189 | The end of the internet as we know it, Higher education AI crisis, AI avatars influencing court cases, and more important AI news for the week ending on May 16th, 2025

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Is the internet as we know it about to vanish?

Recent data shows a dramatic shift—9 out of the top 10 websites are losing traffic while AI tools like ChatGPT are skyrocketing. The era of web browsing is transforming, and if your business relies on old-school web traffic, you might be sitting on a ticking time bomb.

In this powerful news breakdown, we explore the most shocking AI stories of the week, including how AI is not only disrupting the internet but also reshaping higher education and even influencing courtroom decisions with digital avatars.

The big question: Are you ready for the AI-first world?

In this session, you'll discover:

• The End of Traditional Web Browsing: Why traffic to major websites is plummeting and what that means for your business.
• The AI Avatars in Courtrooms: How digital representations are now being used to influence legal decisions—and the ethical chaos that follows.
• Higher Education’s AI Crisis: Students are using AI to complete up to 90% of their assignments. What does that mean for the workforce of tomorrow?
• The Shift in Global Wealth: Why AI could trigger a $100 trillion power shift in the global economy.
• Saudi Arabia's $600B AI Bet: How new investments are setting the stage for US jobs and AI infrastructure—and the risks of foreign control.

About Leveraging AI

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• Connect with Isar Meitis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/isarmeitis/
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Transcript

Isar Meitis: 2:09

Hello and welcome to a Weekend News episode of the Leveraging AI Podcast, the podcast that shares practical, ethical ways to improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career. This is Isar Meitis, your host, and we are going to cover some very profound and interesting topics that happened this past week. The first one, we're going to talk about the first signs of the end of the internet as we know it. Yes, I know that sounds big, but that's the reality. The second topic that we're going to talk about is how impactful is AI in higher education right now, and how it is going to change higher education and the workforce in the next few years, which is going to impact all of us. And the third main topic is going to be Trump's visit in Saudi and how that is connected to AI and AI infrastructure. But before we begin, there's two things I want to add. First of all, next week I'm going to do a special deep dive in the first section of the episode, instead of the regular weekly things I'm going to dive into the AI Company of the Future. It's a podcast that was released by dsh who has an amazing podcast that you should follow if you're not following already. he is a brilliant mind and he's a great interviewer and he has access to anybody he wants in the AI world. But he was doing actually a solo episode talking about the AI company of the future. You can go and listen yourself, but I'm gonna cover it, in depth next week. I wanted to do it this week, but there was too many important things to talk about, which I hope I'll be able to avoid, next week and jump into that. And the last thing I wanna say before we start is I wanna say thank you. so first of all, thank you to all of you for listening to this regularly, but it's amazing to me how close this community is becoming of people following this podcast and engaging with me across multiple channels. We have now several different weeks, more than 20 people every week on the AI Friday Hangouts, which you are more than welcome to join, we'll do this at every Friday at 1:00 PM Eastern. If you wanna join, there's a link to do that in the show notes. But I want to give a special thing to Charlie Hoing, Leon Crisp and Dennis Kovich. All three of them heard an episode I released a couple of weeks ago saying that I like to get an access to Manus and I don't have access yet. And all three of them reached out and offered an invitation from them to give me access to that, which I now have and can experiment and try different things, which I will report in an episode in the next couple of weeks. So thank you all of you for listening. Thanks specifically to Charlie, Leon and Dennis for caring and for offering me Manus invitations. And now let's get started with the episode. So I mentioned the first topic is the end of the internet as we know it. I talked about this in many previous episodes on how AI is changing the way we engage with internet, and how agents and search are gonna be impacted by that, and how my personal behavior has changed dramatically, where probably 85% of what I'm looking for is not coming from going to Google, but going through different AI tools. But this week there was a craze on Reddit on the data about the traffic to the top 10 leading websites in the world. This is the first time in maybe the history of the internet, but definitely in recent years that the traffic to nine out of the top 10 websites has decreased month over month, and there's only one website that saw an increase in the top 10, and that is ChatGPT. That, by the way, was number 15 on the list just a year ago, and now it is in number five and growing. What does that tell us? Well, first of all, I need to say that this is not one data point, but the one data point is very significant. The regular traffic to websites is declining. Apple also reported the overall traffic to websites and browsers is declining with more and more users globally are now using ChatGPT Gemini, and other apps to research things that they're trying to find. This, as I mentioned again in previous episodes as well, is going to have profound implications on every online presence of any company. If the future of your business depends on website traffic as it looks today, even if it's 30% of the revenue that you're making, 40% of the revenue that you're making, if you're not going to make dramatic changes in the next few years, that is going to go away because the internet is going to be browsed through agents. You will talk to whatever applications, whether it's ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude Grok, or anything else that will come out in the next few years, and these will do the research for you and we'll get you back information. And the companies that will understand how to build the backend of their website in a way that will be agent friendly will win. And anybody who is late to that game will lose potentially their entire business. I'm having conversations with very senior people in really large companies, in the billions of dollars who are not aware of what I just said, and they're not planning yet. That tells me two things that, one, the understanding that people at the leading edge of AI has right now that is very obvious to them is not even on the radar of most companies in the world. And the other thing is that there's a huge