Amazon confirmed Wednesday that it laid off an unspecified number of employees in its artificial general intelligence (AGI) organization, the division working on the company’s advanced AI models.

The move, first reported by Reuters, comes as the company invests heavily in programs to help businesses implement AI effectively, including a $1 billion initiative to embed AWS engineers with customers building agentic AI systems.

It’s part of a larger shift in the industry as tech giants and AI frontier labs look to make sure the enormous sums they’re spending on AI pay off in tools businesses actually use.

In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson said building large AI models remains “one of the most important things we’re working on,” but said the company is also “sharpening our focus on the initiatives that matter most for customers, so we can move faster on what counts.”

“That focus means some difficult decisions, including eliminating some roles within parts of our AGI organization, even as we continue to invest in the areas most important to our customers’ future,” the spokesperson said.

It’s the latest in a series of changes in Amazon’s AGI group, which despite its name has always been focused more on frontier models than on what the industry considers AGI, the still-theoretical systems that would match or surpass human intelligence.

Rohit Prasad, the senior executive who oversaw Amazon’s AGI work, left the company late last year, and AGI Lab head David Luan departed in February. In December, Amazon folded the AGI group into a larger organization led by senior vice president Peter DeSantis that also includes chip development and quantum computing.

The cuts are the latest in a series of smaller reductions since January, when Amazon eliminated 16,000 jobs across the company. Amazon said U.S. employees whose jobs are cut will receive 90 days of pay and benefits, outplacement support and transitional health coverage, along with eligibility for severance.

Microsoft is putting $60 million behind the U.S. Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission, a push to use artificial intelligence to speed up scientific research across the government’s 17 national labs.

The company’s investment is split into two pieces: $40 million in Azure cloud computing and AI credits over three years, and $20 million for engineering and deployment help to get DOE researchers actually using the tools, Microsoft said in a blog post Wednesday.

Microsoft is also launching a new internal group called SPARK — Scientific Partnership Advancing Research & Knowledge — to serve as the single point of contact between the company and DOE on Genesis Mission work. It’s meant to combine Microsoft’s program management, engineering, security and research teams into one coordinated effort, instead of leaving individual labs to navigate Microsoft on their own.

President Trump created the Genesis Mission through an executive order in November 2025, directing DOE to build a unified computing and data platform — since named the American Science and Security Platform — that connects the national labs’ supercomputers, AI tools and scientific datasets.

The order likened the effort’s urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project, and the White House said it’s expanded into a whole-of-government initiative involving more than 15 federal agencies, backed by more than $5 billion in commitments.

Microsoft named four initial projects taking shape under the partnership, including work with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., to speed up the discovery of new energy storage materials — cutting analysis that used to take years down to weeks — and autonomous lab work with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory aimed at detecting biological threats earlier.

“We move faster together,” Chris Barry, president of Microsoft’s U.S. Public Sector business, wrote in the blog post announcing the commitment, framing the investment as both a “national security imperative” and economic opportunity for the U.S.

Microsoft isn’t the only Seattle-area cloud giant courting the Genesis Mission. Amazon Web Services was recognized by DOE as a Genesis Mission supporter in December, highlighting its work with Idaho National Laboratory on AI tools for nuclear reactor design, and the company launched its own Genesis Accelerator Initiative in February, offering up to $50 million in cloud credits for DOE-related research over three years.

Google also announced Wednesday that it was committing $40 million of AI tokens and cloud credits for researchers in support of the Genesis Mission.

Jean Paoli has spent his career making documents readable by machines — first as a co-creator of XML, then helping build the file formats behind Microsoft Office. Now his Kirkland, Wash.-based startup, Docugami, is open-sourcing the technology at the heart of its business, betting it can become a standard way to turn documents into data that people and AI agents can trust. 

The company is releasing its technology, called DGML (short for Document Graph Markup Language), under Apache 2.0, a widely used open-source license, so other developers and companies can adopt it.

The idea is to turn it into a shared standard that no single company owns, much as XML became a common foundation across the tech industry. 

The move reflects a shift in where the value is created in AI. Docugami until now has made its money selling software that turns unstructured documents into usable data. It’s betting now that there’s more value in proving that data is trustworthy instead. 

How it works: Docugami is teaming up with Inveniam, a Detroit company whose software helps big investors keep tabs on the mountains of paperwork behind real estate and other hard-to-value assets. Inveniam will record a kind of digital fingerprint of each piece of DGML data on NVNM Chain, its blockchain built with Mantra, a crypto firm that Inveniam is acquiring.

