“Walmart CEO Doug McMillon says the AI wave is here and will change every job,” Morning Brew reported and thanks, but now tell us something we didn’t know. “The world’s largest retailer currently employs about 2.1 million workers globally, and it plans to maintain that head count for the next three years, while still growing revenue. McMillon told the Associated Press it’s hard to say how it will all play out, but corporate jobs will likely get hit first, and roles dealing directly with customers will change more gradually. A recent survey from BetterUp and Stanford found that 40% of US workers reported receiving AI-generated “workslop” over the past month, which can require extra human work to fix.
Peter Theil had a lot to say about AI lately, too, when he was asked to “comment on theology, history, literature, and politics of the Antichrist,” according to a description provided by ActS 17 Collective, the nonprofit sponsoring an off-the-record series at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco,” said Inc.
ACTS 17, is an acronym for “Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society,” according to the Wall Street Journal.Read More...
Considering all the funding that has gone almost blindly – and we’re being generous here – to startups where the product and pitch deck are centered around AI, we’ve come to the conclusion that, at least in investors’ minds, AI is an acronym for ‘All In.’
AI Startups Are Failing at Alarming Rates: Why 90% of AI Ventures Die Within Their First Year, wrote VDWayne on Medium, and of course for the usual reason: no product/market fit, lack of market demand, and a new one, for those who still believe that AI is a do-all and end- all: overestimation of AI capabilities.
Another good read for founders and investors still chomping at the bit to cast their lot into the AI FOMO fever: I Analyzed 100 AI Startups That Failed in 2024 — Here’s What No One Tells You and noted Jeremy Merrell Williams in his piece, “2024 pulled the mask off the AI game. The hype was loud, the VC checks were fat, but the fall-off? Brutal. We’re talking 254 venture-backed startups filing for bankruptcy in just the first quarter. That’s a 60% jump from 2023 and over 7x the rate in 2019. And AI startups? They went down twice as fast as regular tech.Read More...
Last week was a difficult one between it having been the 24th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Rather than opine on the events, we will point out one thing to founders: the importance and power that’s in a name. If you name your company, say, Avalanche, which one did in the days of Web 1.0, whether as an act to defy fate or one of prescience, guess what happened? Yup, it all came tumbling down. The Bonfire Collective? Went up in smoke. Note to self: Charlie Kirk’s outlet was Turning Point and so far, from all indications, his assassination did appear to trigger something of a turning point. As always, time will tell.
In times of stress, people tend to turn to food for comfort, so let ‘s focus on food, speaking of turning points. Food and various ingredients have come under scrutiny of late. Seed oils, in particular. “For several decades, saturated fat was wrongly blamed for heart disease, while vegetable oils quietly caused a surge in obesity, inflammation, and chronic metabolic disorders. Newly appointed FDA commissioner Dr. Marty Makary is now leading efforts to revise outdated dietary guidelines that were built on cherry-picked data from Ancel Keys’ Seven Countries Study. There was just one problem with the research — Keys cherry-picked the data. He selectively chose the countries that fit his hypothesis while ignoring data from 16 other countries that went against his recommendations. Had he chosen a different set of countries, the data would have been the opposite — that increasing the percent of calories from fat actually reduces the number of deaths from coronary heart disease,” Mercola reported in The War on Saturated Fat is Finally Coming to an End.
Despite the methodological flaws in his data, the medical community accepted Keys’ study
FYI, “Seed oils, or “vegetable oils” are extracted from vegetable crops like soybeans, cottonseed, and corn,” HeartandSoil explained. “Seed oils were originally byproducts of manufacturing during the Industrial Revolution. They weren’t initially intended for the dinner table. However, by the mid-1900s, seed oils had become a staple ingredient in packaged foods, reshaping the Western diet in ways that are raising new health concerns today. The food industry favors seed oils for their low cost and so-called “heart-healthy” reputation. Research suggests that seed oils pose significant health risks.Read More...
Summer is nearly over and talk about the coming Fall…“Over two thousand years ago, Plato described an illusion that shaped perception so completely that those trapped inside it mistook it for reality,” wrote The Art of Slow Down.
“He imagined a group of prisoners who had been confined in a cave since birth, chained in place, able to see only the wall in front of them. Behind them, a fire burned, and in front of the fire, unseen figures moved objects – casting shadows on the wall in front of the prisoners. These flickering shapes became the prisoners’ entire world. They gave names to the shadows. They built meaning around them. The idea that something more existed beyond the cave was unthinkable.
Then, one day, a prisoner was set free. At first,… the light was overwhelming, his eyes unaccustomed to anything beyond the dim glow of the cave…But as his vision adjusted, he began to see clearly. He soon realised that what he had once believed to be reality was nothing more than distorted reflections, a shadow play designed to keep him in place.Read More...
