I would love to have all the features enabled on all my devices.

I would love to have Siri on my phone.

I would love to have Alexa control the lighting in my house and play music on command.

I would love to own an electric car with over-the-air updates.

I would love to log in with my Google account everywhere.

I would love to sign up for your newsletter.

I would love to try the free trial.

I would love to load all my credit cards onto my phone.

I would love all of that.

But I can't. I don't get to do these things because I have control over none of them. When I was a kid, I imagined that behind the wild technologies of the future there would be software and hardware, pure and simple. Now that we have the tech, I can say that what I failed to see was that behind every product, there is a company. And these companies are salivating for data.

If you're like me, you have dozens of apps on your phone. You can't fit them all on the home screen, so you use a launcher to find the ones you don't open every day. Sometimes, because I have so many, I scroll up and down and still can't find what I'm looking for. Luckily, on most Android phones, there's a search bar at the top to help. But the moment I tap it, a notification pops up asking me to agree to terms and conditions just to use the search. Of course I won't do that.

Most people have Siri enabled on their iPhone and never think twice about it. Apple has run several ads touting its privacy-first approach. Yet Apple settled a class action lawsuit last year claiming that Siri had violated users' privacy, to the tune of $95 million.

I can't trust any of these companies with my information. They will lose it, or they will sell it. Using Alexa or Google Assistant is no different from using Siri. It's having a microphone in your home that's controlled by a third party.

As enthusiastic as I am about electric cars, I didn't see the always-connected aspect coming. I've always assumed that when I pay for something, it belongs to me. But when an automaker can make decisions about your car while it sits in your garage, I'd rather have a dumb car. Unfortunately, it's no longer limited to electric vehicles. Nearly all modern cars now push some form of subscription service on their customers.

Spy!

Have you ever been locked out of your Google account? One day I picked up my phone and, for some reason, my location was set to Vietnam. A few minutes later, I lost access to my Google account. It's one thing to lose access to your email or files in Drive. But when you've used Google to log in to other websites, you're suddenly locked out of those too. Effectively, you're locked out of the internet.

I was lucky my account was restored the same day, apparently there were several login attempts from Vietnam. But my account was back in service just in time for me to mark another Stack Overflow question as a duplicate.

I don't sign up for services with my real email just to try a free trial, because even when I decide not to continue, the emails keep coming.

When my sons were just a few months old, I received a letter in the mail addressed to the baby. It stated that his personal information (name, address, and Social Security number) had been breached. He was still an infant. I had never heard of the company responsible or done any business with them, yet somehow they had managed to lose my child's information.

I would love to not worry about any of this, but it's a constant inconvenience. Whenever I grab the TV remote, I accidentally hit the voice button, and the terms of service remind me that my voice may be shared with third parties.

Technology is amazing when you have some control over it. But when the terms of service can change out from under you without warning, I'll politely decline and keep my tin hat close by. I have so much to hide.

Isn't it better to upgrade MySQL to the latest version? "It depends."

Isn't it better to upgrade our Ubuntu version to the one that was just released? "It depends."

Our PHP instance is reaching end-of-life, isn't it better to upgrade it right away? "It depends."

At the time, that felt like the wrong answer. The correct answer was obviously "Yes." Of course it's better to do all those things. But there was so much that I couldn't see yet.

Have you considered that the main application using this instance can't be easily updated? It doesn't support newer MySQL drivers, which means we'd have to go through the process of upgrading the application first before touching the database. So yes, upgrading is better in theory. But it depends on whether we can allocate the time to do it in the right order.

It's great to move to the latest version of Ubuntu, but our policy was to stay on LTS releases for stability. Yes, a newer version means new features, but it also means risking breaking changes in a production environment. When you're responsible for systems other people depend on, latest isn't always safest.

At the time I asked this question, we were running PHP 4.x. PHP 5 was already out and receiving patches. Yes, upgrading would have improved performance and closed critical vulnerabilities. But we also ran several forums that had never been tested on PHP 5. In hindsight, they were completely incompatible. A hasty upgrade would have taken them offline.

My lead developer had been doing this for years longer than me. He'd already watched systems break after rushed upgrades. He'd seen obvious improvements cause cascading failures nobody anticipated. When he said "it depends," he wasn't being evasive. He knew there was a list of variables I didn't even know to ask about yet. I heard a non-answer. He was actually giving me the most honest answer possible.