That means, for example, that a single fact buried in a 200-page lease — such as the rental rate, a renewal option, or a default clause — can be verified on its own, without exposing the whole document. An investor, auditor, or AI agent can trace it to the page it came from. 

To work with documents, AI systems usually convert them into a simpler format first. DGML enters a growing field of contenders in that regard, competing with the popular Markdown format and DocLang, a new open standard for AI-ready documents backed by IBM, Nvidia and Red Hat.

The business model: This is a big move for a company of Docugami’s size, taking the 30-person startup in a new direction. Paoli is handing the industry the technology his team spent years building, and pinning the company’s future on a larger idea.

The plan is to make money not from the format itself but from the value of the trusted data. Once a company converts its leases or loans into DGML and anchors the key numbers on the blockchain, investors, lenders and auditors can pay to draw on that verified data.

Docugami will share in the revenue through its partnership with Inveniam. The company also stands to collect a small fee each time a piece of data is recorded on the chain. 

The company is giving away the DGML format and a working version of the software, but not everything. Paoli said the company is keeping some of its own technology private, including AI models it has fine-tuned to read documents, and could sell those or other tools to enterprises. 

“The business model of everybody is changing. And if you know any company where it’s not true, you need to tell me, because I haven’t met them yet,” Paoli said in an interview. 

Docugami has raised about $13 million to date, including a $10 million seed round in 2020 that drew the first investment in Grammarly’s history.

The partnership: Paoli met Patrick O’Meara, Inveniam’s CEO, a few months ago, through a former Microsoft colleague who had become one of O’Meara’s advisers. They quickly realized they had been working toward the same idea from different directions.

Inveniam, founded in 2017, helps big investors keep track of assets that are hard to value, like office towers, private loans and infrastructure. It monitors the documents behind those assets and flags changes as they happen, and its clients include some of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds, according to O’Meara.

What it lacked was a consistent way to break those documents into verifiable pieces. That is what Docugami provides.

“We’re not putting the data itself on-chain, just a fingerprint of the document. Change one bit, one byte, one pixel, and the hash won’t match,” O’Meara said.

The blockchain comes from Mantra, a crypto company run by John Patrick Mullin. Inveniam invested $20 million in Mantra last year and has since agreed to acquire it outright. Mantra’s OM token collapsed in April 2025, erasing several billion dollars in value. 

Paoli said the project uses the underlying blockchain, not the token.

“Crypto as an industry has gone through a lot of changes in the last 18 to 24 months, and it’s growing up in a lot of ways. This is a real use case with fundamental value, not just pure speculation,” Mantra’s Mullin said in an interview. 

The result is a division of labor: Docugami turns documents into data, Inveniam verifies it and brings the customers, and Mantra provides the chain where the proof is recorded.

The DGML specification, sample documents and reference code are at dgml.io and on GitHub. 

Editor’s note: This story was updated after publication to correct the name of a competing document format, DocLang, and to note that Inveniam’s blockchain is called NVNM Chain.

Two months after emerging from stealth mode, TerraByte AI is using artificial intelligence and a new partnership to upgrade its “Earth Search Engine.”

The startup, which maintains operations in Seattle as well as San Francisco, has just rolled out a TerraByte News service that pinpoints wildfires, earthquakes and severe weather events on an interactive map. Users can follow links to access news reports, social media posts and satellite views related to selected events.

The satellite views include open-source images from NASA’s Earth observation system as well as Europe’s Sentinel satellites. And now the database also features high-resolution pictures provided through a newly announced partnership with Texas-based SkyFi. The partnership gives TerraByte’s users access to SkyFi’s self-service Earth intelligence platform, which offers satellite and aerial imagery from more than 300 sources at prices as low as $15 per image.

“In May, when we came out of stealth, we made the planet searchable,” TerraByte CEO Rishi Madhok told GeekWire. “Now, the moment you find something, you can hold the imagery in your hands within a day. The next step is making Earth intelligence as routine as a web search — you ask, you see, and then you act.”

Madhok and Fuxun Yu, TerraByte’s chief technology officer, founded the company last year as a follow-up to their work on geospatial data analysis at Microsoft. They developed search tools that can recognize features of interest in satellite images and deliver data-driven insights in response to natural-language queries.

