At a time when most technology leaders are forecasting the collapse of white-collar work, Box CEO Aaron Levy offers a different vision: one where AI amplifies human productivity instead of replacing it. His central insight is deceptively simple, jobs aren’t tasks. While AI systems can automate individual tasks with extraordinary speed, work itself is a web of judgment, context, and coordination that still requires people. Lawyers may review contracts twice as fast, but that doesn’t erase the legal department; it raises throughput and expands the company’s capacity to act. Engineers may ship code more quickly, but that acceleration creates new bottlenecks, and new roles, elsewhere. Automation doesn’t extinguish work; it increases demand for it. ...

Agentic RAG goes beyond traditional RAG by adding the ability to reason, plan, and act. Instead of merely fetching and producing information, it autonomously determines what to retrieve, how to apply it, and when to adjust the context, enabling adaptive, goal-oriented systems that improve through continuous learning.

The software industry’s latest fantasy- that AI will deliver a tenfold leap in developer productivity- is now colliding with reality. As the author of the piece notes, the trillion-dollar AI sector still cannot produce reliable, production-grade code. Behind the flood of “breakthrough” announcements lies an epidemic of unmaintainable software, riddled with four recurring categories of error. The classical ones- false positives and false negatives- are joined by two new cognitive pathologies born from model mechanics themselves: entangled logic that turns architectures into spaghetti, and memory collisions that make unrelated functions misfire. What was once branded “hallucination” now looks less like quirk and more like structural failure. ...

In 1957, the launch of Sputnik jolted the United States into an era of scientific ambition, triggering massive investment in research and higher education. That anxiety- the fear of falling behind- proved constructive, fueling decades of technological leadership. Today, however, the situation feels inverted. As China quietly consolidates its lead in areas such as energy production and advanced manufacturing, the U.S. response is not urgency but denial. Despite China now generating more than twice America’s electricity, Washington’s political discourse has turned inward, cutting funding for education, science, and renewable energy in the name of culture wars. ...

In an intriguing article, Jeferson Borba discusses the Dead Internet Theory, which suggests that the internet has been overrun by bots, AI-generated content, and algorithmic manipulation since around 2016. He reflects on how platforms like LinkedIn are filled with AI-generated posts that mimic genuine human interaction, making us question whether the internet is truly alive. This theory, which originated in niche online forums, has gained traction as users observe a shift in the nature of engagement on social media and the prevalence of automated accounts that shape public opinion without real human discourse. ...

“Red Friday” marked the largest liquidation event in crypto history, nearly $19 billion erased in a single day amid renewed U.S., China trade tensions. Yet what makes this episode remarkable is not the size of the sell-off but its limited effect: Bitcoin fell only about 8%, a far cry from the 58% crash of March 2020 or the 19% slide after FTX collapsed in 2022. For the first time, the market absorbed massive leverage unwinding without imploding. The combination of deeper liquidity, institutional participation, and new instruments such as ETFs has begun to tame the asset’s once-violent swings. ...

Over the last year the workflows vs. agents debate has turned from a niche engineering question into something every product team seems to argue about. New tooling lowers the barrier to spin up an AI agent that can call tools in a loop, so leaders start asking whether they should rebuild processes around these agents, or stick with the safer structure of step-by-step workflows. The conversation heats up because both sides have real wins and real failure modes: agents feel magical when they solve fuzzy, open-ended tasks, but they can be slow, costly, and unpredictable at scale; workflows are efficient and auditable, but can feel rigid when the job needs exploration. That tension between flexibility and control is why this topic is hot and why teams keep getting stuck. ...

Bloomberg just published this fascinating map of the AI power network, showing how companies like NVIDIA, OpenAI, Microsoft, AMD, Oracle, and Intel are now intertwined through billions in deals, compute, and equity. It’s not just a supply chain anymore. It’s a feedback loop — where hardware, software, and capital keep feeding each other. NVIDIA sits at the center with a $4.5 trillion market cap, investing up to $100 billion in OpenAI, while selling GPUs to Oracle, AMD, xAI, and everyone else. OpenAI, in turn, signs a $300 billion cloud deal with Oracle, deploys 6 gigawatts of AMD GPUs, and gives AMD an option to buy 160 million OpenAI shares. Microsoft is still the connective tissue, part investor, part service provider, part enabler.

I came across a video by Dr. John Padfield, a former engineer and state representative, talking about something that stuck with me. He recalls being told, “never get in a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.” It was a warning for politicians — don’t mess with newspapers. Then he updates it for our time: “Never get in a fight with people who buy network servers by the acre.” ...

Visual Capitalist just released this updated chart of the 50 largest companies in the world (July 2025) — and it’s another reminder that software really did eat the world. The top 5 companies are all in tech: NVIDIA, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet. Together, they’re worth more than most countries’ GDPs. NVIDIA alone — the company powering the AI boom — now sits at $4.2 trillion, ahead of everyone else. ...