risk and opportunity of making the right moves to understand how to engage with agents. To be fair, it's not a well-defined path,.Meaning it's not very clear how that's gonna evolve and how it's gonna look like in two to three years. But what is very obvious to me is that it's not going to be what we see and know right now, or what we see and know and everything we've learned from running web-based businesses in the past 20 years. Now, I said that was just one data point, but the second data point comes from an interview by Ed DQ from Apple, who revealed potential plans to shift Safari search from Apple to AI tools like Open ai, perplexity, Anthropic, and so on. That one sentence sent Alphabets shares down 7%. That's$150 billion in market value that were eliminated because of that. Q'S specific quote was, AI services will eventually replace standard search engines such as Google. Now he's Apple's vice president of services.. He doesn't just say things. I think he was very obvious to him what's gonna be the implications of what he's saying. And the other piece of information is that Safari searches fell for the first time in April of 2025. So again, another data point that shows you where is the direction going, A, from the volume of search to traditional search, and B, from the plans of one of the largest companies in the world when it comes to giving people access to data, meaning Apple in all of its devices. combine that with the US Justice Department lawsuit that is trying to break up Google and potentially disallow Apple to continue using Google as its primary engine, as well as potentially forcing Google to sell Chrome. And you see that things are going to change potentially faster than we initially thought. Now if that's not a big enough blow to your brain to think about. I wanna add a few more points, and I mentioned those in previous episodes, but I wanna touch on them again because I think they're critical and maybe you didn't listen to all the episodes. the first one is, what happens to the financial engine of the internet when, and if this happens. Meaning, the first one is what is going to happen to the internet from a financial perspective when this transition happens? So what I mean by that is, think about it. The internet is the most incredible service, potentially the human kind ever had. That is free. None of us is paying for the internet, mean we are paying the ISP to get internet access at our house. But we're not paying for the internet itself. And the reason for that is because ads are paying for the internet. But if I'm using ChatGPT or Google or Gemini or Grok or Manus or whatever the case may be to access the internet, it's not seeing ads. I don't see the ads. I just see the answers that I was looking for. It's gonna book the tickets for me that I needed. It's gonna order the food that I want and so on. And that means there are no ads. No ads, no money, no money who pays for the internet. And I don't think anybody has answer to that yet. The second question is. Why would people create new content if there is no incentive? Meaning the incentive to create new content that gave us information was I create quality content that's gonna get found by Google, that's gonna send people to my website, that will connect with me, my brand, my company, and will buy our products and services. That model is going to change as well, which means the incentive to create new valuable content may or may not be there, depending how this evolves. So the question becomes who or what is going to create new content in the future? And that's another question I don't think anybody has answer to. A lot of it is gonna be AI created, but even then you're asking, okay, what kind of content will it create for what purposes, based on what information and so on. And the third question, which is maybe the most important question is how do you in your business, in your strategy, are preparing for this future when the facts of how it's going to evolve are unclear? And I think the answer for that is you gotta stay. And I think the answer for that is you gotta start researching how it's gonna impact your industry, your business, your universe, and in parallel, be on top of what is changing in the agent world to slowly try to figure out and try to make the changes faster than your competition. So you can capture market share as this shift happens. It's not a shift that's gonna happen overnight, it's gonna be a process. And this process may take 18 months to five years, but during that timeframe, there's gonna be more and more traffic that is gonna be agent based versus human based. the second topic that we're going to dive into is the impact of AI on higher education. A very long and detailed article in the New York Times has shared findings on research that they've done on the impact of AI in higher education. And what is happening in higher education right now is the younger generation that is in universities right now in that is in colleges and universities in the US right now is using ChatGPT and other AI tools in more and more ways with more and more students claiming that they're generating 70, 80, 90% of their work with ai, with them just adding 10 to 20% of the effort in order to get, to go through, in order to go through their TA in order to complete their, in order to complete the university. In order to complete the task that their professors are giving them. Now, this has many different impacts, both on students and professors. First of all, the students' integrity is at question, but it just depends on what the rules are in each university or in each professor and each room with one of them defines it differently. But it's very, very clear that more and more students are using AI tools in order to do the work for them and not disclosing it as they're doing that. And yes, there are attempts by different universities to have a more holistic approach to this phenomenon, but it's definitely not the norm and it's definitely not a standard with every university and sometimes every professor doing their own thing. Now to tell you how crazy the situation is, one of the examples is a philosophy professor at the University of Arkansas.,Little Rock caught students using AI to write personal introductions for an ethics and technology class. So I will let that sink for a minute. It's a personal introduction. You're telling about yourself to other student in an ethics class, and there were students using AI to write that piece of information. Now, that's funny, but that's also really, really scary. It is scary because what kind of critical thinking capabilities are these students developing? If every task that they need to complete is actually done by ai. Now it's scary year. If you think about that, these are the people that are going to come into the workforce two years from now, because in the past two years, every task that they had, they've done with ai. How are they going to respond when they get into a company in which they cannot use AI for anything? Well, they may not know how to do projects without AI because that's