Over the past couple of months, TerraByte’s team has grown from three to five employees, Madhok said. “Our goal is to grow the team even further this year, because we are seeing a lot of traction from users since we came out of stealth,” he said.

“A lot of traction is coming from insurance [companies], from the government, from mining, from other areas where there is the possibility to see things,” he said. “And finance, right? A lot of quant firms and hedge funds want to see all of this activity coming in.”

One key application involves emergency response. “Our big focus is on catastrophes, particularly wildfires,” Madhok said. “Our vision is that anybody should be able to track this — not limited to just journalists, but including everyone who is living in those areas and wants to see what’s going on.”

Madhok expects the revenue-sharing partnership with SkyFi to open up new opportunities. “I’m happy to say that we have customers who are paying us,” he said. “From that perspective, we’re already doing well.”

Advances in AI are creating still more opportunities. “Now you can do searches not just using text, but using images, which we call visual search,” he said. “Let’s say you’re searching for a certain kind of vessel, and it’s very hard for you to describe it in natural language. You can just take a screenshot of it, upload it, and within seconds it will literally search for what you were looking for.”

Looking ahead, Madhok and his teammates plan to add people power to the power of AI.

“This is the first version of a platform that we’re going to release, and we obviously want to learn more from our users,” he said. “We want this platform to become crowdsourced, so that people who are local to a region can add more information from that perspective, because then it starts becoming more powerful. We don’t want just TerraByte to be the owner of this.”

Madhok shared a video on LinkedIn that shows how TerraByte’s platform can quickly find high-resolution imagery of a shipwreck in Washington state’s Possession Sound:

Clarify, the Seattle-based AI startup that has raised more than $22 million to take on Salesforce and other CRM incumbents, has made its first acquisition: San Francisco-based Seam AI.

Seam’s technology monitors buying signals across the web — such as funding rounds, hiring, website activity, and executive job moves — and surfaces them to sales teams. Clarify plans to fold the technology into a new product called Clarify Signals, slated to launch later this year. 

Clarify is led by co-founders Patrick Thompson (CEO) and Ondrej Hrebicek (CTO), who previously co-founded Iteratively, a Seattle data-analytics startup that was acquired in 2021 by Amplitude, the publicly traded digital-analytics company.

Rationale: Clarify says the deal is part of a shift beyond what it calls a “system of record” that tracks what already happened to a “system of awareness” that flags what’s about to happen. 

Thompson said the Seam deal fills a gap in what Clarify’s own AI can pull from the open web, giving the CRM access to proprietary datasets that can’t be reached with a simple search. 

“The value that Seam is providing is typically the information that’s not necessarily easy to get from the web,” Thompson explained in an interview. “It’s the harder stuff to find.” 

Hrebicek said Clarify’s customers have been looking for a bigger and richer dataset — the ability to “look around the corners on who would be a good lead.” 

Deal points: Financial terms weren’t disclosed. Clarify, which had raised a total of $22.5 million in its seed and Series A rounds from investors including U.S. Venture Partners, Gradient Ventures, and Madrona, said it brought in additional funding as part of the deal but did not disclose the amount. 

As part of the acquisition, five Seam employees are joining Clarify, including Seam co-founder and CEO Nicholas Scavone. With the deal, Clarify is adding a San Francisco office alongside its Seattle headquarters. The company now has 30 people total. 

Backstory: Scavone started Seam in 2020 after five years at Okta, where he saw teams accumulate many different sales and marketing systems, with customer data scattered across all of them. 

Seam raised $7 million including angel funding and a seed round led by Bessemer Venture Partners in April 2024. It counts Zapier, GoFundMe, Drata, and Betterment among its customers. Existing customers are on hold while the technology is integrated into Clarify, but many have already indicated they plan to move over to the new platform.

Scavone said he had been weighing whether to raise a new round or find a home for the company when he and Thompson, who have known each other for years, began talking about a combination. 

“We’re all going after the same big incumbents here,” he said, explaining that he ultimately decided Seam had a better chance of taking on the market’s dominant players by joining forces with Clarify than as a standalone company. 

In a post announcing the deal, the Seam and Clarify founders said they “realized we weren’t building competing products—we were building different halves of the same future.”

Landscape: Clarify is entering a crowded field. Sales-intelligence platforms like Clay, ZoomInfo, and Apollo already sell third-party data to revenue teams, and 6sense and Demandbase lead the account-based marketing category Seam had been targeting.

Thompson said one edge for Clarify is that signals arrive inside the CRM sellers already use, not a separate dashboard. 

