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Products6 min read

ChatGPT's $60 ad CPM eroded to $25 in ten weeks. OpenAI just made it self-serve.

OpenAI opened ChatGPT advertising to any US business on May 5, removed the $200K minimum spend, and added CPC bidding at $3–5 per click. The CPM that launched at $60 had already fallen to around $25 by then. That price signal tells you more than the $100B revenue target does.

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Products6 min read

Google gave Gemini Spark a Gmail address and 24/7 cloud power. Beta starts May 25.

Gemini Spark runs 24/7 on Google Cloud virtual machines, accepts tasks via a dedicated Gmail address, and has day-one MCP support for third-party integrations. It's the most concrete always-on agent any major lab has shipped. Beta starts May 25 for US AI Ultra subscribers at $100/month.

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Industry9 min read

The 10x engineer is back. And the gap is wider than it's ever been.

The 'all engineers will be 10x with AI' framing got the direction right and the magnitude completely wrong. AI tools amplify what you already are. Strong engineers compound. Weak engineers fall further behind. Here's the data and the moves.

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Industry7 min read

Is AI taking your job? The honest answer is more specific than the headlines.

AI accounted for 26% of April's job cuts in the US. 77,999 tech job losses were AI-linked over the prior six months. The numbers are real. The 'AI is taking all the jobs' framing is wrong. Here's what's actually happening, and what to do about it if you'd rather be augmented than replaced.

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Industry9 min read

Reasoning models got commoditized in 90 days. The buyer's market just got brutal.

Reasoning models — the ones that 'think' before they answer — went from rare premium offering to commodity feature in a single quarter. Price-per-million dropped 6x. Quality differences on common tasks shrank to under 4 points on most benchmarks. The interesting decision is no longer which model is best — it's which one fits your shape.

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Debates4 min read

Meta shipped a closed-weight model. Llama, we hardly knew ye.

Meta released its first proprietary closed-weight model on April 8. Three years of 'open is the future' branding ended in one launch post. The interesting question isn't whether Meta abandoned open source. It's what the math behind that decision tells the rest of us.

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