everything they've done for their four years in college and university that was supposed to prepare them for working in the companies. Will they come and work in companies that do not have very open AI policies? What kind of policies you need to have in place as a company once you start receiving these people into the workforce, that their solution for everything is ChatGPT or any other AI tool. Now, professors are really frustrated with the whole situation again because they don't have a good answer to how to address the current situation. In many cases, the universities are asking them to grade work of students that was not done by the students themselves, but was done by ai. It's very obvious to them that that is the situation, and yet they still have to grade it because the university currently does not have a better solution. And yes, there are some AI checkers, but it's almost as accurate as flipping a coin, meaning whether you find that something was done by AI or not, with these checkers, you still don't know for sure. And then what are you going to do? You're gonna throw somebody off their university degree when it's a 50% chance, 70% chance, 90% chance. Where do you draw the line in the sand? If you're saying, I'm gonna mess with somebody's future when I'm not a hundred percent sure that they're actually cheating. The flip side of that is. Is it cheating? Are we really preparing them for the future if we're not allowing them to use ai? So I think this is on one hand, a really scary article that raises a lot of concerns and questions. But on the other hand, it is very obvious that it's the biggest opportunity the education system as a whole ever had. because if you think about how we are teaching students right now, whether in elementary school, middle school, high school, or higher education. It is very, very similar to how we've been teaching for hundreds of years. I live in Florida, not too far from me. There's a beautiful town called St. Augustine. St. Augustine has the first wooden school in the United States. It was built sometime between 1702 and 1716, so that's a very long time ago. Over 300 years. And you know what it has a classroom with desks and chairs and a blackboard and a place for a teacher to stand in front of the students. That looks and feels very much like what we're doing today. So we have an opportunity to deliver personalized, high quality training and education to every kid with the teacher and or professor being more of a mentor that can provide the human side, the mentorship, the handholding, the moral and ethical support for students versus the actual teaching itself, which I believe AI can personalize and do better than what a teacher or a professor can do in front of a class of 30 to 400 students, depending on the size of the class in the specific facility. How do we then balance between critical thinking, AI tools and other tools that will come up in the future? I don't know, but I think it requires and hopefully will force a complete revolution of our education system. And it doesn't end with students. The problem with professors is as profound, meaning professors are stuck in this weird situation when they themselves are using more and more AI because it's helps them create better lessons, faster and cheaper, faster and easier. And on the other hand, they're not allowing their students to use it. But an interesting example came this week from Ella Stapleton, a 2025 nor Northeastern University graduate, who's demanding the university to pay her an$8,000 tuition refund after she discovered that her business professor Rick, Arrow would re arrow would use ChatGPT to generate lectures and lecture notes without disclosing it. So on the student side, there's the same level of frustration, right? Paying all this amount of money in many cases with huge student loans. And now only to find out that my professor, instead of providing me the information that he learned through the years, he's actually using ChatGPT to provide me information that I could have gotten for free. And this obviously doesn't end in the universities because it immediately reflects on internships and entry level jobs. In a recent report by the World Economic Forum, it was found that AI automation is taking over entry level jobs and it reducing traditional internships on opportunities in a very dramatic way. Several different professors from known universities around the world in that research are emphasizing the role of preparing students for careers using internships, but they're claiming that it's becoming harder and harder for them to find internships for students in specific areas. This just amplifies the impact of the education problem itself. Meaning, on one hand, the students are going to do more and more of their work with AI without actually developing some of the skills they need for the job force. On the other hand, they can't even learn that on the job as part of an internship because internships are becoming more and more rare because companies are saying, I don't need an intern. I can actually do this with ai. And that obviously stops the entry for the waterfall effect, that then needs to become more senior employees in multiple companies. I asked that question multiple times. If you don't need junior developers, how do you get senior developers? How do you get team leads? How do you get CTOs after that? And the same question happens in law firms, et cetera, et cetera. These are a lot of questions that I don't think anybody has answers to at this point. Now, the flip side that I do see is I see a big opportunities for companies to be able to shift to AI usage because they will hire people straight out of university that have significant access and experience to using AI tools across multiple aspects of things that they had to do during the university. So while you have a lot of employees who are used to doing things the way they're used to doing it, you may have a breath of fresh air when it comes to hiring people out of university who has been using AI every single day for four years, which is probably not the case for people in your business. So there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I just don't know how long the tunnel is, and I am not sure how long it will take us to all adjust to this new situation because it's shifting very, very fast. And the bigger systems such as the education system, the medical system, the legal system and so on, are very slow to act and it will be a turbulent time through this transition period. Now, on the same topic of AI Impact on the Future economy, a very interesting article on Fast Company addressed actually two aspects of a) what they call the 100 trillion power shift. And they're saying two very powerful things are going to happen in the global economy in the next 20 years. One is the rise of AI that, as I mentioned, they're claiming can drive a hundred trillion dollars relocation in global wealth by 2043. Basically just short of 20 years doubling the global economy, fueled by automation and innovation, what they're arguing, which we've heard