🚨 Elon Musk offers ~$100 billion to buy OpenAI!
Sam Altman politely declines: "no, thank you"
"but we’ll buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want."
Two kids taunting each other on a playground. 😂
Elon lowballs OpenAI at less than half its estimated $260B valuation.
Sam reminds him of his $44 billion overpriced Twitter acquisition, now worth less than 1/10.
Elon was right all along…
We do live in a simulation!
NVIDIA’s stock crash last week was a glimpse of the next Black Swan.
But what is a Black Swan? 👇
In business, a Black Swan is a sudden unpredictable event with the power to disrupt an entire market, or even the global economy.
Think of the 2008 financial crisis, COVID or 9/11.
People and markets try to predict and rationalise these events, but most Black Swans are just impossible to foresee. At least in the way they unfold.
Only time will tell if last week’s drop was just a momentary panic or the first sign of something much bigger.
In his later book, Nassim Taleb argues that people and companies can prepare for Black Swan events by developing Antifragility.
Fragile things break under stress (like glass).
Resilient things survive stress but don’t improve (like steel).
Antifragile things thrive under stress (like muscles that grow through exercise).
The ability to iterate fast, change course and prepare plans B, C, D characterise Antifragile people and companies.
💡Antifragility is the #1 skill for the next decade!
Agreed?
Just by looking at demos of OpenAI Deep Search and Operator, I can totally see how AI Agents could kill Big 4 and MBBs.
Unless...
Big 4 and MBB will embrace AI agents to their advantage. Which they'll definitely do.
But, they'll still get loads of competition from individual AI experts that will deliver as good jobs for 1/10 of the fees.
For the first time in history, single-person companies might represent a serious threat to large businesses.
Future is bright for individual creative entrepreneurs!
ChatGPT just killed Duolingo 🤯
Instead of using language learning apps, here's what I do:
I asked ChatGPT to send me 5 new German words every morning at 8am. It repeats 3 out of the 5 words from the day before, so they stick more.
The complexity of the words will increase every two weeks.
Plus, it sends me 5 sentences to see how the words are used and even gives me a little exercise!
What will GPT kill next?
Ai use case of the day:
Connect a custom GPT to your blog.
How I did it without writing a single line of code👇
1. Ask ChatGPT-o1 for a detailed guide on how to connect to your blog’s API. (Webflow in my case).
2. At some point in the guide, it will generate a Python script for you.
3. Copy and paste this script into Google Colab, a simple tool to run Python code directly in your browser.
4. Run the script to retrieve your blog content and ensure the data looks good.
5. Paste the script back into ChatGPT-o1 and ask it to create an OpenAI schema for custom actions. GPT will understand what you mean.
6. Create a custom GPT.
7. Add a new “action” in your GPT settings.
8. Enter your API authentication keys (the guide will explain how to get them).
9. Paste the OpenAI schema.
10. Test & publish your GPT!
Now, your custom GPT is always synced with your blog. No more manual uploads every time you publish a new post.
But why would you need this?
✅ Ask your GPT to write new articles in your exact style.
✅ Get content analysis & recommendations. Even a roast!
✅ Have your GPT suggest the best next topic to write about.
If you’re serious about custom GPTs, this will 10x your quality & speed.
Look at me, I’m now better than 95% of bloggers out there, or so AI tells me. 😂
Drop below your favourite AI marketing use case!
It seems I'm a "very obscure person". Thanks Claude! 😐
Here is what I'm doing to optimise my personal brand in the age of Ai 👇
I try new chatbots and always ask the same question:
Who is Giacomo Iotti?
-> Claude has no clue.
I appear to be "a very obscure person".
-> DeepSeek admits I’m not widely known.
Fair enough. But it claims to be updated to October 2023? I expected better!
When I tried again with search enabled… it was “busy.” 😒
-> Grok gets closer, but mixes my profile with another Giacomo Iotti.
Turns out, I’m a “multifaceted” individual. True, but I’ve never been a TV director, yet!
-> ChatGPT finally recognises me!
It gives a solid summary and cites my personal website.
Interesting how it picks different articles each time. I’d love to know the logic behind that.
-> Perplexity is by far the best.
Pulls a detailed professional background with sources like my website, LinkedIn, corporate pages, and more.
Some takeaways:
1. Claude, please add a search function!
2. SEO in the Ai era is different.
Forget ranking, traffic and clicks, now it's all about Ai reputation.
Jes Scholz I think you would agree on this one :)
3. Your Ai reputation evolves.
Over the past year, I’ve seen Ai responses shift as I updated my website, LinkedIn, and articles. Makes me wonder: how does Ai chooses what content to show each time?
4. The importance of a personal brand.
It doesn't matter I have just few followers or little traffic to my website.
What matters is that Ai knows me!
And I’m proud of that, it means I’m on the right path.
Next step?
