Listen : Watch : Read #35
🎙️Listen 🎙️
With the recent acquisition of InsTech by Datos Insights, Robin Merttens and Matthew Grant sit down for their regular partners chat as to what's next post acquisition! Always fun and congrats again to the entire team! Excited for the future here and some of the things we have planned together with ServiceNow
This one is super interesting this week, finally Scott Galloway and the All-In Podcast crew may start to agree on something. Scott for years has been talking about the impact of technology and the plight of lonely men. Here Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Friedberg and David O. Sacks talk about changing trends, the average age of pornography access (shocked me), to a change in the American dream (owning a house and getting married) and inability for young men to build or form relationships, or simply just engage. This on the back of a interesting discussion which blew up this week on AI Psychosis, with a fair comparison to previous trends and obsessions.
📺 Watch 📺
Taylor Swift joins Jason and Travis on their New Heights podcast. From Easter Eggs to New News, which of course the whole planet seems to know - a fun podcast and of course the intro of TS12 - the Life of Showgirl! I live in a house full of Swifties, as I'm sure many of you all do too! In a world that often feels chaotic, crazy, lost, or at war... here's 2hrs of fun and Joy! Can't wait for it.
What's crazy - The full podcast episode on YouTube generated 17+ million views (and counting) alone. Additionally, Swift’s appearance produced 379 million video views on Instagram and 61.6 million views on X, while TikTok saw 34.5 million views. Threads had 1.1 million (Aug 15th!)
Although when I text Emma, (my wife) to see if we had pre-ordered it the response was brutal - 'No because I’ve got no way of playing a vinyl, cassette or CD'.
Nikhil Kamath sits down with Sam Altman the day before GPT5's release. I wont spoil the surprise on what scares him most, but the biggest takeaway here for me is - India is currently their second largest market and most likely to become their largest market in the near future.
📚 Read 📚
Back to world of AI, the new's keeps popping! From Perplexity offering to buy Google Chrome for £35bn, certainly got the news - punchy! Remember OpenAI and Perplexity are both bringing out or have launched browsers. Depending on where you look, Chrome already has 65-90% global market share!
Following OpenAI offering the US Federal Government pricing for $1 here, Anthropic does the same for Claude. Is this the beginning of the collapse of the value in foundational models or a way to capture further market share, before changing the dynamics.
With OpenAI GPT5 launch last week to huge fan fare, it quickly turned to challenge and negative feedback from - getting stuff wrong (not quite PHD level) and I recall the impact of this when Google launched Bard and got stuff wrong - $120bn wiped off market value later. Saanya Ojha over at Bain & Company has another good breakdown here.
More here from Allison Morrow over at CNN. I'm not surprised by this - we are moving so fast, things are never going to be perfect. It's the best way to learn too - we are building in public with close to a billion users.
Instead, ChatGPT got a flatter, more terse personality that can’t reliably answer basic questions. The resulting public mockery has forced the company to make sweaty apologies while standing by its highfalutin claims about the bot’s capabilities.
The big question for me - is what does this mean to the enterprise. What does this mean for regulated entities trying to deploy these. Reminds me of a phrase an old friend (CEO of an Insurer) said when I said we should look to fast follow here, his response - I never said fast! Times like this always remind me of that conversation.
With all this, the never ending question of course, with all this money going into AI - has it yet to pay off. This from Steve Lohr over at the The New York Times has a good piece here. Also great to see USAA being highlighted for some of their early work. See here 👇🏻
One company where A.I.’s promise and flaws are playing out is USAA, which provides insurance and banking services to members of the military and their families. After several pilot projects, some of which it closed down, the company introduced an A.I. assistant to help its 16,000 customer service workers provide correct answers to specific questions.
USAA is tracking its A.I. investments, but does not yet have a calculation of the financial payoff, if any, for the call center software. But the response from its workers, the company said, has been overwhelmingly positive. While it has software apps for answering customer questions online, its call centers field an average of 200,000 calls a day.
“Those are moments that matter,” said Ramnik Bajaj, the company’s chief data analytics and A.I. officer. “They want a human voice at the other end of the phone.”
Finally, the brilliant team over at Bessemer Venture Partners have produced the State of AI in 2025. I really liked this comment, which backs up this weeks newsletter...
We’re still a ways from declaring any semblance of stability, but these early AI Galaxies give us more visibility than ever of the shape of things to come.
But also this, one of the their key takeaways. This is why I'm at ServiceNow and what we are doing in solving for the messy middle of Insurers and every other industry! Gregory Kanevski Andrew Brandman Holly Briedis Amit Zavery
Systems of action are replacing systems of record: AI-native apps don’t just store data—they act on it. Don’t bolt AI onto legacy software—reimagine the entire workflow.
👀 Quick bites 👀
Can't make this up - Starbucks - No printers or PCs, Starbucks Korea tells customers
Using generative AI, researchers design compounds that can kill drug-resistant bacteria
No plans to change passenger rules for new young drivers a 'major oversight', AA says - changes to UK driving laws get lots of attention, including banning those over 70 with poor eyesight!
And thats It! See you next week!