Pete Marcus

How Quickly Will A.I. Agents Rip Through the Economy? A.I. agents are here. Have they changed your life yet? The release of agents like Claude Code marked a new pivot point in the history of A.I. We are leaving the chatbot era and entering the agentic…

The conversation between Ezra Klein and Jack Clark of Anthropic is really good

pca.st/episode/130b...

Bonkers chart from a16z: Computer & software demand clocked steady c20% contribution to US GDP growth from 2010, "until it absolutely exploded upwards in 2025. That’s a Dotcom crash amount of discontinuity, but *in the positive direction*."

Stripe’s 2025 annual letter A recap of the global internet economy in 2025, through Stripe’s data and perspective.

Happy Stripe annual letter day to all who celebrate stripe.com/gb/annual-up...

Yes it's really surprising coming from Amazon. Either a sign of a brand whose principles are eroding; or leaders utterly obsessed with AI adoption without considering impact; or both...

Writing Crystalized Thinking At Amazon. Is AI Muddying It? Amazon’s famously writing-centric culture is being aided by generative AI. What does that say about the company’s culture, priorities, and future?

This piece is fascinating. Amazon is encouraging the use of AI to draft its famous "six-pagers" - which undermines the whole purpose of writing the document in the first place. Writing is thinking; pressing an AI button is not. www.bigtechnology.com/p/writing-cr...

Best Buy, Expedia, Enterprise Mobility Are Among the First Brands Spotted Running Ads on ChatGPT Analysis of over 500 prompts on ChatGPT found that Open AI is starting with a conservative approach to ads on its platform

"Expedia, Qualcomm and Best Buy have begun appearing inside ChatGPT responses, a spokesperson for OpenAI told ADWEEK" www.adweek.com/media/first-...

Crazy

"Journalism is better when it's backed by live markets"... 🤔

Mandelson-founded advisory firm Global Counsel to go into administration Collapse follows revelations about former peer’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein

Wow, GC is winding up. The toxic curse of Mandelson and Epstein. www.ft.com/content/ad5d...

A valuable note of caution from @thebenedictevans.bsky.social on the current AI hype and SaaSacre 👇

Spotted around Shepherd’s Bush recently. Not sure what it means but I kinda like it.

@petemarcus.bsky.social just pointed me to this article which is a very thorough takedown arriving at the same conclusion: www.exponentialview.co/p/how-95-esc...

The "95% fail" number is essentially meaningless

People often jump to saying online propaganda is either the work of radicalised actors, or else Russia.

In practice, it’s amazing how often the answer is much simpler – someone is chasing either (a) clout, (b) money, or (c) both.

X: Britain isn’t as good as it used to be.
Bluesky: America isn’t as good as it used to be.
Insta: Football isn’t as good as it used to be.
Threads: Music isn’t as good as it used to be.

No one everyone’s so depressed, pessimistic and angry.

This morning is my first someone’s-doing-a-Teams-call-on-the-Central-Line experience

Just learned that the guy who founded Capital One is called Rich Fairbank. Talk about nominative determinism!

I get so much value out of my @londoncentric.media subscription, but the most value is the guilt-free ability to say “no thank you” to the fake charities at stations.

It used to be said that the left was far too 'online', but it seems that this is increasingly (more) so for the right nowadays.

TikTok coverage seems to have become somewhat numb to this, but worth remembering that the President simply refusing to enforce a *crystal-clear* law of Congress for over a year to instead broker a deal on his own terms, & Congress just shrugging, is very much not how this was supposed to work

Just contemplating a news article sentence that begins: "As part of his long-running plan to seize Greenland, Donald Trump says..."

Stat in @economist.com: 71% of US podcasts now have video. Interesting suggestion that video aids social sharing and discovery too. (Audio is notoriously difficult to share and seems not to be inherently viral like text/video.)

So does every generation of writers eventually feel like their job is just reminding people of things everyone used to just know

Interesting to see the logic set out in Ben H's post on a16z's new fund. The chain goes: policy --> tech --> geopolitics --> freedom. They increasingly understand the first two links as connected, and essential for underpinning the second two. You can argue against it, but that's the logic.

Standing Out The new narrative alpha

"In 2024, the biggest opportunity for comms was going direct... In 2025, the edge came from winning attention... In 2026, narrative alpha will come from doing real things."

www.getflack.com/p/standing-out

The whistleblower, for his part, worked to amp up the pressure. He told me he had shared the document with other reporters, putting me into a competitive crunch. He asked when I thought I would publish. I asked him if he could point me to any current or former coworkers of his who could help me understand the document better. “Not really,” he said. By this point, alarm bells were starting to ring. I wondered if the employee badge the whistleblower had shared with me might have been AI-generated. While AI systems are notoriously unreliable at identifying their own outputs, Google Gemini can detect SynthID watermarks embedded in images that it produces. I uploaded the badge to Gemini and asked if Gemini had made it. “Most or all of this image was edited or generated with Google AI,” it said.

The author of a viral Reddit thread alleging fraud at a food delivery company tried to back up his claim by sending me AI-generated documents. Today I'm publishing those documents in the hopes that it helps other reporter see what we're up against in the age of AI www.platformer.news/fake-uber-ea...

Totally!

Accenture to Acquire Faculty to Scale AI Capabilities Accenture has agreed to acquire Faculty, a leading UK-based AI native services and products business built on highly technical applied AI skills and a unique decision intelligence product that feature...

Bit of a marmalade dropper in the UK tech world newsroom.accenture.com/news/2026/ac...

This person went on a buying spree over the past 24 hours. Fresh wallet. Only existed since Dec 27th and has only bet on Venezuela-related markets.

polymarket.com/@0x31a56e9E6...

A US president uses his for-profit (but money losing) social media site to announce a military strike against a foreign sovereign nation and the seizure by military force of a foreign government leader. Says a lot about where things are at in the US in 2026.

Coining a new term to explain modern media: operafication. Like opera, the major cultural forms of the postwar era (the novel, movies, rock and roll) are in decline. New stuff is still being created, but the canon is set and most activity is about replaying key works.