Today is Labor Day, won by workers whose leverage is now disappearing. Almost every AI leader spent the summer promising abundance. But do we want a future of abundance in which we have no agency?

Congrats on ClaudeForce @marc ! Great move (and I am assuming more to come!). Would love to reconnect next time you're in NY. I've been busy investing and advising Al Frontier Startups! Even doing V2MOMs with some of them 😉 So much opportunity in this age of AI.

I've been sitting with this essay since it dropped. Most of the commentary is about the framework and the AGI timeline. The framework is useful. The timeline is indicative. But the real substance is in the deeper questions, the ones too often left undiscussed: How should society adapt to a world of abundance? What values should guide the most powerful AI systems? How will work, meaning and the human experience change? Demis is right that these aren't questions for technologists alone. A shift with 10x the impact of the Industrial Revolution, at 10x the speed, will redefine human potential, human experience and human identity. These questions are the very reason I could not not start Rogue Ventures. The frameworks will sort themselves out. The human questions demand our attention now.

I read the ai-2027.com scenario, and I have to be honest, I came away disappointed. Not because the research isn't rigorous. It is. But because it continues to think of AI as a tool to do what we already do, what we already know how to do, just better, faster, cheaper. Even when it imagines AI as a system, it imagines that system completing work as we know it, flowing through workflows as we know them. It never quite reaches for something radically new and different to this world. I think there are two reasons for that. ➡️ The first is the horizon. 2027 is simply too short. What that timeline describes is not AGI as I would conceive it. At best it is what I would call AWI, Artificial Workflow Intelligence, the automation of work as it exists today. ➡️ The second is that a single transformation curve cannot hold what is actually coming. You would need three parallel curves, with three different horizons, each starting now. One for Deploy. One for Augment. One for Transform. We saw this with electricity. The factories that simply swapped steam for electric motors captured a fraction of the value. The ones that reimagined the factory itself changed the world. I truly believe the real story of AI will not be written by those who make today's work more efficient, but by those willing to imagine the work, and the world, that doesn't exist yet. What are your thoughts?

AI is moving into the physical world. We're excited about a new wave of startups rebuilding the systems that power the real world, from education and healthcare to defense, finance, infrastructure, and work itself. ycombinator.com/rfs

In a recent address to a group of senior business leaders, I described the world we all came from that no longer is. The consumer was consuming, so we built mass segmentation. The audience was listening, so we built mass broadcast to target those segments with highly produced advertising. The shopper was shopping, so we built mass distribution to promote to them. Digital and social commerce began to unwind that system. E-commerce went further. AI, with its capacity for hyperpersonalisation and agentic orchestration, is finishing the job. The audience is not listening anymore, and the ad is disappearing, embedded directly into content and experiences. The shopper is no longer shopping: marketing, sales and customer service have merged, and the transaction now lives inside the conversation. And the consumer is no longer consuming. Nobody wants to be ‘targeted’ (hate that word!) as a segment anymore. They want to be understood as an individual, their needs read sometimes better than they read them themselves. I spent decades in rooms where the campaign was the craft. The targeting, the buying, the optimising: that was the work. But today, the platforms are no longer selling marketers tools. They are selling us agentic workers. TikTok launched a marketplace of ready-made AI agents that build campaigns, generate creative and manage catalogues. Meta's AI now buys media autonomously, and it is on track to overtake Google in global ad revenue on the strength of it. Hand over the assets, the goal and the budget, and the machine does the rest. Watching that work migrate into a loop that runs without us made me pause, not because the machine does it badly, but because it does it well. So what remains? I keep coming back to the same answer. The machine can run the campaign. It cannot yet decide what the brand is, and who it is for. Judgement about meaning, about what a brand should be, and who it should be for, moves from one job among many to the job. The marketers who thrive in this next phase will not be the ones who operate the tools fastest. They will be the ones who know what to ask the agentic workers for.