The company was co-founded in early 2024 by Thompson, Hrebicek, and Austin Hay, a marketing-technology operator who served as co-CEO alongside Thompson. Hay departed in September 2025 and is now with Khosla Ventures, per his LinkedIn.

What’s next: Clarify plans to launch Signals later this year, Thompson said, noting that the company is considering raising additional funds in a Series B round early next year. 

Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump agree on almost nothing. But they do agree that the public should own a piece of the AI industry.

The Vermont senator and the president disagree on both the structure and stake of public ownership, but the idea is being discussed at the highest levels of government. Even OpenAI and Anthropic back versions of the idea, though Anthropic’s is a tax rather than a stake. Let’s tune in.

The table below summarizes preliminary proposals and shows how far apart they stand, from a voluntary sliver to an outright seizure. After taking a stake in Intel, the president said he wanted “many more cases like it.” Treasury paid $8.9 billion for 9.9% of Intel in August 2025; by the following spring the stake was worth roughly $36 billion, increasing the appetite for such deals. The Pentagon has already taken 15% of a rare-earth miner. This is a pattern, not a one-off.

The argument for these proposals is a public-finance argument, and a strong one. The science under AI grew out of decades of federally funded research. The training data came from the writing, code, and art of millions of people who were never asked and never paid.

Sanders puts the principle plainly: “When a public resource generates wealth, the public should share in that wealth.”

The cleanest versions cost the taxpayer nothing up front, because the equity is contributed rather than bought. That is not the Intel model, which Washington bought for cash; it is the AI version now on the table, where the shares would be donated. If the bubble bursts, the public is out nothing. If it holds, the public owns a slice. A bet with no ante is a rare thing in public finance.

Source	Stake	Structure
Bernie Sanders	Roughly 50% government position (reported figures vary)	Federal sovereign wealth fund; government holds voting shares; ~$1,000-per-person dividend
Trump administration	Case-by-case equity stakes; 9.9% of Intel (now ~$36B)	Direct federal ownership; framed as a taxpayer “windfall”
OpenAI	~5% of equity (~$42.6B) contributed voluntarily	“Public Wealth Fund” modeled on Alaska’s; returns distributed to citizens
Anthropic	No equity	Taxes on AI firms to fund worker support, possibly UBI

Proposals as of July 2026; talks remain preliminary and any federal version would require an act of Congress.

There’s a real danger, though, in what the government becomes when it owns a piece of the industry it is supposed to regulate. A public stake in AI can be a dividend or a trap, and the whole difference lives in the fine print.

Three things separate the dividend from the trap. The first is the size of the stake. The second is a wall between the government as owner and the government as referee, so the hand that banks the dividend never writes the safety rules. The third is a fence around the money: proceeds earmarked for the workers the technology displaces, not swept into the general fund. None of the three enforces itself.

Here’s a loose historical precedent. In 1998, 46 states settled with the tobacco industry for about $206 billion, paid out over 25 years. The states came to lean on the yearly checks, which quietly made them partners in the survival of the product they were supposed to fight. And the money drifted: today states spend only about three cents of every tobacco dollar on the anti-smoking programs the settlement was meant to fund.

A stake with no end date makes the government a permanent co-owner of the industry it regulates, and permanence is one thing that turned a tobacco settlement into a tobacco dependency. The answer is a fixed end date. The same law that creates the stake should set the year it must end. This is known as a sunset clause.

If Uncle Sam owns a stake, he should collect the dividend through the buildout years, then sell it down on a fixed, published schedule until the position is gone. Ten or 15 years. Economists can pick the number. The deadline should be set in law from the start, so a future Congress cannot quietly extend it.

Temporary co-ownership lets the public bank the upside of the boom without leaving the referee holding shares in the game for good. Sanders and Trump, from opposite ends of the political spectrum, have seized on a real grievance and reached for the permanent version of the remedy, which is the version most likely to curdle. Of course, sunset clauses are not etched in stone either.

Another challenge is that the moment Washington owns pieces of its AI champions, other capitals follow — Beijing, Brussels, the Gulf — each taking a stake in its own, and the claim that American platforms answer to no government gets harder to make. A vendor with the state on its cap table is not a neutral one. No wall and no expiration date solves this problem.

