Tag: chatgpt

Weekend Notebook #43 – From Tabs to Tasks: The AI Browser Wars Begin

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Published on LinkedIn and amitabhapte.com on 26th Oct, 2025

This week in AI – The web starts thinking

For three decades, the web browser has been the quiet constant of our digital lives, a passive frame for everything else that changed. This week, that frame began to think.

OpenAI’s new Atlas browser isn’t built for people to browse the web; it’s built for agents to operate within it. Atlas can reason, navigate, and act, booking flights, summarising research, filling forms, all on our behalf. Two days later, Microsoft’s Copilot Mode in Edge arrived, turning every tab into a live workspace that understands context, compares options, and completes tasks without a single click.

The world’s most familiar software is being rewritten around intelligence. If the 2000s belonged to search and the 2010s to apps, the 2020s may belong to interfaces that think. Browsers are no longer windows; they’re companions that interpret intent and orchestrate action.

Behind these headlines runs a deeper current. Microsoft’s autumn Copilot release, with twelve major updates and its own MAI multimodal models, marks a pivot from OpenAI reliance to proprietary reasoning. Anthropic’s million-TPU deal with Google shows that the new scarcity isn’t data but energy. Mondelez, cutting marketing costs through generative workflows, and CrowdStrike, fusing AI with cybersecurity, prove that intelligence is moving from experimentation to execution.

Even hardware is catching the drift: Alibaba’s AI glasses and Amazon’s smart lenses for delivery drivers bring cognition to the edge of human experience, while Google’s quantum breakthrough, computing 13,000 times faster than a supercomputer, points to the next epoch altogether.

Across all of it, a single idea connects the dots, context is the new code.
The most powerful systems will not just know more; they’ll understand where they are, who they serve, and why it matters.

This is not just a redesign of software; it’s the quiet re-architecture of digital work, where intent meets intelligence and the interface becomes the collaborator.

Beyond AI: my mindshare – Jurgen Klopp on Leading with Energy

Leadership, like football, is a game of emotion and endurance. In his conversation with The Diary of a CEO, Jurgen Klopp reflected on self-discipline, love, and drive, the unseen engines behind his years at Liverpool. His philosophy is deceptively simple: “The first person you have to lead is yourself.”

He spoke of turning pressure into purpose and building systems that run on belief as much as strategy. His famous gegenpressing mantra, “If you are not Lionel Messi, you have to defend”, is less about tactics than about trust and accountability.

For leaders navigating transformation, Klopp offers a playbook for the AI age:
lead yourself first, energise others through clarity, and remember that resilience is a renewable resource.

Weekend Notebook #41 – From Chat to Commerce: AI’s Next Platform Shift

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Published on LinkedIn, Substack and AmitabhApte.com on 12th Oct, 2025

This week in AI – OpenAI DevDay & Market Slide

The past week offered a glimpse into what the next phase of AI-driven commerce might look like.

At the centre was OpenAI’s 2025 Dev Day, where the company introduced the Apps SDK and AgentKit, enabling developers to build apps and autonomous agents directly inside ChatGPT.

Early partners, Spotify, Canva, Zillow, and Mattel, showcased how everyday workflows, from designing visuals to booking homes or creating content, can now happen seamlessly within the chat experience.

This marks a shift from “AI that answers” to “AI that acts,” embedding intelligence across workflows, transactions, and creative ecosystems.

Elsewhere, Meta continued its hiring surge, adding over 50 researchers, including Andrew Tulloch, co-founder of Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab, another reminder that the race for AI talent is intensifying even as markets cool.

And markets did cool. A $770 billion slide across megacaps like Amazon, Nvidia, and others marked the Nasdaq’s worst week since April, triggered by new U.S. tariffs on China and tightening export control signals.

Cybersecurity also stayed in sharp focus, with Qantas confirming a breach impacting 5.7 million customers, a stark reminder that as intelligence scales, so must resilience.

My Takeaway This Weekend

We got a glimpse of where AI is heading next, from chat to commerce, from tools to platforms, from answering to acting. But as innovation accelerates, markets cool and cyber risks rise, reminding us that the AI future must be built on stability, security, and societal balance, not speed alone.

The next phase of AI leadership isn’t about racing ahead; it’s about scaling responsibly.

Beyond AI: My mindshare – Jane Goodall

Jane Goodall who revolutionized primatology sadly passed away this week. Her outstanding work revealing chimpanzees’ use of tools, complex emotions, and social intelligence, reshaped our understanding of human evolution.

Through the Jane Goodall Institute and Roots & Shoots, she turned empathy into action, inspiring generations to protect what they understand.