The more I've worked as a software engineer, the less I give black-and-white answers, and the more I understand why.

When a product team asks if it's possible to build a feature, the answer is never a simple yes or no. It depends on the timeline. It depends on what else we're working on. It depends on team bandwidth, technical debt, third-party dependencies, and a dozen other factors that aren't visible from the outside.

My friends who are learning to program often ask me: "What's the best programming language?" I'm always tempted to just say "machine code" and leave it at that. But the real answer is that "best" is meaningless without context. Best for what? Best for whom? I could say Python, but what if they're building an iOS app? I could say JavaScript, but what if they're writing data pipelines? The question assumes a universal answer exists. It doesn't.

A doctor doesn't say "exercise is always good" without asking about your heart condition. A lawyer doesn't say "you should sue" without reviewing the facts of the case. A structural engineer doesn't say "that wall can come down" without checking whether it's load-bearing. Expertise in any field means learning which questions to ask before answering. And understanding how much the answer can shift depending on the variables.

The more you learn and specialize, the more you see the variables that others miss. And the more you see those variables, the harder it becomes to answer a simple question simply. Because you know it's never actually simple.

I don't mind having a conversation with coworkers. What I mind is the interruption itself, especially when I'm in the middle of a task. Sometimes I'm debugging an issue in a legacy application, building a mental model of the workflow, reading a comment that describes an exception, following a function declaration, right when I'm on the verge of the next clue, I hear a voice: "Hey! What's going on? I haven't seen you in a while. What have you been up to?"

The conversation is never long. But when it's over, my thoughts are gone. Where was I? Right, the function declaration. But where was it being called? What was that exception the comment described? Where did I even see that comment? I have to retrace every step just to rebuild the mental state I was in before I can move forward again.

Working remotely helps, to a point. Interruptions via Slack can be muted until I'm ready to respond. But remote work isn't immune. You're still expected to be in meetings. As a lead, I'm frequently pulled into calls because "everything is on fire." Often, my presence isn't to put out the fire, it's to hold someone's hand. An hour later, I can barely remember what I was working on.

The cost of interruption falls entirely on the person being interrupted. You lose your place, your focus, and eventually your ability to finish anything on time. For the person doing the interrupting, though, it's often a positive experience. The manager who constantly pulls the team into status updates feels productive. They're in the loop, they're present, they're on top of things. They schedule daily standups, attend every scrum ceremony, and expect developers to translate their work-in-progress into business-friendly language on demand.

Meanwhile, the developer is spending their day sitting in calls, reassuring, explaining, and planning, but never actually building anything. When they push back, the manager doesn't cancel the meetings. Instead, he trims them from 30 minutes to 15. It feels like progress. But the length of the meeting was never the problem. Three meetings a day means three interruptions, regardless of how short they are.

Being constantly interrupted at work reminds me of being in a hospital. Doctors prescribe rest, but hospitals are among the worst places to actually get any. Before our kids were born, my wife spent close to a month in the hospital. I had a small corner of the room, a chair and a desk, where I'd work on my laptop by her side. Every 20 minutes, the door would swing open, a nurse would bustle in and out, and the door would be left wide open behind her.

It didn't matter that the doctor had ordered rest. Her sleep was interrupted every single time.

That's what interruption-driven development looks like in practice. The work requires uninterrupted effort to actually happen. You can have the right tools, the right team, the right intentions, and still produce nothing. The work environment itself is working against you.

My headphones might keep those eager to converse at bay. But what we really need is time to get work done without the constant interruption. It should be part of the software development lifecycle.

Have you ever heard of Mo Samuels? You probably haven't. But you must have heard of Seth Godin, right? Seth Godin is the author of several bestsellers. He is an icon in the world of marketing, and at one point he nudged me just enough to quit an old job.

This is someone I deeply respected, and I bought his book All Marketers are Liars with great anticipation. I was several chapters in when he dropped this statement:

I didn't write this book.

What does he mean by that? His name is on the cover. These are the familiar words I often heard in his seminars. What is he trying to say?

What I mean is that Seth Godin didn't write this book. It was written by a freelancer for hire named Mo Samuels. Godin hired me to write it based on a skimpy three-page outline.

What? Mo Samuels? Who is Mo Samuels? If that name were on the cover, I wouldn't have bought the book in the first place.

Does that bum you out? Does it change the way you feel about the ideas in this book? Does the fact that Seth paid me $10,000 and kept the rest of the advance money make the book less valuable?