time and time again that AI is not just going to take jobs, but it's going to actually help offsetting the shrinking workforces in many countries around the world, especially in aging nations like Japan. So I highly recommend, if you haven't read the book, the End of the World is just the beginning that you go and read that book, or at least listen to it if you're more of an audiobook kind of person. It's a fascinating book that talks in addition to a lot of other things about the shrinking workforce in several different places around the world and the implications it will have on these particular economies. So being able to offset that with AI and then robots is potentially saving these economies and allowing the world economy to continue growing despite less workforce that is available to do traditional jobs and potentially new jobs. Now, the other two aspects that they're mentioning that are very interesting when it comes to global economical trends, one of them is what they're calling the Reverse distribution of wealth that started in the seventies, meaning most of the money is enriching the top 1% versus the people who are actually doing the work and they're claiming that access to AI can help reverse that phenomena because people will be able to do more on their own, not necessarily depending on enterprises to support their livelihood. And connecting that to the transition in education that needs to happen. A recent report states that 23% of the 2024 Harvard Business School grads were still unemployed three months after graduation. That's very rare. Over 4 million members of the Gen Zs in the US not employed and not in school or any kind of training joining this new concept called NEAT NEET, that stands for not in education, employment, or training. These are alarming numbers, and again, it very clearly shows that the need for entry jobs is shrinking. But that being said, the flip side of that is there's a lot of things that AI cannot do yet, and I AI cannot repair a busted water line. It cannot install sonar panels. It cannot build skyscrapers. It cannot fix power lines or build data centers. And this may signal a very interesting shift in our education system where more and more people will go towards these kind of jobs and where the salaries are actually growing dramatically. I mentioned with you last week that there's a shortage of a hundred thousand electricians to build the power plants that will feed the data centers that are being built in the next few years. Salaries of elevator technicians and power plant operators are now crossing the a hundred thousand dollars a year. That was not the case a couple of years ago. Now combine that with the fact that Gen Zs and millennials are less inclined to work in corporate jobs, mostly because what they see in social media that is reshaping their perception when they're seeing people younger than them or their age on YouTube and TikTok that are presumably making millions either flipping houses or selling clothing or doing whatever hassle jobs that they're seeing. Or not. To mention, Kylie Jenner building a billion dollar empire on Instagram. You understand that the drive to do something different, that they can, a nine to five corporate job is definitely there. and to add a completely unrelated to AI aspect to all of that, the Gen Zs and millennials are about to inherit a hundred trillion dollars from baby boomers in the next 10 to 15 years, which is the largest wealth transition in history. That by itself will have implications on how the global economy works. So we are in for an interesting ride in the next few years, and I will try to keep you posted and as educated as much as I can, but you need to think about what's the implication of that to you and the business that you're running on, that you're in. A last deep type topic is Trump's visit to Saudi Arabia, which ended up with a$600 billion investment deal from Saudi to the us. This includes investment in ai, defense, energy, and potential other aspects that is supposed to create 2 million new US jobs based on the White House fact sheet. Now, if you remember Trump's integration, he had all the who's and who's from Silicon Valley and top companies behind him on stage. If you thought that was just a part of the inauguration party, then you are absolutely wrong. All these people went to Saudi together with the president, including Iel Musk and Altman San Wong and other people like that, and they all met with the Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. And this shows you how this administrator works. They're all about growing the US economy and the AI in the eyes of the current administration and myself plays a very big role in that. Now, my only problem with this whole thing, or maybe there's a few other problems, but the biggest problem that I have with this whole thing is that means that Saudi will hold significant components of US AI infrastructure, whether it's power generation, data centers and so on. And I don't know if that's a healthy thing and I don't know what are the long-term risks of that. All I can tell you is that when I compare this to the chip manufacturing situation right now, US made every mistake possible allowing Taiwan to become more or less the world's sole supplier of advanced chips. And if we're now gonna have another foreign nation hold components of our entire supply chain for ai, I'm not sure it's a great investment in the long run, but time will tell. And now let's shift to the rapid fire topics. We're gonna start with a lot of open AI news like almost every week. They seem to be on fire in the past few months. So open AI are still in conversations with Microsoft to approve their new restructuring, process. As we mentioned last week, they gave up on converting from a non-profit to a for-profit. And what they're actually doing is they're converting their for-profit component that used to be an LLC to a public benefit corporation. I'm not a hundred percent sure, and it's definitely not my field of expertise to say what that means, but it means that it is a for-profit entity that can have shares for different companies, meaning investors can have shares in that entity, but that also has to balance with its mission to advance AI for humanity. And the nonprofit board this. PBC is still going to control the for-profit arm. Microsoft hasn't approved that yet. They are in conversation on exactly how that's gonna look like and how many shares in this new entity Microsoft is going to have It has been leaked that in these conversations, Microsoft is actually potentially looking for less equity, but in return they want to get access to open AI tech beyond 2030, which is the current agreement. This tells you that Microsoft is a huge believer in open AI's ability to achieve its goals and still be the leading, or one of the leading companies in this field in the next five years, because otherwise they obviously wouldn't want that. They would want more equity in the company. That's despite the huge investment that Microsoft is making with developing their own AI capabilities. Now