plans to bypass traditional ETL pipelines—and why it’s a massive engineering gamble: bit.ly/4vmXA0U

Germans, Scots sing AMERICAN PIE in downtown Boston

Employers are using AI all wrong when it comes to talent management. Instead of screening jobseekers and employees out, they should use it to learn more about workers. Read about it bit.ly/4fPLUyN

Google and Blackstone just dropped a $25B bombshell that threatens Nvidia’s AI infrastructure dominance. With 500MW of TPU compute on the way, CoreWeave’s stock is already feeling the heat. Is the GPU monopoly finally cracking? Inside the mega-deal bit.ly/4dTJ8qS

@cvspharmacy is unable to have a relationship with its customers and unable to fix the problems they create. The FDA needs to close half of CVS' and provide customers with a choice. Someone will eventually swoop in and offer an improvement.Until then, customers in-need lose.

Mark Cuban just described the largest wealth transfer of the AI era. Almost nobody understood what he said. Cuban: “There are 33 million companies in this country. Aren’t going to have AI budgets. Aren’t going to have AI experts.” Not tech startups. The shoe store. The regional trucking outfit. The accounting firm with 12 employees. The businesses that actually run the physical economy. They know AI is coming. They have no idea what to do with it. Cuban: “You’ve got the head of Microsoft saying software is dead because everything’s going to be customized to your unique utilization.” Software is dead. The SaaS era ran on one rule. Build a generic product. Force millions of companies to bend their workflows around it. Charge rent forever. AI ends the contract. The business stops bending to the software. The intelligence bends to the business. But customized by whom. The third-generation manufacturer cannot tell Claude from Gemini. The county hospital is staring at a reactor asking where the light switch is. Cuban: “Who’s going to do it for them?” That question is worth more than the frontier models themselves. Hundreds of billions are being burned to build the foundation. The smartest engineers alive are locked in a bloodbath over who owns the base layer. Let them fight. Let them burn the capital. Let them drive the cost of raw intelligence toward zero. Because the wealth does not collect where the brain is built. It collects where the brain meets the business. Every ambitious kid in college right now thinks survival means a seat at OpenAI or Anthropic. Cuban is staring at the other 99 percent of the economy. Learn the models. Then learn the messy, unglamorous reality of how a 50-person company actually operates. Walk through the door. Understand their problems. Wire the intelligence directly into their revenue. That is not a job title. That is an entire economic class being born. You do not need to build the brain. You need to build the nervous system. The biggest winners of the electricity era were not the engineers who built the generators. They were the ones who walked into dark factories and showed the owners where to plug in. 33 million companies are standing in the dark right now. Silicon Valley is racing to build the god. The fortunes will belong to whoever teaches him a trade.

Is OpenAI the WeWork of 2026?

SAP may be able to keep AI honest with its pending acquisition of Reltio. bit.ly/4vkRBu7

🚨BREAKING: Kentucky family rejects a $26 million offer to turn their farmland into a data center, roughly 10x the area’s going rate. “If it’s my way, I’ll stay and hold and feed a nation. 26 million doesn’t mean anything.”

From Sam Altman’s occasional liberalism to Elon Musk’s flexible free speech absolutism, tech broligarchs politics are hard to nail down. @CaseyNewton and @noUpside try to make sense of who they really are. #theweeklyshow #jonstewart #politics

Workers are setting up AI Agents using their personal accounts. IT has no idea what information they are accessing and using. Okta is trying to help companies stay safe. bit.ly/3PduoJF

There's a high-stakes legal and ethical battle between the Pentagon and Anthropic, triggered by the refusal to remove safety guardrails against mass surveillance and autonomous weaponry. It reveals an unprecedented moment of industry solidarity, bit.ly/4suhXas

the contract snippet from the openai dow blog post is so obviously just "all lawful use" followed by a bunch of stuff that is not really operative except as window dressing. the referenced DoD Directive 3000.09 basically says the DoD gets to decide when autonomous weapons systems are deployable. as others have covered, there are a ton of mass domestic surveillance loopholes not covered by the 4A, national security act, FISA, etc.

I have been a loyal @OpenAI guy from day 1. I’ve had an account since they first released and used it daily since I think GPT 3.5. Based on @sama’s move tonight to accept the DoD terms that Anthropic would not, I am removing all traces of Codex and OpenAI software from all devices. I absolutely hate to do this and it’s going to really compromise my ability to be productive in the short term, but every possible alarm bell is going off at full blast in my head right now. This has the potential to be the most egregious incursion on privacy the world may have ever seen. I think Sam just saw too many dollar signs and didn’t realize how obvious this move would make the optics but it’s clear to me now OpenAI is compromised. Not sure what the next step will be from here, but the trust is totally gone. Very disappointing.

We’ve been warning for years that this is where AI was leading: mass surveillance, automated bombings, the imprisonment of freethinkers. It’s urgent that we collectively boycott OpenAI and ChatGPT. They are building the engines of our oppression.

It’s extremely good that Anthropic has not backed down, and it’s siginficant that OpenAI has taken a similar stance. In the future, there will be much more challenging situations of this nature, and it will be critical for the relevant leaders to rise up to the occasion, for fierce competitors to put their differences aside. Good to see that happen today.

ServiceNow Bets Hundreds of Millions That Enterprises Can't Wait a Week for Answers by @actbrilliant reworked.co/information-ma… #ServiceNow #Analytics

If you work from home, give this a try. A 1 minute dance break every hour. If you work from an office, do it there and get your cronies to join in. instagram.com/reels/DT8-lTAE…

Salesforce's managers are leaving in a hurry. The CRM maker is stopping development of much loved Heroku, and it's laying off almost 1000 employees. Add to that that it's stock has lost half of its value. bit.ly/4acewPy

@JosephJacks_ He’s a really gracious interviewee even when he gets irritated