Well, yeah. It doesn't change the ideas in the book. But it is deceptive. I bought it specifically to read his words. Not someone else's.

Why should it matter who wrote a book? The words don't change, after all. Yet I'm betting that you care a lot that someone named Mo wrote this book instead of the guy on the dust jacket. In fact, you're probably pretty angry.

Very.

Well, if you've made it this far, you realize that there is no Mo Samuels, and in fact, I was pulling your leg. I (Seth Godin) wrote every word of this book.

Imagine he hadn't added that last line. I never return a book after purchase, but this would have been a first. We don't just buy random books, a name carries value. I bought this book specifically because I wanted insight from this author. Anything less would have been a betrayal.

Well, that's how people feel when they read an LLM-generated article. I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't used LLMs to write articles on this very blog.

The first time, I wrote a draft that had all the elements I wanted to present. The problem was the structure didn't entirely make sense. The story arc didn't really pay off, and the pacing was off. DeepSeek was just making the rounds, releasing open weights and open source code. I decided to use it to help me structure the article. The result was impressive.

Not only had it fixed the pacing, it restructured the article in a way that made much more sense. Where I had dense blocks of information, DeepSeek turned them into convenient bullet points that were much easier to read. I was satisfied with the result and immediately published it. What I failed to notice, or maybe was too mesmerized to notice, was that the sentence structure had also been rewritten.

I didn't use LLMs every time I wrote, but throughout the year I had at least a dozen AI-enhanced articles. When publishing, they sounded just fine.

The problem started when I wanted to reference one of those articles in a new post. Reading through the AI-enhanced post felt strange. A paragraph I vaguely remembered and wanted to quote didn't sound like what I remembered. The articles were bloated with words I would never use. They had quips that seemed clever at the time but didn't sound like me at all. I ended up rewriting sections of those posts before quoting them.

The second problem appeared whenever I landed on someone else's blog. I noticed the same patterns. The same voice. The same quips. "It's not just X, but Y." "Here's the part I find disturbing." "The irony is not lost on me." "It is a stark reminder." These and many more writing tropes were uniformly distributed across my LLM-assisted articles and countless others across the web.

It felt like Mo Samuels was a guest writer on all of our blogs.

And here's the kicker: (another famous thrope) I'm not singling out DeepSeek here. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, they all seem to have taken the same "Writing with Mo Samuels" Master class. It feels like this voice, no matter what personality you try to prompt it with, is the average of all the English language on the web.

I wouldn't say readers of this blog are here for my distinct voice or writing style. I'm not famous or anything. But I know they can spot Mo from a mile away. My goal is not to trick readers. I want the stories and work experiences I share here to come from me, and I want to give readers that same assurance.

So here is what I did. Since my goals are more modest this year, I've rewritten several of those lazy articles. I spend more time writing, and I try to hold onto this idea that's gaining traction among bloggers:

"If you didn't bother writing, why should anyone bother reading?"

I want to share my thoughts, even if no one reads them. When I come back to rediscover my own writing, I want to recognize my own voice in it. But if you do read this blog, if it sucks, if you disagree, if you have an opinion to share, you should know that I wrote it. Not Mo Samuels.

How does it work? Does it apply to offline systems? When I set up my Raspberry Pi at home, is this enforced? What if I give an incorrect age, am I breaking the law now? What if I set my account correctly, but then my kids use the device? What happens?

There is no way to enforce this law, but I suspect that's not the point. It's similar to statements you find in IRS documents. The IRS requires you to report all income from illegal activities, such as bribes and scams. Obviously, if you are getting a bribe, you wouldn't report it, but by not reporting it you are breaking additional laws that can be used to get you prosecuted.

When you don't report your age to your OS whether it's a windows device or a Tamagotchi, you are breaking the law. It's not enforced of course, but when you are suspected of any other crime, you can be arrested for the age violation first, then prosecuted for something else.

What a world we live in.

This comes right after Anthropic's CEO wrote a public letter stating their refusal to work with the DoW under their current terms. Now Anthropic has been declared a public risk by the President and banned from every government system.

Large language models have become ubiquitous. You can't say you don't use them because they power every tech imaginable. If you search the web, they write a summary for you. If you watch YouTube, one appears right below the video. There's a Gemini button on Chrome, there's Copilot on Edge and every Microsoft product. There it is in your IDE, in Notepad, in MS Paint. You can't escape it.

