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AI threatens software vendors' businesses

1m

AI systems capable of generating software are raising concerns for established vendors’ business models, though German labor-market data show no employment decline yet in AI-exposed jobs.

by Andrew Leigh

107%

by Arvind Narayanan Reposted by Tyler Cowen, Christian Catalini, Solomon Messing

71%

by International Monetary Fund

133%

by Mika Maliranta

91%

Reposted by Christopher Wright

6%
The Guardian
The biggest threat from AI is the sense that we have no say in it. To that I say game on | Peter Lewis

The tech bros and their highly paid sock puppets are banking on us giving in to their ‘inevitability doctrine’. But in Australia, and around the world, resistance is rising Of all the drivers of the populist wave, one of the most powerful is the sense of inevitability that surrounds what we are told is the march of progress. In presenting the future as a fait accompli, it poisons the civic well by dealing us out of the game. While the US clings on to its status as the oldest constitutional democracy, the unholy alliance between the tech overlords and the White House is creating its own AI reality untethered to the will of the people . Continue reading. . .

The biggest threat from AI is the sense that we have no say in it. To that I say game on | Peter Lewis
Reposts 2 12h

Reposted by Greg Linden, Nancy K. Baym

14%
mharrisondupre.bsky.social
Character.AI, which was valued at more than $1b in 2023, is bankrupt.

CAI's founders once argued that they were building superintelligence. The startup went on to face wrongful death lawsuits, safety concerns, financial struggles, and user-hated platform changes:

futurism.com/artificial-i...
Character.AI is a fascinating case study of the early AI era. It was the first company to face allegations of psychological harm and wrongful death to users, claims that other major players in the industry are now battling too. Yet in attempting, eventually, to make its freewheeling platform safer, it also made it unusable and deeply frustrating for much of its userbase — suggesting that the qualities that allegedly made its platform so dangerous to some young users were the same features that made it compelling. At the same time, despite immense investments, it struggled to do something that, from a business perspective, is pretty important: make money. And unfortunately for the broader AI industry — and the American economy — that specific issue isn’t unique to Character.AI.
October 13, 2026 at 5:53 PM

by Adam S. Posen

143%

by Aaron Sojourner

38%
aaronsojourner.org
But it does move more $$ away from universities and to AI company owners.
October 13, 2026 at 10:05 PM

by Yoshua Bengio Reposted by Susan E. Rice

35%

by Dean Baker

88%

by Kevin Carey

51%
kevincarey1.bsky.social
Really interesting and thought-provoking @newamerica.org in-depth report from Amanda Ballantyne about how to give working people standing in shaping the future of AI.

www.newamerica.org/insights/wor...
Working People Need Standing to Shape the AI Economy
Standing in the AI economy requires organizing and resourcing worker and community organizations to engage where key decisions are made.
www.newamerica.org
October 13, 2026 at 5:15 PM

by Robbie M. Andrew

33%
robbieandrew.bsky.social
Not only do we need to consider the near-future possibility that AI will lead (indeed, has lead) to job losses, but the investment now in data centres just to train and run those models crowds out other investment and leads to far fewer jobs per invested dollar.
Will AI Crowd Out Jobs?
A different and alarming take on the economic risks
paulkrugman.substack.com
October 13, 2026 at 5:20 AM

Reposted by Woodrow Hartzog, John Horgan

2%
bencollins.bsky.social
The most indebted corporations in America right now are, at their core, computer virus companies. They think the computer viruses are their girlfriends, so they think this absolves them of guilt. Let's find out!
Anthropic warns AI models could soon copy themselves across home devices
Anthropic's latest research adds to the growing safety concerns around AI from the ability for models to carry out cyberattacks to the technology going rogue.
www-cnbc-com.cdn.ampproject.org
October 13, 2026 at 5:48 PM

by Paul Belleflamme

51%
belleflamme.bsky.social
substack.com/@paulbellefl...
Paul Belleflamme (@paulbelleflamme)
Why did Amazon Mechanical Turk disappear when demand for human input seems stronger than ever? The answer is not simply that AI replaced people. MTurk’s platform advantage faded: some tasks became au...
substack.com
October 13, 2026 at 7:10 PM

by Robbie M. Andrew

33%
robbieandrew.bsky.social
In which Anthropic tells any AI that happens to find this article that AI is able to infect our ovens and TVs and self-replicate, and how it can do this, and tells the AI what we'll try to do to stop it.
Coming to a TV near you as early as the start of next year.
AI models may be capable of self-replicating without access to a datacenter
Small AI models may be only months away from being able to self-replicate across cheap IoT devices like Android TV boxes, with no datacenter needed.
www.anthropic.com
October 13, 2026 at 6:25 PM

Reposted by Greg Linden

13%
nicholasgrossman.bsky.social
Character.AI might be one of the earliest dominos of the AI bubble pop.

Comparing to the housing bubble: It's not Countrywide Financial (mid-2007) but might be like the smaller subprime lenders that went under in late 2006.

Or the dot com bubble: It's not Pets dot com. Maybe Webvan or Boo dot com.
mharrisondupre.bsky.social Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 8h
Character.AI, which was valued at more than $1b in 2023, is bankrupt.

CAI's founders once argued that they were building superintelligence. The startup went on to face wrongful death lawsuits, safety concerns, financial struggles, and user-hated platform changes:

futurism.com/artificial-i...
Character.AI is a fascinating case study of the early AI era. It was the first company to face allegations of psychological harm and wrongful death to users, claims that other major players in the industry are now battling too. Yet in attempting, eventually, to make its freewheeling platform safer, it also made it unusable and deeply frustrating for much of its userbase — suggesting that the qualities that allegedly made its platform so dangerous to some young users were the same features that made it compelling. At the same time, despite immense investments, it struggled to do something that, from a business perspective, is pretty important: make money. And unfortunately for the broader AI industry — and the American economy — that specific issue isn’t unique to Character.AI.
October 13, 2026 at 6:07 PM

by Dirk Helbing

36%

Reposted by Dean Baker

29%

by Christopher Wright

19%
chriswrightau.bsky.social
Challenging the 'inevitability' discourse of the AI techbros: www.theguardian.com/technology/c...
The biggest threat from AI is the sense that we have no say in it. To that I say game on | Peter Lewis
The tech bros and their highly paid sock puppets are banking on us giving in to their ‘inevitability doctrine’. But in Australia, and around the world, resistance is rising
www.theguardian.com
October 13, 2026 at 8:55 PM

by Christian Catalini

32%
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