FT: “Starbucks is betting $1bn that an environment with leather armchairs, rugs and hardback books can lure back customers willing to buy one of its $6 lattes and perhaps linger long enough to have another. The world’s biggest coffee shop chain is making the investment so that as many as 9,000 cafés feel more like a “community lounge”, even serving as an oasis for “lonely and disconnected” lives lived online.”
Axios: “Let’s look at this tale of two worlds through two different sets of eyes — a mid-career manager and an Anthropic data scientist. The average manager has limited time to experiment with AI, worries it might threaten their job, and mostly uses the models as a search engine and for writing better emails or presentations. It’s a nice-to-have, sometimes delightful, other times unimpressive. They don’t understand the hype. The Anthropic employee spends all day, every day, staring at rapidly improving AI, often mesmerized, even spooked, by what it does. They see it exceeding even the most optimistic benchmarks, then spend their nights and weekends with similar AI obsessives discussing how it could cure cancer — or go rogue and destroy humankind. To them, this is truly civilizational and existential — a clear reality, not hype.”
Ben Thompson: “It’s not enough to have systems to do things, you have to actually do the things. Writing things down is unbelievably powerful; its power will always pale in comparison to getting things done.”
WSJ in a review of a book on stamp collecting: “Keeping a collection of arbitrary objects may be irrational. It is also a way of coping with an unpleasant reality.”
Philip Bobbitt: “Now America faces another set of predictable attacks from two looming perils. Both stem from the emergence of artificial intelligence and its widespread availability to those who would harm the country. The first is an A.I.-designed cyberattack on U.S. critical infrastructure that could imperil the financial and health care systems, or any other internet-connected network on which we rely for our national well-being. The second is a biological attack mounted by small groups or even nihilistic individuals using A.I. to design and deploy a deadly and highly contagious pathogen. Once again, we are failing to take the steps that can prevent, or preclude the effects of, such atrocities.”