there are more and more rumors and signals that this is just a step on the way for open ai for an IPO, which makes a lot of sense to me. This would be the logical thing for many different reasons. A, it will allow them to raise significantly more money than the stupid amount of money they raised so far, but also will allow the public to be a part of that and get access to more reporting on what's actually happening in OpenAI as it's happening. The other huge investor in OpenAI being SoftBank, that is now actually a bigger investor than Microsoft is because they're committed to invest$30 billion versus the only 13.75 billion invested by Microsoft. So SoftBank, CFO. Approved that they are giving the thumbs up to this new restructuring of OpenAI and that they're going to maintain their$30 billion investment. So initially there were questions about that because the$30 billion investment were dependent on their converting from a non-profit to a for-profit by the end of this year. Otherwise, that number would've been cut by$10 billion to only$20 billion investment. But now they've confirmed that the full investment is secure based on the equity they're going to get in this new entity. Now, to show you another angle, if you needed that on, how strong is open AI's position across everything. BBVA one of the largest banks in the world is increasing its open AI agreement from 3000 licenses to 11,000. ChatGPT Enterprise licenses equipping 10% of their employees with these AI tools now the bank's initial trials with 3000 licenses saw that chat. PT saves employees nearly three hours a week every week to every employee on average, which obviously drives a lot of productivity across Tesla coding, customer service, data analysis, and more. Something that they are doing in BBVA that I've seen other companies do, which is incredible, is they've launched their own chat, GPT store with over a hundred tailored applications that employees have access to, that were developed by other employees and their development team. This means that they're now a hundred AI tailored apps and solutions specifically for different aspects in the bank that employees have access to. Now, I wanna expand on touch of that point for a minute, and I know we're not in the deep dive section, but it's very important for you guys to understand because it's a huge opportunity. The first one is licenses different than Microsoft copilot, where if you want your employees to have copilot, every employee needs a co-pilot license because if that's the way the licensing works, you have a Microsoft license and you want to add co-pilot on top of that, and nobody can share that license with open ai, you can have multiple employees using a single license. I don't know if you ever thought about it, but you can have your entire marketing team using one CHA PT license, or two or three depending on how large is the team. But you don't necessarily need a license per person. The same thing in other aspects of the business. This only means that multiple people are sharing the same conversations, but as long as there's no problem with information sharing, that way you can save yourself a lot of money, still enjoying the benefits. Now, will OpenAI close that loop? Maybe at a certain point, but right now it's definitely a possibility and many companies that I know and many of my clients are doing that right now. The other thing is teaching your employees how to develop custom GPT and other AI solutions is the most effective way to apply AI quickly, efficiently, effectively across multiple aspects of the business. I have weekly meetings with several of my clients and in every meeting a department comes up with a question, idea, solution, or direction that they want to take with AI in their little world. And together we build what they need in order to apply it in their universe. In every one of these sessions, it's actually a training session, meaning I'm not just building it from them, we're building it together so they know how to continue build it themselves. And what happens is every single week we develop an AI solution in many cases, as simple as a custom GPT that can save hours to a specific department every single week. With every single meeting that is either one hour or two hours, the companies are getting savings of several hours per week in that one department. This is a very dramatic shift in efficiency across every aspect of the business. And again, I'm doing this with multiple businesses across all the departments. So if you want to enjoy the same kind of thing you need to train employees in your business on how to build things that are as simple as custom gpt or more advanced capabilities, and start enjoying these benefits. If you wanna learn how you can do it in your business, how can you train your people? Just reach out to me on LinkedIn or send me an email@esratmultiply.ai and I will gladly share with you the training programs that we have. But it doesn't have to be me. It can be any other source that can give you this kind of training in an effective way. It is definitely worth the investment. Another big piece of news from OpenAI. They just released GPT-4 0.1 to chat GPT. So GPT-4 0.1 was released a few weeks ago, but only for the API. The goal of 4.1 was mostly to be more competitive in the vibe coding universe. And so the API came first, but now GPT-4 0.1 is available in ChatGPT in the dropdown menu under the more models section. So all the way on the bottom. You need to remember again that while this is a great model for coding, it is geared for coding, and it also apparently is very good at following sophisticated instructions. So if you have a complex process, that might be the right model for you, but just the fact that they're quote unquote, hiding it under the more models is telling you it's probably not as good as GPT-4 oh or oh three in day-to-day tasks that most of us are using chat GPT-4. Another really interesting and powerful capability from ChatGPT is the ability to now connect ChatGPT Deep research to OneDrive and SharePoint. Basically allowing you to query all the data that is in a SharePoint site or a SharePoint drive, which is something that was very desperately needed by many different companies. The only solution that provided that before without going crazy with dedicated enterprise installations was Perplexity Enterprise that could do the same thing, and now that is available in deep research in pt. If you click on deep research, there's a little plus button you can click on that, and then you can select to connect it to these tools and then query those as well. This is now available to any paid customer, so plus pro teams and enterprise users. It provides a benefit beyond Microsoft copilot that is supposed to provide the same kind of capability, but it's limited with the amount of files that you can actually connect and query. There is no clear definition in the ChatGPT universe on what's the limitation on how many files or what the size of the files that can be in those folders. I'm sure that we're gonna learn that in the next few