🦔Microsoft's internal strategy document for its new AI assistant Scout says the explicit goal of phase one is to "make people addicted." The doc, obtained by 404 Media, outlines a three-phase plan from "addictive app to agentic platform." The tool sits on your desktop, manages your calendar, triages your inbox, files expenses, and acts on your behalf. It requires access to your accounts and files. Security and compliance are things to "figure out" later. Nadella already uses it. My Take After everything this week, I think this document accidentally explains the entire AI business model. Not just Microsoft's, everyone's. The product can't sustain itself on current pricing. We know that because Copilot just proved it on Monday. The unit economics don't work at flat rate. So the play is to get people locked in before the real bill arrives. Make the tool essential to how you work, let your company cut the people who used to do those tasks, and by the time consumption pricing kicks in, walking away costs more than paying up. IBM's CEO just told us the industry needs $6 to $8 trillion in capex to chase revenue he says doesn't exist. Google diluted shareholders to fund a buildout it can't cover from cash flow. Oracle fired 30,000 people during a record quarter to redirect salaries into data centers. And Microsoft's answer to all of that is an internal doc where step one is addiction. They're not selling the product on value. They're selling dependency. Get people hooked before anyone calculates what it costs to run, and make sure they can't leave once they find out. A product that needs addiction to survive is a product that can't survive on its own. Hedgie🤗 404media.co/microsoft-wants-…

🦔Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon told Computex this week that AI agents will replace your phone as the center of your digital life. The agent follows you across every device, earbuds, glasses, phone, laptop, and never turns off. 6G networks will "make all of us into walking cameras," and by tracking millions of radio connections, network operators will build a digital twin of every road, car, bicycle, and pedestrian in your city. "Resistance is futile," Amon said. My Take A CEO just stood on stage and told investors his company's vision is an AI agent that follows you everywhere, sees what you see, hears what you hear, and feeds it all into a digital replica of your city where every person and vehicle is tracked. He said "resistance is futile" like that was a selling point and not a threat. This week Ring got sued for labeling people's faces without consent. Microsoft put "make people addicted" in a strategy doc. MicroAGI sent cameras into apartments. And now Qualcomm is pitching the hardware layer that ties all of it together into one continuous feed from your earbuds to a datacenter, running around the clock. Each company sells its piece as a standalone product, but they all benefit from the same outcome: you generate data constantly and it flows through their compute. Amon says economics will drive adoption and he's probably right. But I haven't heard a single person on any of these stages this week ask whether the people generating all that data actually want this future. The pitch is always to investors, never to the public. I feel like that should bother more people than it does. Hedgie🤗

Every company’s AI workflow rn be like 😭💀

🦔Microsoft canceled its internal Claude Code licenses this week after token-based billing made the cost untenable, even for a company with effectively infinite cloud resources. Uber's CTO sent an internal memo warning the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. American AI software prices have jumped 20% to 37%, and GitHub (owned by Microsoft) is dropping flat-rate plans for usage-based billing across its products. My Take The AI subsidy era is ending in real time. The same company that put $13 billion into OpenAI and built the Azure infrastructure powering most of Anthropic's compute just looked at the bill from a competitor's coding tool and decided it was not worth paying. That is not a productivity failure on Anthropic's end. Token-based pricing is forcing every enterprise customer to confront the actual cost of running these models at scale, and the number turns out to be far higher than the flat-rate experiments suggested. This ties directly to my Gemini Flash post yesterday. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all raised effective prices in the last six months. Enterprises that built workflows assuming AI costs would keep falling are now watching annual budgets evaporate in months. Two outcomes look likely from here. Either enterprises scale back AI usage to fit budgets, which slows the revenue ramp the labs need to justify their valuations ahead of IPOs, or the labs cut prices and absorb the losses, which makes the unit economics worse at exactly the wrong moment. Both paths land in the same place, the numbers stop working, and somebody has to take the writedown. Hedgie🤗

Just published Events Evaporate, Patterns Persist: Lessons from Eddie Obeng on Navigating Complexity medium.com/p/events-evaporat…

I regret to inform you that Ask Jeeves is dead. The site closed yesterday. Web 1.0 lost another founder. Ask Jeeves: 3 June 1996 - 1 May 2026. Send no memes.

The poor and middle-class are paying taxes, the rich are paying accountants, and the wealthy are paying politicians. That’s the circle.

Hello world! This is the X account for Cronk Advisory, founded by @cronky

China just turned 10,000 drones into a single coordinated system 🤯 What looks like a light show is actually something deeper. 10,000 autonomous units moving in perfect coordination. No collisions. No chaos. Just precision. One wrong signal could collapse the entire formation. Instead, they behave like a single system. I see this as more than a spectacle. It’s a glimpse into how AI systems are evolving — from isolated tools to coordinated swarms that act together in real time. The first time you look at it this way, the implications go far beyond entertainment. So here’s something I’d be curious to hear from you: Where do you think swarm intelligence like this will have the biggest impact next? #ArtificialIntelligence #Drones #Robotics #Innovation #FutureOfTech

How is AI impacting people and the planet, and how can we do better? 🌍 In my most recent TED talk, I shed light on how the current way we do AI and explore ways forward in which we can make it more sustainable -ted.com/talks/sasha_luccioni…

Listen to the latest #ArchitectTomorrow episode with Selena Evans and Darryl Carr: open.spotify.com/episode/1Pa…

These aren’t the charts you are looking for. You can go about your business.

Just published "Zoology to Systems Thinking with Jenny Wilson, Chief Architect at Kingfisher" the latest Architect Tomorrow episode. You can find it on YouTube too. #ArchitectTomorrow creators.spotify.com/pod/pro…

1. "Nobody in their right mind will use autoregressive LLMs a few years from now." The technology powering ChatGPT and GPT-4? Dead within years. The problem isn't fixable with more data or compute. It's architectural. Here's where it gets interesting...

Beyond training AI in vector space we could be building a conceptual world view model / KG connecting entities and properties? Challenges and it might require quite a lot of human input (and debate on the model specifics), but surely this is the grounding required for #AGI?

AI PROMPTING → AI VERIFYING AI prompting scales, because prompting is just typing. But AI verifying doesn’t scale, because verifying AI output involves much more than just typing. Sometimes you can verify by eye, which is why AI is great for frontend, images, and video. But for anything subtle, you need to read the code or text deeply — and that means knowing the topic well enough to correct the AI. Researchers are well aware of this, which is why there’s so much work on evals and hallucination. However, the concept of verification as the bottleneck for AI users is under-discussed. Yes, you can try formal verification, or critic models where one AI checks another, or other techniques. But to even be aware of the issue as a first class problem is half the battle. For users: AI verifying is as important as AI prompting.

I've #justdonated to support Cancer Research, Herts Young Homeless & Harrisons Fund cycling 4,004km, 47,895m in 22 days in Italy in August. How hard can it be ?. Donate on @justgiving and help raise 20000.00 justgiving.com/crowdfunding/…

The future of gaming? Not just water cooling but full immersion 🤯 #sponsored #cisco #gaming #computer #pc @Cisco @CiscoLiveEMEA

Number crunching: Fiscal ‘black holes’ From the new Private Eye, out now.

Call for speakers for the 7th @bcs #Architecture conference - London & online, 11th October. Please nominate yourself or get in touch if you'd like to discuss.