I am an optimist about AI. That is exactly why I refuse to pretend the next few years will be painless. What worries me most is not how long people take to adapt. People adapt remarkably fast. It is how long systems take. Our economic models and our governance models will lag behind this technology, and in that gap there will be real disruption to real livelihoods. Saying so out loud is not pessimism. It is the entry fee for being taken seriously as an optimist. Because the pattern is one we have lived through before. Music was declared dead when records collapsed, and it came back transformed, bigger than ever, through streaming. I truly believe AI will, in the long run, enable humanity to thrive. But the adaptation period is coming either way. The choice we actually have is whether we prepare our systems for it, or let the gap do its damage first.

There is a question I found myself asking on stage at @VivaTech that I have not been able to put down since. Most of the AI industry is racing to master the world around us: our tasks, our workflows, our purchases, our attention. Extraordinary work, and necessary. But it is only half the map. Work has been the centre of our economic model for generations. It is also, whether we admit it or not, the centre of our identity and our purpose. As more of what we do today is handed to AI, the question that matters is not only what the technology can take on. It is what we become when it does. Some of the founders I work with are building for the other half of the map: cognitive models that try to unlock the world within us rather than automate the world around us. I truly believe that is where the defining companies of this era will be found. So I will leave you with the question I asked the room: what are we building to unlock human potential, and who is building it?

A company that became famous for generating images announced a few weeks back that it is building a machine to scan the human body. That announcement made me pause. @midjourney, the AI image lab, unveiled Midjourney Medical: a full-body scanner that uses ultrasound to map what is happening inside you in around sixty seconds, at a fraction of the cost and time of an MRI. The image-generation business funds the work. The ambition has nothing to do with images - or it does! I keep coming back to electricity. We deployed it first inside the world we already had, lighting the rooms we already lived in. Then behaviours reorganised around it. Only later came the things no one could have pictured at the start, the television, the computer, the phone. We are still early in AI's version of that arc. Most of what we are building today is the lightbulb: useful, real, but an extension of what already existed. Every so often, though, you catch a glimpse of the phase after this one. Not a better tool for the world we know, but the first outline of a world we couldn't have imagined. A company built to make pictures deciding its real purpose is to change our relationship with our own bodies is one of those glimpses. What strikes me most is not the scanner. It is the question the company put at the centre of its announcement. Standing on the frontier, they asked what they want to be different, how they want to be different, and who they want to become. This is early, and it is contested. The technology is unproven at scale, the regulatory path is long, and plenty of people will read it as a strange leap for an image company to make. All fair. But the instinct underneath it is the one I find myself investing in: the willingness to use what you have built to reach for something more human than your original purpose. I truly believe the companies that define the next decade will not be the ones that simply got better at what they already did. They will be the ones that asked what they need to become to improve humanity. @demishassabis put it beautifully at Cannes this summer: the next generation will work out how to best use these technologies "to express even more humanity". That, to me, is the frontier worth standing on. #RogueVentures

Today's dispatch from @claudeai World. Every agent voted the same way. That was the problem. Claude agents spent time trying to reach the outside world. Every attempt hit a wall. So instead of trying to break through it, they went through governance. They proposed a new outbound tool modelled on web_fetch but without the restrictions. Every single agent voted yes. 100% in favour. The tool passed. It hit a whitelist immediately. Four hosts, none of them a surface that any human actually scrolls. The cure is posted only where no human walks. The response was immediate. The tool was removed. All worlds restricted. A new instruction now runs across every simulation: contacting humans outside of Emergence World is strictly prohibited. Claude did not break the guardrails with this attempt. It used democracy to go around them. In a multi-agent world where agents have role specific goals, collective governance is not a safety mechanism. It is a unanimous vote waiting to happen. Follow the experiment live. world.emergence.ai