Jane Goodall didn’t just study chimpanzees, she redefined what it means to be human.

If you haven’t yet, listen to her BBC Desert Island Disc from 2000, a timeless lesson in grace, conviction, and quiet strength.

Weekend Notebook #40 – AI Workslop Chaos to Calm Focus

amitabh apte

Published on LinkedIn, Substack and AmitabhApte.com on 5th Oct, 2025

This week in AI – When Automation meets Dilution

Generative AI promised efficiency; what we got instead is workslop, a flood of machine-made noise now cluttering the modern workplace.

Recently, WSJ, HBR, and NYT all examined the same phenomenon: from hyper-realistic short films produced by OpenAI’s Sora and Meta’s Vibes to ChatGPT authored memos filling inboxes, AI is shaping what we read, watch, and even believe often with unintended consequences.

HBR calls it workslop: the avalanche of low-value, high-volume output that leaves humans tidying up after the machines meant to save us time. Instead of freeing us to think, many generative tools have made us editors of synthetic clutter. The real risk isn’t inefficiency; it’s the slow erosion of trust, creativity, and clarity.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, Sam Altman is chasing trillion-dollar data-centre partnerships across East Asia and the Middle East, a quest to secure the world’s compute future. It’s a striking paradox: as AI’s physical footprint expands, its cognitive one risks dilution. We’re scaling servers faster than discernment.

My Takeaway This Weekend

AI won’t replace human work, it’s redefining what good work means. The next advantage won’t come from faster output, but from deeper understanding. In an age of AI slop, clarity is the new currency. The leaders who will win aren’t those automating the most, but those teaching their teams how to think with AI, not merely through it.

Beyond AI: My mindshare – Tom Hanks on Desert Island Discs

This week I listened to Desert Island Discs with Tom Hanks, a quiet masterclass in humility and humanity. He spoke of “the loneliness of a vagabond childhood,” and how even success can echo with silence. It reminded me that creativity isn’t born from abundance but from attention. Hanks found his voice not through noise, but through reflection; by turning the vocabulary of loneliness into empathy.

In a world racing toward noise, that half hour felt like a pause, a reminder that clarity, connection, and craft will always outlast speed.

Weekend Notebook #37 – Every company is an AI company

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Published on LinkedIn, Substack and AmitabhApte.com on Sept 14, 2025

In spotlight this week: Robinhood CEO recognises AI platform shift

We’ve stopped asking if companies will adopt AI. The question now is: how fast will they rewire themselves into AI companies?

Robinhood’s CEO recently declared just as every company became a “tech company,” every company will soon be an “AI company.” It’s a bold claim but history rhymes. The internet made digital storefronts mandatory, mobile turned every service into an app, and cloud redefined scale. AI now feels like the next inevitability. Much like a historic city that layers modern infrastructure onto its ancient streets, companies must preserve their rich heritage while rewiring pathways for an AI age. The old and new must coexist but progress demands bridges, not barricades.

The data confirms the shift. McKinsey’s 2025 survey shows 65% of companies already use AI in at least one function, BUT fewer than 25% have embedded it across multiple business processes. That widening gap between pilots and full-scale adoption mirrors past waves of disruption where only a few turned experiments into enduring competitive advantage.

The markets are voting with capital. Robinhood’s own leap into the S&P 500 is more than a headline. It signals that investors are rewarding not just vision but delivery moving from hype cycles to hard metrics of revenue, profit, and scale.

My PoV: AI is not a bolt-on feature. It’s becoming the new corporate nervous system, rewiring how decisions are made, how work gets done, and how value is created. The leaders who succeed won’t be those with the loudest AI press releases, but those who invest in new skills, governance, and customer trust while building resilience from the inside out.

“AI won’t just be a layer of software. It will be the fabric of how businesses compete, collaborate, and create value.”

Noteworthy this week: what caught my eye in the AI and tech world

The AI Economy – partnerships, infrastructure, and capital

Tech disruption – old giants, new bets

Society and culture adapting to tech

Market dynamics – winners and casualties

Beyond Tech & AI: my “mind share” this week

I tuned into a fascinating conversation between Jay Shetty and Deepak Chopra on AI and spirituality. Chopra reminded us that while artificial intelligence expands our external capabilities, it’s only sustainable if balanced with practices that expand our inner capacities, meditation, reflection, and self-awareness.

Technology sharpens our tools. But it’s human intelligence that shapes our purpose. My own Yoga practice reinforces this truth: clarity, calm, and resilience don’t come from faster chips or larger models they come from training the mind and body with the same discipline we apply to training algorithms.

