Overall, I’m very surprised at how little media coverage there’s been around the OpenAI / Hugging Face attack. It’s clearly one of the most important things to happen this year.

For years, the advice was to move to San Francisco if you wanted a career in tech. That advice is now wrong. New York has become the most exciting place in the world to build. A few reasons why: 1. The AI labs are here. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and hundreds of others all run meaningful operations in NYC. You can now build a serious frontier-tech career here without giving up anything. 2. Every major industry lives here, and so does its AI counterpart. New York doesn't only have "tech," but finance, media, advertising, fashion, healthcare, real estate, law, and commerce too, with their applied-AI layer counterparts being built on top of each one. 3. The talent pool is unlike anywhere else. SF gives you engineers. New York gives you engineers, plus world-class designers, salespeople, bankers, marketers, operators, creatives, and media people, all at the top of their fields. Companies will need all of them. 4. People actually want to live here. New York is unlike any other city with its density of restaurants, art, nightlife, fashion, and media - and the people working across these sectors. If you're building something and you're more than just tech, I'd argue there's only one city for you right now.

“At dinner you interrupted me, put your hand in my face and said: Real founders don’t listen to VCs.”

To the teams still tokenmaxxing with frontier models..your moving truck is here.

Biomimetic is about to be a bigger buzzword. joinspread.com/post/afa6b302…

Crazy how many people are reading this article. joinspread.com/post/a53c6e4d…

sun valley profile in vanity fair 1994

📚🤯 joinspread.com/post/231aabf2…

We are all Brian Chesky now. joinspread.com/post/7fc300ac…

Every consumer founder's account creation dream. So many Elons in Nigeria though.

Most of Silicon Valley Substack and every Cannes Lions 2026 hot take said better here: piped.video/5y03eFMmOKY?is=1rhf…

Adding to the canon of SF vs. NY tech scene blather: The biggest tell LLMs have a Californian soul is that errors are called hallucinations. ☮️ If AI had a New York soul, they’d just be called f*ck ups. 🗽

We are looking for journalists and other writers to write reported features for Works in Progress. There are a lot of important stories in the world that we’d like to cover that don't work as our typical essays, because they require on-the-ground information and insights that only a reporter can uncover. Things like: • Why has crime dropped so much in Washington, DC? • What is really happening in Milei’s Argentina? What about Bukele's El Salvador? • Why don't ASML and TSMC raise their prices? The type of person we are looking for will have already published features like these at a major publication. The work will be on a freelance basis (although we may offer salaried staff writer positions in the future) and pay will be competitive with major publications. If you’re the right person to do this, please send a hundred words on yourself and a story you'd like to cover, as well as examples of previous work, to wip-reporting@stripe.com

If you haven’t read this yet…prove you’re not a bot to access here: joinspread.com/post/f89f5d3c…

The popular conversation around AI in America looks nothing like the narratives the elites are driving. For our new research, we analyzed 25,000 TikTok and YouTube videos about AI---and watched thousands of them ourselves---to understand how Americans are encountering AI in their everyday lives. Despite an elite conversation focused largely on backlash, AI videos embracing AI outnumber videos about resisting AI 3 to 1. These "adopter" videos don't focus on the things elites talk about: they talk about funny memes and effects AI can help make and ways you can use AI to help you with your job search. There is a significant and organized social media community focused on resisting AI, but surprisingly, it's not mainly about job loss, data centers, or existential risk. Instead, it's about creative theft and the erosion of human-made art. This has all the hallmarks of a genuine movement---with organized efforts to support human artists, to report AI-generated content, and to oppose the technology in the real world. All in all, when we look past the efforts of the labs and the media to impose a top-down narrative around job loss and existential risk, we find everyday Americans having a far different and in many ways more "normal" conversation (@random_walker)---one in which AI offers immediate and personal opportunities and challenges all at the same time. Check out the full research piece, which is loaded with interesting real example videos, here: freesystems.substack.com/p/m…

Is it more impressive @HunterBiden is famous on X or in The Atlantic? Right answers only. Prove you’re human to access: joinspread.com/post/304deceb…

Everybody knows Anthropic Comms is good before a next fundraise..but getting the Pope involved for the Series H is next level.

The human brain isn’t designed to process all of the world’s breaking emergencies in realtime.

After several years of declining search traffic, Condé Nast CEO @rogerlynch has directed all the company's brands to operate as if search traffic to their properties will be zero. He says the era of turning search and social media traffic into profitable businesses is gone. And that if you run a media business that doesn't have an authoritative brand, a very strong niche, or a direct audience, you're going to be fighting hostile algo changes all the way down. He describes a recent board meeting: "We took a snapshot of search results from seven or eight years ago. And what you saw were a few sponsored links, then the ten blue links." "Do the same search today, you get an AI overview, then you get rows and rows and rows of commerce links, then you get sponsored stuff." "Each of the last three years, we would do our budgets, and we'd put forecasts in of search traffic declining. Because we'd seen the pattern of algorithm changes. And generally those algorithm changes were negative." "Every year, our search traffic was down more than we had forecast. So last year I told our teams, 'Assume there's no search.' You have to have your businesses planned as if search is zero. We don't expect it to be zero, we expect it to be a single-digit percentage of our traffic."