weeks as people start using it, but this is an extremely powerful capability that is now available in your regular CHA GPT license, but that's not all CHA GPT Deep Research can now export PDF files. That can also include tables, images, graphs, and so on in A PDF format, straight out of deep research. So you can now run deep research on external and internal information and create a PDF report that you can then share with whoever you need to share it with. Now, they're also building more and more integrations for deep research and Chachi in general to tools like Dropbox, linear SharePoint, Datadog, Zendesk, box Resend Teams, SendGrid, gold Cast, HubSpot Intercom, and many other tools. And they're building support for cps, meaning you'll be able to connect any MCP server out there to ChatGPT and use that connection to get information back and forth, which will make ChatGPT extremely more powerful than it is today. For business context And now from open AI to their big frenemy, Microsoft. Microsoft just announced slashing 6,000 jobs in the next step of its restructuring. That's about 3% of its global workforce and it's coming across multiple aspects of Microsoft workforce. It is their largest cut since the end of 2023 where they cut 10,000 jobs. And the quote from the statement from Microsoft themselves was, we continue to implement organizational changes necessary to best position the company for success in a dynamic marketplace. Now you combine that with the fact that Microsoft pledged to invest 80 billion in AI infrastructure in 2025, and with its pressure to additional profitability and you understand the need to cut jobs. You combine that with the fact that Satya Nadella said that 30% of their code is now generated by ai. And you understand that the amazing returns that they're getting right now mostly on Azure Cloud and AI infrastructure, is not necessarily fueling more jobs, but actually allowing them to potentially cut jobs while maintaining this growth. The biggest portion of people in that group are software engineers and middle managers and. Out of those 6,000, almost 2000 are Redmond alone. So if you think about a concentration of a lot of people in the same field losing their jobs, it's not gonna be easy to find jobs, especially when the same trend of AI replacing these jobs it's happening in other companies as well. Now they're not the only ones. So meta cut 5% of their global workforce, Salesforce, a thousand layoffs in 2025. And a lot of other tech companies, whether you see it in the news or not, are becoming more lean, letting people go and replacing them with AI capabilities. The combination of that with a shaky global economy, with tariff wars and so on is a perfect storm, hitting the global and definitely western job markets. Staying on Microsoft, they just added a hey copilot voice feature to activate copilot on PC computers. So if you have that capability turned on, you can now say, Hey, copilot, and just speak with your own voice to copilot and ask it to perform different tasks for you on the computer. We mentioned that many times before, voice is going to most likely replace keyboards as the main interface between us and computers. I switched almost completely to voice typing on my computer. a lot of it is because I started using the advanced voice mode in chat pt, and this just led me to understand that I can actually type that way as well. And now I use the voice type feature on the Mac for many of the things that I'm doing, whether I'm writing documents, exchanging emails, or writing long prompts in different AI tools, voice typing is allowing me to do this significantly faster. There are third party tools out there as well that do an even better job than the internal tool on the Mac. The reason I don't use them is I don't know exactly where the data goes as I don't know exactly where the data goes, and then they track everything that I'm doing. And so for now, despite the fact it's not the best tool out there, it's a good enough tool for me to use, and I use the Internal Mac tool, by the way, to complete the knowledge about this new functionality from Microsoft. The. Wake up word happens locally, but to analyze the information, it actually requires internet access. So you can only use the hey copilot feature if you have internet connection. Another big announcement from Microsoft is they announced that they're going to support A to a, which is agent to agent protocol that was open sourced by Google just a few weeks back, and it's going to become available on Azure AI Foundry and copilot Studio in the next few weeks. There are now two large scale protocols that have been accepted by many companies around the world. MCP is one, which was open source by Anthropic and MCP allows agents to connect to data sources and tools in a standard way, which is taking the world by store with, I don't even know how many, but probably millions of MCP servers available right now from multiple different tools and connectors. And on the other hand, A to a, which is agent to agent, which is a protocol that allows agents to talk to other agents in a standard way, regardless of the platform or the tools you use to develop them. The combination of these two things. Is creating a global infrastructure in which agents can collaborate with themselves and connect to different tools in a much more efficient way. That was available just a few months ago, and that is going to dramatically change everything we know about agents and how they're going to work. KPMG and other companies based on the research, are expecting the agent market to reach$7.8 billion this year and$52 billion by 2030. I actually think that's low bowling, where it's gonna be in 2030, because I think agents are gonna take over, more or less everything that we do. Meaning 52 billion is a drop in the ocean compared to what it's actually going to do. And from Microsoft to Google, Google DeepMind made a very interesting announcement this week where Alpha Evolve, which is a new model that they've developed, can now autonomously design and optimize complex algorithms, surpassing human solutions in math and computing algorithm creation. This tool is using Gemini Flash for rapid idea generation of what these algorithms can do, and then Gemini Pro to actually do deep analysis and research and come up with these new algorithms. Google is already seeing huge success with using Alpha Evolve to create new capabilities across multiple aspects of what they're doing. Including metrics, manipulation that is outperforming deep minds, alpha tensor chips, the way they're built right now. So, this is another step in the direction of AI agents creating better AI agents if they can, on their own, spin up better algorithms. That's a very big step towards the singularity in which the acceleration is just not going to be stoppable because they'll be able to continuously create better and better AI capabilities on their own without the need for human input. I. Staying on new tools and capabilities. Hugging face just released Open Computer Agent, which is a free cloud-hosted AI