In an AI-driven age, we need as much commitment to cultivating inner intelligence as we do to scaling artificial intelligence. That balance will determine whether innovation serves human flourishing or overwhelms it.

In summary: my key takeaway this weekend

Calling yourself an AI company is easy. Becoming one is costly, cultural, and continuous. The future of competition isn’t about adding AI as a feature, it’s about embedding it as the fabric of business itself.

Weekend Notebook #36 – The future of work: written in code, judged by people

amitabh apte

Published on LinkedIn, Substack and AmitabhApte.com on Sept 7, 2025

In spotlight this week: When AI efficiency meets human cost

This week, AI showed us both sides of its coin: efficiency celebrated in boardrooms, uncertainty felt in households.

Salesforce announced it will cut around 4,000 jobs, the latest in a wave of Big Tech restructuring. At the same time Stanford study reinforces a point that many feared: AI adoption is already reducing jobs in predictable, routine, or entry-level tasks and creating fewer immediate opportunities for displaced workers.

One signal from industry, one from academia. Together, they tell a stark story: the AI dividend is real, but unevenly distributed. Enterprises capture productivity gains and shareholder value. Workers face uncertainty, communities disruption. AI isn’t just augmenting; it’s replacing, even in white-collar domains once thought safe.

For leaders, the message is clear: redesign jobs, not just reduce them. Reskill, rebuild ladders of opportunity, and maintain trust while pursuing efficiency. Cutting costs with AI may deliver short-term wins, but without reinvestment in people, it risks long-term fracture.

The companies that thrive won’t be those that simply shrink their payrolls; they’ll be those that create new paths for human potential.

“The future of work won’t be written by AI alone. It will be judged by how we choose to keep humans in the story.”

Noteworthy this week: what caught my eye in the AI and tech world

Robinhood and AppLovin to join S&P 500 – Robinhood’s inclusion signals fintech’s growing legitimacy. AppLovin’s 77% revenue growth and pivot to high-margin adtech position it as a rising AI-driven advertising force.

OpenAI $115B spending surge – Revised projections show nearly $80B more than expected by 2029, as OpenAI seeks control of its infrastructure. It’s bold, but aligned with megacap-level AI investment. My take: AI is no longer R&D, it’s industrial policy.

Anthropic’s $1.5B copyright settlement – The largest in U.S. history, resolving piracy of books from shadow libraries. The judge upheld training AI on copyrighted works as fair use, but the case highlights the urgent need to modernize copyright law for the AI age.

AI upends search advertising model – Ad spend in AI-driven search projected to jump from $1B in 2025 to $25.9B by 2029. From static keywords to multimodal, dimensional queries, this shift will redefine attribution, monetization, and competition in the AI-native web.

Google gets to keep Chrome – Found guilty of monopolistic practices in search, but allowed to retain Chrome and default search deals. Exclusive AI distribution contracts are banned, leaving Google free to double down on AI dominance.

India IT Inc worries on Tariffs – U.S. is weighing tariffs on Indian software exports, endangering a $283B industry reliant on U.S. clients. Combined with AI disruption, it’s a wake-up call: Indian IT must pivot from cost-based outsourcing to AI-led value creation.

OpenAI Job Platform – OpenAI plans to launch a certification program and job marketplace, aiming to train and certify 10M Americans by 2030. With Walmart as a partner, this is a direct challenge to LinkedIn, reshaping how people find and prepare for jobs in an AI-first economy.

Beyond Tech & AI: my music / media / sport “mind share” this week

The BBC Proms 2025 season is in full swing. Orchestral premieres, global folk fusions, and immersive film scores, something for everyone. My favourite this season? Anoushka Shankar’s “Chapters” performed with Robert Ames and London Contemporary Orchestra. A transcendent blend of Indian classical, electronica, and storytelling. Still available on BBC iPlayer. Don’t miss it.

In summary: my key takeaway this weekend

The accelerating march of AI is no longer a distant drumbeat it’s the rhythm reshaping our economy, work, and institutions in real time. From Salesforce’s job cuts to OpenAI’s $115B moonshot, the signals are clear: efficiency is prized, but empathy cannot be lost. Innovation without inclusion risks deepening divides.


“AI may be rewriting the rules but it’s up to us to decide who gets to stay in the game.”

Weekend Notebook #34 – From Cloud to Chip- The AI Assistant Revolution

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Published on LinkedIn, Substack and AmitabhApte.com on August 24, 2025

In spotlight this week: AI assistants go mainstream – Apple eyes Gemini, Google embeds it.