A stake also puts the government in the business of picking winners. Own a piece of OpenAI or Anthropic and Washington acquires a financial interest in their business, and a reason to favor them when it writes the next rule or signs the next contract. The startup is forced to compete against incumbents favored by the feds. And in the fast-moving AI field, the players change rapidly.

AI’s economic challenges are real and the grievance underneath these proposals is legitimate, but government ownership is the wrong remedy. The conflict of interest is real, the precedents are bad, and it’s hard to imagine that a referee with money on the game will be neutral.

Still, the momentum is real, too. Sanders, Trump, and the labs are all pushing versions of the same idea, and one of them may pass. If it does, the temporary version with guardrails beats the permanent one: price it honestly, wall it off, aim the money at the damage, give it a hard end date. None of that is a reason to take the stake. It is only what keeps a bad idea from calcifying into a worse one.

A coalition of activists and community organizations plans to rally Sunday outside Anduril’s Seattle office, protesting the defense technology company’s development of artificial intelligence-powered military systems and its growing presence in the region.

The demonstration, scheduled for 9:30 a.m. at Anduril’s downtown Seattle office, is being organized by groups including BAYAN Washington, International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines and The International League of Peoples’ Struggle. Organizers say the event will highlight concerns about the use of AI in warfare, autonomous weapons systems and the expansion of defense technology companies in Washington state. They expect more than 50 to attend.

“The rally will respond to urgent developments in the expansion of AI weapons companies in Washington State and will expose Anduril as an engine of U.S.-led wars of aggression and a domestic threat to migrant and working class communities,” the organizations said in a statement.

Anduril said it recognizes the right to protest, while defending its work supporting the U.S. military and service members.

“We respect the right to free speech and we understand that protests are a hallmark of democratic expression,” Anduril said in a statement provided to GeekWire. “That said, it is perplexing when people choose to protest a company dedicated to supporting the very military that safeguards those rights.”

The company’s statement continued:

“At Anduril, we’re proud of our role in helping the brave men and women who risk their lives to defend the freedoms that we all enjoy, freedoms that include the right to stand outside and protest our existence. We’ll continue to honor those serving our country, even when others stand in opposition.”

The protest comes as Anduril expands its operations in the Seattle area, including a new maritime manufacturing and testing operation along Seattle’s historic Lake Washington Ship Canal. GeekWire reported earlier this year that the company has taken over the former Foss shipyard, where it is thought to be testing autonomous vessels for the U.S. Navy.

Founded in 2017 by entrepreneur Palmer Luckey, Anduril has become one of the most prominent defense technology companies in the country, developing autonomous aircraft, maritime systems, surveillance technologies and AI-powered software platforms for military and national security customers.

The company’s Seattle expansion has drawn attention because of the region’s long history as a hub for aerospace, maritime engineering, artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing. The new maritime facility on the south bank of the Ship Canal represents a new chapter for a site with deep roots in Seattle’s shipbuilding history.

In announcing the rally, organizers cited the company’s work on autonomous systems, including underwater and surface vessels, and raised concerns about the role of artificial intelligence in global conflicts.

The groups also pointed to the ongoing Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) military exercises, a multinational naval exercise held in and around Hawaii. The exercise runs through July 31 and includes participation from dozens of nations.

Anduril has increasingly positioned itself as a technology company focused on modernizing defense capabilities, arguing that faster adoption of advanced software, autonomy and AI can improve the effectiveness and safety of military operations.

Sunday’s event is expected to include speeches, testimonials and cultural performances from participating community organizations.

The rally adds a new point of public debate around Anduril’s expansion in Seattle, as the company builds out its presence in a region already home to major technology companies, aerospace firms and a growing defense innovation sector.

In addition to the new facility at the Foss shipyard, Anduril operates facilities in downtown Seattle and Bellevue, where it expanded last summer with a lease for 39,851 square feet of space at Skyline Tower.

Anduril also is rapidly expanding its operations in California, where the company is headquartered. And it is building a massive facility just south of Columbus, Ohio, that it dubs Arsenal-1, described by the company as “the future of American defense manufacturing.”

In May, the company raised a $5 billion funding round from Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and others at a $61 billion valuation.

For the first time in several years, there are indications that the worst may be over for the Seattle region’s battered office market — and artificial intelligence companies appear to be playing a leading role.

The regional office market (spanning Seattle, Bellevue and the surrounding Eastside) posted positive net absorption during the second quarter, meaning companies occupied more office space than they vacated, according to a new report from commercial real estate firm JLL. It’s a notable shift after years of downsizing driven by remote work, layoffs and corporate cost-cutting.