tool that autonomously performs computer tasks similar to open AI operator only with one big difference. It is free and it's open source. It is powered by Quinn vl, which is a Chinese model with great visual capabilities, and it knows based on that model to map everything on your screen and so it knows where to click with a virtual conceptual mouse and keyboard and actually can take over and do every task that you can imagine. I think the fact that it's open source is gonna be very appealing to companies to come and integrate into their tools and so. This is just another step in the acceleration of AI agents that can take over tools that we're using today, not even building new stuff that can eliminate the stuff that we're doing today. They can just use the tools we're using today in a much more efficient way and without the need for us to be there and actually do the work. Now it is currently working a little slow because a lot of people want to use it, and the popularity is going through the roof right now. I'm sure they will figure it out in giving it the right compute or the right cost or the right cost and compute in order to run this more smoothly. But even as it is right now, you just have to wait a few more minutes for it to do the task instead of you doing it. And so I think it's still worth the wait. Staying on models and new releases. Windsurf, which as we mentioned in the past few weeks, might be acquired by OpenAI for$3 billion, just released their own in-house family of models that they call SWE dash one. These are frontier level AI models designed specifically for software engineering. They're claiming it matches the performance of top models from Claude and GPT, such as Claude Sauna 3.5 and GPT-4 0.1. And that it's surpassing them in complex software engineering tasks, even beyond just code generation. There are three different models. SWE Premium for Advanced Tasks, SWE one Light, which is free and replacing what was called previously Cascade Base and SWE one Mini, which is also free and is supposed to be quick for coding predictions. So three different models for three slightly different types of tasks. All developed by Windsurf and deployed by them as well. How will that be integrated with the new developments from Open AI and G PT 4.1 and the fact that they might merge into one company is unclear yet, but I will keep you posted as it evolves. Speaking of mergers and acquisitions and investments in the AI world, Databricks, just acquired Database Startup Neon for$1 billion. Neon actually has a really cool solution that allows AI agents to spin up databases for the use of other AI agents in less than 500 milliseconds. It basically allows the creation of databases on the fly as needed by AI agents to perform different tasks. Their recent telemetry data is showing that over 80% of the databases that exist on the near platform was created by other AI agents and not humans showing you the flexibility that this platform provides, which makes it a very logical acquisition for Databricks that is focusing almost solely on AI future of businesses and how data needs to be structured and how to deploy it effectively, and it's just gonna strengthen Databricks position in this universe. Now another point on Databricks, they just hired Stefan Orban, who is the former Google Cloud and AWS executive who has led big initiatives in both these companies. He was Google's cloud VP for Migrations and Marketplace, and AWS VP and general manager of AWS marketplace. So he brings decades of cloud computing expertise to Databricks, showing you how much this company is going all in on AI infrastructure and growing their market and customer base, staying on funding routes that is actually more related to Windsurf. Any sphere, which is the company behind the AI powered coding tool. Cursor, secured a 900 million founding ground led by Thrive Capital, Anderson, Horowitz, Xcel, and a few other big names, valuing the company at$9 billion. Now, to tell you how crazy this is in December of 2024, so six months ago, the company raised a hundred million at a$2.6 billion valuation, so their valuation almost quadrupled in just six months. The combination of that plus the potential acquisition of Windsurf shows you how burning hot the AI coating war is right now. And I don't think it's gonna stop anytime soon. And if you connect it back to all the news we talked about in the beginning as far as people getting jobs, people losing jobs, Microsoft laying off people meta and so on, it's telling you this is not stopping. If anything, it's just accelerating, but it's not unicorns and butterflies for every AI company out there, cohere, which is a smaller competitor in the field, which we don't talk about a lot, has missed their projections for 2024 by 80%. He projected$450 million annualized revenue for 2024, and it's just on the pace to hit 70 million for that pace in February of 2025. ISTs are claiming that their biggest problem is obviously the elephant in the room, OpenAI releasing more and more capabilities that they just cannot compete with, especially at the price point that OpenAI is releasing them. And Cohere has made a strategic change in the middle of 2024 to focus specifically on developing enterprise level applications versus better underlying models that help them to still grow dramatically between 2024 to 2025, but not even close to hitting the numbers it was supposed to hit that obviously has a very significant snowball effect where investors will probably be less likely to invest in them for the next round. And in parallel, companies and enterprises may not be willing to bet on them because of that same exact reason. If they run out of money, then everything you're building on the enterprise may go down the drain together with them. So sadly, I don't see a very bright future for cohere. Maybe one of the big players will buy them for their existing enterprise access and that will save them and the stuff that they develop so far. But other than that, it's gonna be very hard to compete with OpenAI, Google, and the really big players, just because they have really deep pockets right now, access to capital, knowledge, distribution, compute, and everything else that is required in order to really be competitive in this field. Another company that announced an interesting tool that will help many businesses in AI based data analysis is S-A-P-S-A-P. SAP, just announced what they're calling Business Data Cloud or S-A-P-B-D-C, which is a mouthful, but the goal is obviously to leverage all the different data points that are available in SAP for businesses, which is a lot of data points from many different sources, and create one single data fabric that enables decision makers to find relevant information and get insights from that data. SAP is claiming that S-A-P-B-D-C reduces data to decision latency by up to 80% compared to the way it was done traditionally so far. Now, in addition to the infrastructure itself, they are developing more and more power intelligent apps for planning ai, advanced analytics and so on, that will allow