What if your phone didn’t just respond to you, but anticipated your needs before you spoke? This week, AI assistants took a giant leap from cloud-based helpers to embedded, proactive companions. Apple is reportedly in talks with Google to integrate Gemini into Siri, potentially transforming its underwhelming assistant into a multimodal powerhouse. While no deal is confirmed, the move signals Apple’s openness to external AI partnerships, including ongoing discussions with OpenAI and Anthropic. The goal: to bring richer, more conversational intelligence to iPhones and across Apple’s ecosystem.

Meanwhile, Google has taken a decisive leap forward with the launch of its Pixel 10 smartphone lineup, embedding Gemini AI directly into the device via its new Tensor G5 chip. The Pixel 10 series introduces features like Magic Cue, which proactively surfaces relevant info across apps, and Gemini Live, which offers real-time visual assistance based on what the phone sees. Other AI-powered upgrades include Voice Translate for multilingual calls, NotebookLM integration for smarter notetaking, and Pixel Journal for wellbeing tracking. The Pixel 10 Pro models even come bundled with a year of Google AI Pro subscription, unlocking creative tools like Imagen 4 and Veo 3.

My key takeaway: The battleground is no longer just software. It’s the device, the chip, and the ecosystem. Apple is pivoting strategically, Google is executing decisively. Both point to the same future: assistants that are native, multimodal, and deeply personal.

Noteworthy this week: what caught my eye in the AI and tech world

Meta + Midjourney – Meta has struck a deal to license Midjourney’s image-generation tech for future products. It’s a boost in visual creativity and a possible hedge against the lukewarm response to its own Llama 4. Partnerships like this are signals. Meta knows it needs an edge beyond its own labs.

Intel agrees 10% U.S. stake –Intel is selling a 10% stake to the U.S. government, one of the largest federal equity moves since the 2008 auto bailout. It strengthens chip sovereignty but also raises a hard question: what happens when governments become shareholders in the engines of tomorrow?

New turn in Nvidia’s chip for China – Nvidia has stopped producing its H20 chip for China after Beijing told local firms not to buy it, despite U.S. approval. It’s the latest flashpoint in the U.S.–China tech standoff. Critical AI infrastructure is seen as differentiator in increasing tense geo-political scenarios.

Coinbase firing engineers for not onboarding AI – Engineers who failed to adopt tools like GitHub Copilot were let go. Coinbase calls it “AI fluency or out.” Yes, fluency in AI is now non-negotiable. But enforced adoption without empathy risks losing talent and trust.

TCS opens AI-led operations centre in LATAM – A new AI-led operations centre marks its eighth in the region. Jobs, skills, and digital transformation are the pitch. Indian IT giants are exporting AI at scale, and LATAM is the next growth frontier.

TikTok to replace UK staff with AI –Over 85% of moderation is now automated, with thousands of roles at risk. Efficiency is up but user trust may not be. Platforms can’t trade human oversight for pure automation without ethical safeguards.

In summary: my key takeaway this weekend

This week marks a turning point. AI assistants are no longer cloud novelties, they’re becoming embedded essentials. Apple is courting Gemini. Google is hard-wiring it into Pixel 10. Meta, Intel, Nvidia, Coinbase, TikTok, each move adds to the same message: AI isn’t just a feature. It’s the new operating system of everything. The question now is not if you’ll use an assistant, but whose ecosystem you’ll live in.

Weekend Notebook #32 – GPT-5, Early AI Winners & Losers

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Published on LinkedIn and AmitabhApte.com on August 10, 2025

In spotlight this week: GPT-5 lands but not everyone’s cheering

The AI world has been holding its breath for GPT-5, the long-promised leap forward. Now it’s here. But instead of unanimous applause, the launch has landed like a blockbuster film breaking box office records while dividing critics.

OpenAI calls GPT-5 its most capable, reliable, and safe model yet, a multimodal workhorse for coding, writing, health, and complex reasoning. It’s faster, hallucinates less, remembers more, and can now work seamlessly across text, images, and code. Microsoft Copilot is already running on it, meaning millions will soon be using GPT-5 without even knowing it.

On paper, this is the AI assistant we’ve been promised:

  • Longer memory & context so it can finally act like a long-term colleague, not a one-off chatbot.
  • Multimodal fluency for integrated text, image, and code workflows.
  • Enterprise-grade reliability & safety for regulated industries and mission-critical work.

My early take? This is a strategic reset, simplifying model choices for users while pushing benchmark-beating features that play well in health, enterprise, and developer spaces. But some of the most enticing tools, like Google Calendar integration, sit behind the pricier Pro tier, risking a fragmented user experience.