Switching from one LLM to the next makes minimal to no difference for everyday use. If you have a question you want answered or a document to summarize, your local Llama will do the job just fine. If you want to compose an email or proofread your writing, there's no need to reach for the state of the art, any model will do. For reviewing code, DeepSeek will do as fine a job as any other model.

A good use of ChatGPT's image generator.

All this to say, ChatGPT doesn't have a moat. If it's your go-to tool, switching away from it wouldn't make much of a difference. At this point, I think the difference is psychological. For example, my wife once told me she only ever uses Google and can't stand any other search engine. What she didn't know was that she had been using Bing on her device for years. She had never noticed, because it was the default.

When I read the news about OpenAI, I was ready to close my account. The only problem is, well, I never use ChatGPT. I haven't used it in years. My personal account lay dormant. My work account has a single test query despite my employer trying its hardest to get us to use it.

But I think none of that matters when OpenAI caters to a government agency with a near-infinite budget. For every public account that gets closed, OpenAI will make up for it with deeper integration into classified networks.

Not even 24 hours later, the US is at war with Iran. So while we're at it, here is a nice little link to help you close your OpenAI account.

One system can't cater to every team, every workflow, every context. When implemented you start seeing in-fighting, projects missing deadlines, people quitting. Compromises get made, and in my experience, it almost always becomes overwhelming.

The first time I was part of a merger, I was naïve about how it would go. The narrative we were sold was reassuring. The larger company was acquiring us because we were successful. The last thing they'd want to do was get in the way of that success. But that's not how it went.

It doesn't matter what made you successful before you join a larger organization. The principles and processes of the acquiring company are what will dominate. Your past success is acknowledged, maybe even celebrated, but it doesn't protect you from assimilation.

One of the first things we had to adopt was Scrum. It may be standard practice now, but at the time it was still making its way through the industry. Our team, developers and product managers, already had a process that worked. We knew how to communicate, how to prioritize, how to ship. Adopting this new set of ceremonies felt counterproductive. It didn't make us faster. It didn't improve communication. What it did do was increase administrative overhead. Standups, sprints, retrospectives, layer after layer of structure added on top of work that was already getting done.

But there was no going back. We were never going to return to being that nimble, ad hoc team that could resolve issues quickly and move on. We had to adopt methods that got in the way.

Eventually, we adapted. We adopted the process. And in doing so, we became less efficient at the local level. A lot of people, frustrated by the slowdown, left for other opportunities.

But as far as the larger company was concerned, that was acceptable. Our product was just one of many in their portfolio. Slowing down one team to get everyone aligned was a price they were willing to pay. It wasn't efficient, but it was manageable from their perspective. The math made sense at the organizational level, even if it felt like a loss from where we were standing.

I understand that logic. I just don't think it's the best way forward.

Think about how a computer works. A CPU doesn't concern itself with how a hard drive retrieves data. Whether it's spinning magnetic disks or a solid state drive, the internal mechanics are irrelevant to the CPU. All it knows is that it can make a request, and the response will come back in the expected format. If the CPU had to get involved in the actual process of fetching data, it would waste enormous processing power on something that isn't its concern.

Organizations can work the same way.

Rather than imposing a single process across every team, a company can treat its departments as independent components. You make a request, the department delivers an output. How they produce that output like what tools they use, how they run their meetings, how they structure their work, that shouldn't be a concern, as long as the result meets the requirement.

There are places where unified processes make sense. Legal and compliance, for example, probably need to be consistent across the whole organization. But for how individual teams operate day to day, autonomy is often the better choice. Will every team's process be perfectly aligned with every other team's? No. But they'll actually work. And the people doing the work will be far less likely to walk out the door.

Sometimes in large organizations, it's important to identify which process works, and which team is better left alone.

Now that that is out of the way, we are left with all the positives. All the good things that come from having the world's information at our fingertips. I can ask any question and get an answer almost instantly. Well, not all questions. The East has its sensitivities around a certain square, and the West about a certain island, but I digress.

I can learn any subject I want to learn. I can take the work of any philosopher and ELI5 it. I can finally understand "The World as Will and Representation" by Schopenhauer. A friend gifted me a copy when I was still in my twenties, it's been steadily collecting dust ever since. But now I can turn to the book and ask questions until I thoroughly understand it. No need to read it cover to cover.