businesses to benefit from this new unified fabric of data. Now this is a necessity right now because a Salesforce survey reveals a staggering 18% drop in business leaders' confidence in data-driven decisions compared to just 2023. with less than half feeling secure of their data reliability. Think about what I just said. more than half top executives do not feel that they use to make significant strategic decisions is reliable. So this new world of agentic analytics, that is just the next evolution of business intelligence, is going to potentially help a lot with that. I think will require significant investments in data cleaning and application building and testing and so on. But I think it will lead to a world in which any person who needs to make a decision can get a huge amount of information summarized at whatever level and format they need. And it's gonna be at the fingertips of every single employee that has access to these tools. And that's gonna be a very dramatic change to what most companies and most senior executives are experiencing right now. Which I believe is a very good thing. To be fair, you can start doing this in your business today. I'm right now with some of my clients are building tools that knows how to integrate data from several different sources and provide either a written report or a spreadsheet or charts and graphs and dashboards that do not exist in the systems the company is using right now. Especially when you're trying to cross data from, let's say marketing and sales, or sales and customer service and so on. And now all you need to do is to take CSV exports from these files, drop them into one place, and get a detailed analysis in a format that you want that can be created in. So within a few hours today, you can have something like this in your company that can give you significantly better information with significantly less work than the way you're doing it right now. Another big story this week was the backlash in several different places in the US against data centers and their impact on rural areas. One story was about X's new supercomputer center in Memphis that consumes over 150 megawatts of electricity annually. That doesn't mean to most of us anything, but it means the same amount of power that can power a hundred thousand homes that obviously will strain the local. The local infrastructure and potentially can cause significant environmental harm as well. Now, while the mayor of Memphis is focusing on the potential of creating high paying jobs and boost the economy in the area, it's still not addressing the issue of raising costs of water and power supply.'cause it uses a lot of water for cooling as well as I mentioned. What's the environmental impact of these centers? Similar concern are sounding across multiple other places in the US Including Warren County in Virginia. They had conversations with Dominion Energy representative. That estimate that the data center power needs in Virginia has skyrocketed from 21 gigawatts in July of 2023 to 40 by December of this year. So this is more than two X. They're also claiming that many of these data centers are using diesel generators as backup whenever they have power surges. And these pollute and make a lot of noise for nearby neighborhoods. And the other concern is that many of these data centers got significantly tax benefits in order to be built in those areas, which takes away many of the potential revenue that was supposed to come in, which is part of the promise of building data centers in these rural areas. One of the city council representative Eric Gagnon revealed that a second Chick-fil-A would bring in more tax revenue and jobs than Amazon data center that only employs 25 contract workers at this point. So, where is this heading? I spoke before about potential general pushback against AI from people. I always assumed it's gonna be around job losses, but apparently the data center in rural areas might get a bigger pushback than what I was thinking. That being said, there is way too much money involved that I think the rejection by people against it will actually slow it down. but I hope it will, or I hope at least it will push us to do this in a more environmentally friendly way. And now just something strange and interesting that happened in a courtroom this past week. In a road rage murder incident, the sister of the victim and her husband, both with tech backgrounds, created an AI video of the victim that, again, to be clear, is dead. That is sharing his thoughts on the incident, and they showed it in court. As part of a testimony. They were trying to capture the victim's words and how he would feel in the current situation, he even forgave the murderer in the case. The judge was highly impressed and touched by the video and increased the sentence of Gabrielle ti Jita who was convicted for a manslaughter of Christopher Poey and obviously the defense in this particular case have immediately filed for a, an appeal, basically saying that the judge shouldn't be impacted by this video because we don't actually know what this person would've said. These are just concepts that are introduced in a very sophisticated way using AI as if the person has actually said them. Now, well, there's obviously two sides to that story and I'm not sure which one makes more sense to me at this point. It definitely shows where the future that we're going to, it is going to be very hard to know what is real and what is not. Whether the person in this particular case, it's very easy to know because the person is dead, but the same exact thing could be done for live people presenting specific points of views and things that they presumably said without being able to distinguish whether it was the actual person or not. I see that as a very serious issue in this new AI era we live in, and I think the biggest issue is that most people don't know that's possible. That's it for this news episode. We will be back on Tuesday showing you a detailed comparison between cha, mid Journey and Gemini image generators for business ad and promotional product creation. It's a fascinating episode, including showing all the different prompts and everything that you need to know in order to create amazing visuals for your business and showing you which tools you want to use for different use cases. Don't forget to share this podcast. If you like it, just open your app right now. Click on the share button and share it with several people that can benefit from it as well. And while you're at it, I would appreciate if you do two things. One is fill up the survey. There's a link to a survey of what you think about this podcast, what you like, what you don't like, and will allow us to improve the podcast to better fit your needs. And also you can rank us and give us a review on your favorite podcasting platform. I would really appreciate that. You can also sign up to our newsletter and join our Friday Hangouts and be a part of our Lively AI community. And you can do all of those with links in the show notes. That's it for today. Have an amazing rest of your weekend.