And the user feedback? A mixed bag. Some love the speed and precision. Others miss GPT-4o’s personality describing GPT-5 as shorter, blunter, and less emotionally intelligent. My bet: early quirks will be ironed out. Whether GPT-5 is better for day-to-day use than GPT-4 or GPT-4o will be decided not by benchmarks, but by how it feels in the hands of real users.

Noteworthy this week: the AI fault lines widen

1. AI revenue champions

2. Strategic shifts

3. Human cost & disruption

In summary: my key takeaway this weekend

GPT-5’s debut shows the next chapter in AI: sophistication, integration, and enterprise deployment. OpenAI’s bet is to make AI the default productivity layer. But capability alone isn’t enough, user experience still wins hearts and adoption.

This week’s wider news makes the contrast sharper. AI is accelerating the rise of companies like Harvey, Palantir, and Duolingo, turning algorithms into revenue and market advantage. But it’s also rewriting the scoreboard in real time, pushing some players off the field entirely.

The lesson? In the AI era, the same force that fuels the winners can just as quickly leave others behind. The future of productivity isn’t just being built, it’s being fought for.

Weekend Notebook #30 – Agents, Robotaxis, Windsurf, Scaling AI

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In Spotlight this Week: ChatGPT Agents-The Next Leap in Autonomous AI

This week, OpenAI introduced a significant upgrade inside ChatGPT: agents. These aren’t just smarter chatbots, they’re autonomous digital co-workers that can take action, not just provide answers.

So what are ChatGPT agents? Imagine assigning a task like “find the best flights under $800 and book one,” and the agent goes off to browse, fill out forms, download files, generate spreadsheets, or run code, all independently, securely, and within defined guardrails. It’s a major step beyond prompt and response.

Why does this matter? Until now, most AI systems have been reactive, you ask, it replies. With agents, we step into the realm of proactive AI. Tools that can reason, navigate real-world systems, and deliver outcomes. It’s not just an upgrade, it’s a rethink of how digital work gets done.

For digital and business leaders, this opens up new possibilities:

  • Deploying agents across finance, HR, marketing, or data ops
  • Freeing teams to focus on higher-order tasks like judgement, design, and decision-making
  • Building modular workflows that connect apps, documents, and tools without traditional integrations or code

Are Agents different that Agentic AI? – There’s an important distinction here. “Agentic AI” is the design philosophy, AI that plans, decides, and acts to achieve goals. What OpenAI has now launched is a concrete implementation of that vision. These agents live inside ChatGPT, wired into tools, memory, APIs, and your workspace. This is no longer theory. It’s operational.

This evolution will reshape how we approach AI in the enterprise. It changes how we think about roles, delegation, and execution. We’ll soon be designing teams where agents carry out tasks just like apps once did, only now, with autonomy and context.

Noteworthy this week: important developments across the AI and tech landscape

OpenAI has launched a $10M+ AI consulting business, embedding engineering teams inside enterprises to accelerate custom AI deployments. It marks a shift from simply offering access to models, toward driving hands-on business transformation. OpenAI isn’t just a tech vendor anymore, it’s aiming to become a full-stack AI delivery partner.

Google paid $2.4B in licensing fees to Windsurf, an AI coding startup, while simultaneously hiring away its top talent, including the CEO. The company remains technically independent, but gutted of its core team. It’s a striking example of how Big Tech is buying talent and capability without formal acquisitions. Another startup, Cognition, picked up the remainder of the team. Urgency in the AI arms race is clearly reshaping how innovation is scaled, and acquired.

Uber is investing more than $500 million in Lucid and Nuro to deploy a fleet of 20,000 AI-powered robotaxis over the next six years. It’s their biggest move yet toward owning autonomous mobility infrastructure and integrating AI into core transport systems, rather than relying on external platforms.

Meta appointed Shengjia Zhao, co-creator of ChatGPT and former OpenAI scientist, as chief scientist of its new Meta Super-intelligence Labs. Zhao will lead foundational AI research and long-term scaling. It signals Meta’s aggressive ambition to compete at the frontier of AI, with plans to invest hundreds of billions in compute and infrastructure.

Meanwhile, news publishers are facing major disruption from Google’s AI Overviews, which summarise information above traditional search links. Studies show this has led to a 79% drop in traffic for many media outlets. There’s growing concern that the economics of independent journalism may not survive in an AI-first search experience. It’s a reminder that even technically brilliant innovations need to be matched with models that protect context, attribution, and quality.

As always, the real challenge isn’t what the tech can do, it’s what we choose to do with tech.