In fact, last year I decided I wanted to learn about batteries. I first went to the Battery University website and started to read lesson by lesson. But I had questions. How was I going to get them answered? The StackExchange network is not what it used to be, so I turned to ChatGPT. It had all the answers. I learned and read so much about batteries that I am tempted to start a battery company.

My twin boys are at that age where they suffer from the infinite WHYs. Why does it rain? Why does the earth spin? why does California still use the Highway Gothic font on some freeway signs? I do not have answers to these questions off the top of my head, but I have access to the infinite knowledge machine, so of course my kids know the answers now.

Just the other day, I had a shower-thought about cars. "Are cars just a slab of metal on wheels?" And now I learned that the answer is "essentially yes." But then I kept reading on the subject and learned about all those little devices and pieces of mechanical technologies that exist that I had never heard of. For example, the sway bar link. Did you know about it? Did you know that it reduces body roll and maintains stability during turns? Fascinating.

Ever since LLMs made their public debut in 2022, we've been gifted with this knowledge base that we can interact with on demand, day and night, at work or at home. The possibilities seem endless. I can learn or understand any codebase without being familiar with the programming language. And yet it feels like something is missing.

The more I access this knowledge, the more I feel the little box on my table is starting to open. Now this is just my opinion, but I'm starting to believe that the sum of all parts is still just one. Let me explain.

In 2022, the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was shot and killed. It came as a shock to me, Japan is not a country known for gun violence. So in December of that year, I decided to learn more about him, about Japan, and about their stance on guns. With the holiday season and the rolling code freeze at work, I spent a good amount of time just reading through Wikipedia, some translated Japanese forums, and some official documents. A whole lot of material. Long story short, I still don't have a definitive answer as to why exactly he was killed, but I came away with a richer understanding of the story and the perspectives of the people around him.

Reading more material is not going to give me a definitive answer, but it helps paint a richer picture of the event. I spent enough time with the subject to appreciate the knowledge I gathered over those weeks.

When you ask ChatGPT why Shinzo Abe was shot, it will give you a satisfying answer. It will be correct, it will include some of the nuance, and will probably ask you if you want to learn more. The answer satisfies your curiosity and you move on... to your next question.

It could be the chat interface. Even though the words on the page clearly ask you "if you want to know more," somehow you are more keen on starting a new subject. And rare are the times we go back and re-read the material we have been provided with.

With the books I've "read" through an LLM by asking multiple questions, I can hardly tell you that I understand them. Yes, I know the gist of it but it doesn't replace the knowledge you build by reading a book at a steady pace. You save a whole bunch of time by using an LLM, but the knowledge is fleeting. Reading original sources is slow, but you get to better immerse yourself in the subject.

It seems like reading through an LLM removes the friction of learning, but in doing so it makes knowledge shallow and disposable. The problem is the way we process information as humans. We don't become experts by learning from summaries. The effort of learning is part of the process.

Those endless questions my children have, there is a snack-like quality to the answers I give them. Because the answers are so easy to get, we treat them like a social media feed. I scroll through and one post is about batteries, the next is about sway bars, and somehow I land on California highways.

Having the world's information at your fingertips is a gift, but knowing the gist of everything is not the same as understanding something deeply. We do not form character by reading the gist of it. Instead, character comes from the hunt for information. The limitation of a manual process forces us to focus, to dwell on a subject, until we truly internalize it.

You can hardly spot a hallucination unless it concerns material that you already have knowledge in. Wait a minute. What's happening here. Ah! I see. The box has crept back open.

When you sign up for LinkedIn for the first time, it's right there. A little red dot in the top right corner with a number in it. It stands out against the muted grays and blues of the interface. Click on it, and you'll discover you have a notification. It's not from someone you know; this is a fresh new account, after all. But the dot was there anyway.

Add a few connections, give it some time, and come back. Refresh the page, and you'll have new notifications waiting.

If your LinkedIn account is like mine, a ghost town, you still get the little red dot. My connections and I usually keep a few recruiters in our networks, an insurance policy in case we need to find work quickly. But we rarely, if ever, post anything. Yet whenever I log in, there's a new notification. Sometimes it's even a message, but not from anyone in my connections list. It's from LinkedIn itself.

The little red dot isn't exclusive to LinkedIn. My Facebook account has been dormant for years, yet those few times annually when I log in, the notifications are right there waiting for me. I've even visited news websites where the little red dot appeared for reasons I couldn't understand. I didn't have an account, so what exactly were they notifying me about?