Technology companies accounted for 42.5% of all leasing activity during the quarter, easily outpacing every other industry. JLL said AI-related leasing is on track for a strong year as companies establish engineering hubs in the Seattle region to tap its deep talent pool while taking advantage of office costs that remain well below San Francisco and New York.

In fact, leasing by AI companies has accounted for 21.6% of activity in the Seattle and Eastside year to date, and now the entire AI footprint in the region is 855,000 square feet. That’s double the amount in 2024, according to JLL.

The quarter’s largest deals reflected that trend.

• Databricks signed a 142,000-square-foot lease at Four106 in downtown Bellevue, the biggest office transaction of the quarter.
• DocuSign committed to 116,000 square feet at Seattle’s JPMorgan Chase Center.
• Pokémon moved into The Eight office tower in Bellevue, taking 369,800 square feet of space.

The Pokémon deal helped push the region to 372,000 square feet of positive net absorption for the quarter — reversing a run of quarters in which tenants gave back more space than they took.

The numbers offer an encouraging change after years of gloomy office market reports, but they hardly signal a full recovery. Regional vacancy remains elevated at 23.9%, while overall availability sits at 25%.

Companies continue to consolidate space, landlords are still offering concessions, and asking rents remain under pressure as tenants retain significant negotiating leverage, JLL said in the report

Still, there are indications the market’s fundamentals are improving.

Availability has now declined for two consecutive quarters and has fallen from a peak of 26.5% a year ago. At the same time, JLL reports there is currently no new speculative office construction under way — buildings started without tenants committed — meaning even modest growth in demand could have a greater impact on occupancy than in previous years.

Rather than signaling a broad-based office comeback, the latest leasing data suggests a more nuanced story: AI companies and other fast-growing technology firms are helping stabilize a market that had spent years moving in the opposite direction.

The report reinforces a trend GeekWire has been tracking over the past year as AI companies expand their presence across the Seattle region. Alongside Microsoft and Amazon, companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Armada and Anduril have been building engineering teams in the area, drawn by one of the country’s deepest concentrations of AI and cloud computing talent.

Whether that momentum continues will depend on how quickly AI hiring expands and whether more companies decide they need additional space for a new generation of engineers. But after several years defined by shrinking footprints and empty offices, the second quarter offered the first meaningful indication that Seattle’s office market may finally be finding its footing.

The past two years have transformed the world of software development, but there’s at least one area that remains largely untouched by artificial intelligence: the operating-system layer inside phones, vehicles, and other connected devices. 

A Seattle startup called logcat.ai has raised $2.55 million to change that.

Co-founded by CEO Varun Chitre and CTO Tarun Vashisth, two engineers with years of experience building device software, logcat.ai is developing a system of AI agents that autonomously hunt down bugs across the kernel, modem, and firmware of devices running Android or Linux.

The pre-seed round was led by Founders’ Co-op, with participation from Act One Ventures, TheFounderVC, Shorewind Capital, Clayoquot Capital, and Alumni Ventures. 

“It’s one of the toughest areas of software engineering, and it doesn’t get a lot of exposure. Operating-system engineering is virtually hidden today,” Chitre said in an interview.

It’s also a challenge for many companies given a shortage of engineers who specialize in the field, compared to the much larger population of developers who build apps and software that run on top of the operating system.

How it works: An engineer using logcat.ai uploads the log files a device generates when something goes wrong — such as bug reports and kernel logs — and logcat.ai’s software analyzes them together to find the root cause and point to where in the code to fix it. Each finding cites the exact log line it came from, so an engineer can check the work.

Currently, logcat.ai finds the root cause and recommends a fix. The larger plan is to have the AI write the fixes, test them, and eventually build new features on its own, with engineers approving the work before it’s deployed.

The long-term goal, Chitre said, is to become the standard tool for building and maintaining operating systems on new and existing hardware — from smartphones to cars to robots and other embedded systems — so a company can ship without a full-stack specialist on staff.

“We’re moving toward a world where software and intelligence extend far beyond our laptops and phones, yet the tooling to build high-quality products for that world is still missing,” said Aviel Ginzburg, general partner at Founders’ Co-op, in a statement.

He called Chitre and Vashisth “one of the only teams in the world truly up for the challenge.”

Traction: The company says it has served hundreds of engineering teams in a public beta, analyzed more than 10 billion lines of trace data, and run thousands of automated investigations. It’s generating revenue but isn’t ready to disclose numbers or customers. 