Adding "Who is Giacomo Iotti?" as a FAQ to my About Page.
Have you asked AI about your name yet?
Elon Musk wants to conquer the world.
Here’s how.
To conquer the world you need:
Am I forgetting something?
(Edit November 14th, 2024.)
Yes, I am.
He's just been appointed by Donald Trump as the Head of the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), whatever it is.
It doesn't matter what DOGE is or will be. What matters is that if the above list wasn't enough, the richest man in the world will occupy a formal position in the government of the richest and most powerful country on earth. Reason to be worried? Yes, I think so :(
Google is a monopolist.
What will the others do about it? Apple, Microsoft & co
The American DOJ will likely first target Google's practice of paying third parties to be the default search engine on their devices. If that happens, Google will save $20b and Apple will lose $20b, and then what?
Will Apple choose Microsoft Bing as the default? Unlikely.
Eddie Cue, from Apple stated:
“I don’t believe there’s a price in the world that Microsoft could offer us” [to make us switch].
In the end, Apple wants the best for their users and no other search engine does a better job than Google. In any case, $20b exceeds Microsoft's annual revenue from Bing, so even if Apple were open to negotiations, it would be mad for Microsoft to pay that amount.
Will other startups build a Google competitor? Also unlikely.
Indexing and analysing the entire web is an expensive business.
Apple estimated that creating a Google clone would cost them at least $6 billion a year. Even the most well-funded VC startup couldn't afford such an investment.
Another factor is that Google is obviously the default search engine on Chrome, which holds over 64% of the global browser market share.
This raises the question: why would Google even need to pay to be the default search engine on other browsers or devices?
The answer is in this screenshot.
On iPhones, users can perform searches outside of a browser, and currently, the first results are reserved for Google (via the default browser, Mozilla in my case). However, just below those results, there are direct links to publishers' websites.
I know what you’re thinking 😁 but no, they’re not ads! yet…
In essence, Google wants to prevent Apple or Samsung from experimenting with similar solutions, as these could potentially bypass it altogether.
My best bet is that if Apple stops receiving payments from Google, they would soon push direct links more prominently. And they could make money from them too.
However, ads isn't Apple's core business. Apple Search Ads is still an underdeveloped product, and their sales organisation is small. This could open a new market for other companies to manage ads for Apple or Samsung. In fact, this is already partially happening, with startups offering "expansion" features for Apple Search Ads. But, Apple would still be the “gatekeeper”.
To make things more complicated, Ai chatbots are entering the search game too.
It seems ChatGPT will be integrated natively into iPhones. So, will Apple need to offer a choice screen also here? Will Google, with Gemini on Android?
No matter how you approach the issue, a new monopolist will emerge.
By the way, Apple was also recently sued for monopolising the smartphone market.
It seems we're just shifting from one monopolist to another.
Sunday thoughts: are you asking the right questions?
We often focus on working hard to find the right answers, but sometimes the questions are more important.
Ai is teaching us this.
Technology is now able to find all the right answers for us. So, asking the right questions has become key to solving complex problems. Think of ChatGPT. Its answers are just as good as your prompts.
Harvard Business Review suggests we ask five types of questions to improve our problem-solving and leadership skills.
And you, are you taking the time to ask questions and listen, or you rush to find answers?
Google is officially a monopoly.
The US Department of Justice came to this conclusion last week ending a landmark antitrust case. Google’s obscenely high market share and the $20bn it pays Apple annually to be the default search engine on Safari were the key elements of the trial. Now the problem is what to do about it.
The EU came first in sanctioning Google for its anti-competitive practices. Its recent Digital Markets Acts forced Google to let users choose their default search engine on Android phones. Some argue that the EU ruling did little harm to Google’s dominant position, and the same will be true for any enforcement following the US DoJ sentence.
Hard to disagree. However, something it is indeed changing.
Google search engine market share on desktop in Europe has declined consistently since 2022. According to Statcounter, it was 85.4% in January 2022 and 79.4% in July 2024. On mobile, the decline is less severe, but still visible. From 96.7% in January 2022 to 95.9% in July 2024. The same trend is seen in the US. From 79.8% in January 2022, to 74.2% in July 2024 on desktop. Bing is eating Google’s lunch, growing its market share from 12% in January 2022 to 18% in July 2024.
But in my opinion the biggest disruption is yet to be seen and will come from Ai search engines like Perplexity, You.com and soon SearchGPT.
OpenAi even partnered with Apple to power the native iPhone’s Ai capabilities, potentially jeopardising the multi-billion dollar deal between Google and Apple. If iPhone users will get all the answers natively from Apple Intelligence, why would they even use a search engine?
It could be that the DoJ won’t even need to take any action as new competitors are coming for Google already.
In any case, let’s never forget that American Big Tech companies are first of all an intelligence and power-holding asset for the US government. This is also why it took so long for regulators to even start looking into a potential Google’s monopoly.