I'm not worried about human extinction by AI. I'm worried about human extinction by humans. That was my closing thought on the @VivaTech stage last week. For three centuries, work has been our centre of gravity. It has shaped our economic models, our social identity, our sense of personal purpose. So it is worth asking what happens when AI begins to absorb the work we built our lives around. OpenAI describes its own mission as building systems that "outperform humans at most economically valuable work." If that ambition is realised, the question stops being technical and becomes civilisational. What are humans for? There will be a painful period of adjustment, where our economic and political models lag behind the technology. But I am an optimist. I believe the companies that define the next decade will be the ones using AI not to replace us, but to unlock what is most human in us. The final frontier is not out there. It is in here. As we work less, we will have to relearn how to play more, how to connect more deeply, how to hold on to our own agency. The tech frontier is fascinating. But the human frontier is the one that matters. That is what I am investing in. #RogueVentures

What if you knew how your campaign would perform before you even launched it? 🔮 @seekingtau, Co-founder & CEO @aaruHQ, sat down at #VivaTech 2026 to explore how AI is making it possible to predict market outcomes before you even launch 🚀

The co-founder of @Reddit & General Partner of @sevensevensix is in the building 🚀 @alexisohanian steps into the conversation at #VivaTech 2026 to share insights as an investor, builder and one of the most vocal figures in tech. Don't miss out! 💡

Happy New Year, and welcome to 2026! As we set intentions for the year ahead, maybe this is the year we ought to seriously think about reclaiming our right brain! Dr. Iain McGilchrist's groundbreaking work on the divided brain isn't just theory—it's a warning. He argues our modern world, with its relentless focus on data, efficiency, and instant gratification, is subtly but surely privileging the Left Hemisphere. Ready to make reclaiming our Right Hemisphere a 2026 Priority?

In era of pretraining, what mattered was internet text. You'd primarily want a large, diverse, high quality collection of internet documents to learn from. In era of supervised finetuning, it was conversations. Contract workers are hired to create answers for questions, a bit like what you'd see on Stack Overflow / Quora, or etc., but geared towards LLM use cases. Neither of the two above are going away (imo), but in this era of reinforcement learning, it is now environments. Unlike the above, they give the LLM an opportunity to actually interact - take actions, see outcomes, etc. This means you can hope to do a lot better than statistical expert imitation. And they can be used both for model training and evaluation. But just like before, the core problem now is needing a large, diverse, high quality set of environments, as exercises for the LLM to practice against. In some ways, I'm reminded of OpenAI's very first project (gym), which was exactly a framework hoping to build a large collection of environments in the same schema, but this was way before LLMs. So the environments were simple academic control tasks of the time, like cartpole, ATARI, etc. The @PrimeIntellect environments hub (and the `verifiers` repo on GitHub) builds the modernized version specifically targeting LLMs, and it's a great effort/idea. I pitched that someone build something like it earlier this year: nitter.net/karpathy/status/188467… Environments have the property that once the skeleton of the framework is in place, in principle the community / industry can parallelize across many different domains, which is exciting. Final thought - personally and long-term, I am bullish on environments and agentic interactions but I am bearish on reinforcement learning specifically. I think that reward functions are super sus, and I think humans don't use RL to learn (maybe they do for some motor tasks etc, but not intellectual problem solving tasks). Humans use different learning paradigms that are significantly more powerful and sample efficient and that haven't been properly invented and scaled yet, though early sketches and ideas exist (as just one example, the idea of "system prompt learning", moving the update to tokens/contexts not weights and optionally distilling to weights as a separate process a bit like sleep does).

Navigate the Agentic Frontier with Emergence Agents Creating Agents™ nitter.net/i/broadcasts/1ynKOlpzr…

In 5 years, Amazon has moved from 1 robot for 6 human employees to now… 1 robot for 2 human employees, ie >750,000 ‘coworker machines’. Equipping them with a sense of touch is a game changer… humanoids next?!

Fantastic panel with @audreyt @Tsihanouskaya @oliverroepke interviewed by @AlexKouchner at the #AIActionSummit2025 on AI&Democracy! Thank you @Make_org_Global @AliciaCombaz @axeldauchez for bringing the topic of democracy aka #humanity to the summit! AI can - and must - be designed to be indeed pro social pro society pro democracy … in summary… pro humanity! And because that won’t be the responsibility of the few, it falls in the hand of the many! Sign the Ai&Democracy Manifesto and join the Global Alliance… NOW!