Competitive landscape: Chitre said logcat.ai’s main competition isn’t another product but in-house scripts and the knowledge locked in a few senior engineers’ heads. App-level crash tools like Google’s Crashlytics and Sentry stop at the app layer and don’t do the deeper system debugging.

Specialist vendors and the contract manufacturers that build devices are potential partners more than rivals, Chitre said, since they face the same engineer shortage.

GeekWire first reported on logcat.ai in March, in a Startup Radar roundup.

The team: Chitre and Vashisth met at Esper, the Bellevue, Wash.-based device-management company, where they worked together for more than seven years. They started logcat.ai because they had spent years doing debugging by hand and knew what was missing.

Chitre has spent more than 13 years in the field, getting operating systems to boot and run on new hardware and porting new Android releases and Linux kernels onto older devices. He was also a maintainer of LineageOS, a widely used open-source version of Android. 

Vashisth has led engineering teams working across Android, Linux, and iOS, and brings a background in large-scale distributed systems. At Esper, he rose to senior software engineering manager. His prior experience includes platform-architecture engineering at Target.

For now, the company is just the two founders: Chitre in the Seattle area, Vashisth in Bengaluru, India. They plan to hire about 10 people over the next year, with a distributed team working remotely from wherever they can find the specialized talent.

They know those hires won’t be easy to find, given the scarcity of people in the field. “That’s the same shortage our product exists to address,” Chitre said, “and we’re not exempt from it.” 

The best thing about Seattle’s grunge era is that it existed before the internet could completely spoil it — although the mainstream media, MTV and fashion designers eventually did their best.

None of them would be any match today for artificial intelligence.

In a new video we spotted on Instagram, a time-traveling vlogger under the handle Roxy In Time goes back to 1992 Seattle to explore the city’s music scene during its heyday. The result is grunge meets 2026 AI slop.

It’s an interesting study in how technology that’s very much being built and hyped in modern Seattle can be used to illustrate what the city sort of looked like more than three decades ago. In the video, it’s two years before the start of Amazon and another 15ish before cloud computing and a massive tech boom truly reshaped the region.

AI is being both celebrated and derided for its ability to help create content like Roxy’s time-traveling exploits. Where some see an innocent, weirdly educational history lesson, others can’t look past the replacement of human creativity, the excess of such material polluting social media channels, and the tech’s ability to deceive viewers in more dangerous ways.

Roxy is an AI-generated influencer — not a real person — with a penchant for visiting historically significant places, both real and imagined. She recently checked out L.A.’s Sunset Strip in 1987 and a New York speakeasy during Prohibition in 1929. In other videos she runs across fantastical figures including Paul Bunyan and Humpty Dumpty, and she visits cavemen in 30,000 B.C.

In the Seattle video, Roxy is dressed for the era’s part in a flannel, Nirvana T-shirt, ripped jeans and combat boots. She starts her tour by saying she’s in town to see the band Mudhoney play at Belltown’s Crocodile Cafe. But first she heads to Easy Street Records in West Seattle to browse records, tapes and CDs.

The video is populated with images of random musicians carrying guitars down the street, and people drinking coffee and reading actual print publications instead of staring at laptops. At The Central Saloon and OK Hotel in Pioneer Square, everyone has long hair, or a beanie, or both. Sweaty music fans in mosh pits seem to fit the timeline.

AI’s artistic limitations do come into focus in a few spots, especially when written words are displayed. The names of bands and clubs on music flyers — such as Comet Tavern — are a jumbled mess. Same goes for some of the names on record dividers at Easy Street, where the store’s neon wording also breaks apart.

Back at the Crocodile, Roxy is in line to see Mudhoney, and she’s confused by an opening act named Pen Cap Chew. Inside, as the show starts, she realizes that Pen Cap Chew is actually Nirvana, playing under the secret moniker because by that time the band was a worldwide sensation riding the success of the album “Nevermind.”

In perhaps the most realistic demonstration of being in 1992 — in a club where no one knows what a smartphone is yet — Roxy ends the video by saying she needs to stop recording.

“I’m putting this thing away, I’ve gotta watch this,” she says.

No way anyone would do that in 2026.

— Rina Hahn has left Seattle’s Remitly as chief marketing officer. Hahn joined the remittance company in 2018 as director of digital marketing and rose to CMO after four years. Before joining Remitly, she was an executive at Blue Nile and Big Fish Games.