That little red dot is a sophisticated psychological trigger designed to exploit the brain. It activates the brain's Salience Network. Think of it as a circuit breaker that alerts us to immediate threats. When triggered, it signals that the brain should redirect its resources to something new.

The color red is not chosen by accident either. On my Twitter app, the notification is a blue dot, which I hardly ever notice (don't tell them that). But red triggers our brain to perceive urgency. We feel compelled to address it immediately.

The little red dot fools us into believing that something trivial is actually urgent. Check your phone and you'll notice all the app icons with a little red dot in their top right corner. Most, if not all, social media alerts function as false alarms, and they gradually compromise our ability to focus on what matters.

Whenever you spot the little red dot, you feel compelled to click it. It promises a new connection, a message, a validation of some sort. It doesn't matter that you are almost always disappointed afterward, because you will be presented with content that keeps you scrolling, never remembering how you got there.

Facebook used to show the little red dot in their email notifications. When there is activity on your account, say you were tagged in a photo, Facebook sends you an email and in the top right corner, they draw a little red dot on the bell icon. Obviously, you have to click it so you don't miss out.

Note: my old facebook emails have broken images, but linkedin just sent me a new email with the red dot in it.

There was a Netflix documentary released a few years ago called The Social Dilemma, an inside look at how social media manipulates its users. Whether intentional or not, their website featured a bell icon with a little red dot on it. You visit the site for the first time, and it shows that you have one notification. There's no way around it, you are psychologically enticed to click.

A notification is supposed to be a tool, and a tool patiently waits for someone to use it. But the little red dot seduces you because it wants something from you. It's all part of habit-forming technology: the engagement loop.

The engagement loop follows three steps: a cue (the notification), a routine (an action such as scrolling), and a reward (likes, a dopamine hit). From the social media platform's perspective, this is a tool for boosting retention. From the user's perspective, it's Pavlovian conditioning.

For every possible event, LinkedIn will send you a notification. Someone wants to join your network. Someone has endorsed your skills. A group is discussing a topic. Each notification generates a red dot on your mobile device, pulling you back into actions that benefit LinkedIn's system.

In the documentary, they show that this pattern is just the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the surface lies a data-driven, manipulative machine that feeds on our behavior and engineers the next trick to bring us back to the platform.

For my part, I've disabled notifications from all non-essential apps. No Instagram updates, no Robinhood alerts, no WhatsApp group messages. I receive messages from people I know. That's pretty much it. For everything else, I have to deliberately seek out information.

That said, I did see another approach in the wild. Some people simply don't care about notifications. Every app on their phone has a little red dot with the number "99" on it. They haven't read their messages and aren't planning to. You're lucky if they ever answer your call. I'm not sure whether this is a good or bad thing... but it's a thing.

That little red dot represents something larger than a notification system. It's the visible tip of an infrastructure built to capture and commodify human attention. The addictiveness of social media isn't an unfortunate byproduct of connecting the world. Right now it's the most profitable business model.

The more addictive the platform, the more you engage; the more you engage, the more advertisements you see. This addiction shapes behavior, consumes time, and affects mental wellbeing, all while companies profit from it.

That is one reversal of commitment. Remember that graph that has been circling around for some time now? The one that shows the circular investment from AI companies:

Basically Nvidia will invest $100 billion in OpenAI. OpenAI will then invest $300 billion in Oracle, then Oracle invests back into Nvidia. Now, Jensen Huang, the Nvidia CEO, is back tracking and saying he never made that commitment.

“It was never a commitment. They invited us to invest up to $100 billion and of course, we were, we were very happy and honored that they invited us, but we will invest one step at a time.”

So he never committed? Did we make up all these graphs in our head? Was it a misquote from a journalist somewhere that sparkled all this frenzy? Well, you can take a look in OpenAI press release in September of 2025. They wrote:

NVIDIA intends to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as the new NVIDIA systems are deployed.

In fact, Jensen Huang went on to say:

“NVIDIA and OpenAI have pushed each other for a decade, from the first DGX supercomputer to the breakthrough of ChatGPT. This investment and infrastructure partnership mark the next leap forward—deploying 10 gigawatts to power the next era of intelligence.”

It sounds like Jensen is distancing himself from that $100 billion commitment. Did he take a peak inside OpenAI and change his mind? At the same time, OpenAI is experimenting with ads. Sam Altman stated before that they would only ever use ads as a last resort. It sounds like we are in the phase.