“Feel Good Fun Mix” tops my recommendations on Spotify. Spotify has created over 6,000 such labels by hand.
Amazon and Netflix attributed 35% and 75% of their revenue to their recommendation systems. This is a profound & counterintuitive shift in how we think about marketing.
In a recent case study led by Aampe, an AI agent with this type of segmentation sent far fewer messages than traditional systems while achieving better results.
How often do you use AI? I tracked my Sunday workday to find out. Between 4:30-9:00 PM (with a dinner break), I monitored every AI interaction while handling emails, analyzing data, & writing.
If the average American picks up their mobile phone 144 times per day & we call that addiction, I am using AI about a hundred times per hour. Is AI ten times more valuable than a phone?
Speech
These are the top 10 posts of 2025. I like to do a roundup each year as a retrospective of how much the industry has changed through some of these posts from the beginning of the year. Some are outdated already & some presaged accelerating trends.
AI Drove the Largest New Bookings of Any New Product : In January, ServiceNow announced that their AI product was the fastest growing product in their history. Since then, many other companies have reported massive growth in their AI businesses. It was a harbinger of the tectonic shift to come.
Ten years ago, I hired an editor to grade my blog posts as an AP English teacher might. Yesterday, I asked an AI to do the same thing.
The verdict? A solid B-.
Claude’s Scorecard
Grade: B-
Strengths: The piece demonstrates a clear understanding of complex technical concepts and attempts to make them accessible to a general audience. The author’s personal connection to deep learning through graduate school studies adds authenticity and historical perspective. This human touch helps ground the technical material in lived experience.
In the bustling tech campuses of 2024, the age of passive AI – systems that merely respond to our queries – is giving way to something far more profound: the era of AI agents.
As we look to 2025, we’re about to discover what happens when algorithms learn to act.
At the heart of these emerging agents lies a trinity of learning approaches :
Today, we’re announcing our second fund of $450m to support our mission of partnering with early stage software companies that leverage technology discontinuities into go-to-market advantages. This marks the next chapter in our firm’s evolution.
Since we launched Theory in 2023, we’ve gathered a wonderful team : Lauren, Spencer, Andy, Rafa, Amber, Arjun, & Kristin.
We have partnered with 8 marvelous founding teams, all using data to power the next wave of innovation across the Modern Data Stack, Artificial Intelligence, & Web3.
I didn’t notice it at first but there in the back corner of my laptop, I’ve been assembling a little library.
The library doesn’t contain books, but scraps of text that explain what an AI should do.
Visit Anthropic’s home page & you’ll find their collection :
Each of us will assemble these little libraries with tracts like :
As we work in a role, we have assemble these workflows and kept them to ourselves.
What it cost to have an assistant with you like in the movie Her?
The cost of using AI has dropped precipitously, an order of magnitude every year.
If the average American picks up their phone 144 times per day & engages with an assistant, each time for four interactions every day of a month, an assistant like Her would cost about 78 cents in inference cost.1
77% of enterprise AI usage are using models that are small models, less than 13b parameters.
Databricks, in their annual State of Data + AI report, published this survey which among other interesting findings indicated that large models, those with 100 billion perimeters or more now represent about 15% of implementations.
In August, we asked enterprise buyers What Has Your GPU Done for You Today? They expressed concern with the ROI of using some of the larger models, particularly in production applications.
After the election, the public markets have roared, but not equally.
The broad software ecosystem has seen a relatively muted change in forward multiples. There’s no statistically significant change in the days after the election compared to the month before.
On the other hand, crypto’s top tokens have seen tremendous appreciation. Bitcoin is up 48% ; Solana up 70% ; & SUI up 324% in the few days since the announcenment. All of those ar statistically significant changes.