The publicly traded company helps customers in more than 170 countries send money internationally.

“I’ve seen firsthand the deep love this company has for its customers and the impact that purpose-driven work can have on immigrants and their families around the world,” she said on LinkedIn. Hahn, who is based in London, did not share her next move. Remitly co-founder Matt Oppenheimer stepped down as CEO in February.

— Temporal announced that Preeti Somal has been promoted to executive vice president in a role that will oversee the company’s engineering, product and design operations, which were recently reorganized under a single leader.

The industry is moving so fast that “we can’t afford any distance between the people who decide what to build and the people who build it. Unifying these functions closes that loop,” said CEO Samar Abbas on LinkedIn.

Somal has been with Temporal for three years, joining from HashiCorp where she held EVP roles.

The Seattle-area software company offers a platform for running complex computer workflows more reliably. In February, the business closed a $300 million round that pushed its valuation to $5 billion. Temporal is No. 2 on the GeekWire 200 is a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

— Veeam Software, a Seattle-based data protection and ransomware recovery company, appointed Michelle Graff as senior vice president of global partners and channel. She joins from the cybersecurity company Commvault and is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“The future belongs to organizations that can transform trusted data into trusted AI with resilience built in from the start,” Graff said on LinkedIn.

Graff’s hiring is the latest in a string of leadership changes at Veeam, which has made five other executive hires or promotions this year.

— Qualtrics, an experience management technology company with headquarters in Seattle and Provo, Utah, has promoted Ken Hoang to senior vice president of product. Hoang is based in San Mateo, Calif., and will work remotely. He was previously a VP at Apptio in Bellevue, Wash.

Qualtrics had a big leadership shakeup in April, when five executives were let go in what CEO Jason Maynard described as an effort to “simplify our structure and ensure we are positioned for our next phase of growth.” Two product executives were among those who left, and Hoang joined the company around that time.

Qualtrics, which employs more than 4,500 people globally, makes software that helps companies gather and act on feedback from customers, employees and others through surveys, AI-powered analytics and other tools.

— Monica Lazo is now the sales director for Loopr AI, a Seattle startup that sells computer vision quality control software to manufacturing firms. She joins from Neurala, an AI platform automating visual inspections that is based in Boston.

— Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has named atmospheric scientist Larry Berg as the director of the Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement User Facility.

And some departures from Big Tech:

• Mary Birkner is retiring from Microsoft after 21 years, primarily in leadership with Xbox. “I thank you for the laughter and goodness that were part of the journey to all the big work stuff,” she said on LinkedIn.
• Steve Andrews has closed out a 32-year career that included more than 11 years across two stints at Amazon, most recently as senior principal technical program manager. The TPM role “is often misunderstood and misused, so I dedicated a substantial amount of effort helping to set TPMs, their managers, and their teams up for success across the company,” he said. “I hope it made a difference.”
• Jeff Nienaber is departing Microsoft after more than 16 years, leaving the role of senior director and principal PM for the office of the CTO. “I’m really excited to see what tomorrow’s sunrise has in store,” Nienaber said.

Seattle-area startups raised $2.7 billion in venture funding through the first half of 2026, across 163 deals, down about 40% from $4.5 billion in 210 deals during the same period a year ago.

The figures come from the recently released PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor report for Q2 2026. The decline in capital reflects fewer deals across the board in the Seattle region, with much of the funding going to a handful of large rounds for energy, cybersecurity, and space startups.

Here is the region’s top 5 for the second quarter, as tracked in the report:

• Helion Energy’s $465 million Series G round was the biggest deal of the quarter.
• Starcloud raised $170 million for space-based data centers.
• XBOW pulled in $155 million for autonomous cybersecurity systems.
• Starfish Space closed about $110 million for spacecraft servicing.
• Gradial raised $65 million for its agentic enterprise software platform.

Against the AI grain: In Q2 2026 specifically, startups in the Seattle area closed 85 deals totaling $1.5 billion. That was down from 101 deals and $2.3 billion in the same quarter a year ago, but up from Q1 2026, which PitchBook revised to 78 deals and $1.2 billion as part of its regular data updates.

Heavy infrastructure investments by Microsoft and Amazon have helped to establish the Seattle area as an AI hub, but the region’s pure-play AI startups, on the whole, aren’t seeing investment on the same scale as some of their peers in Silicon Valley and other tech hubs around the country.

That creates a disconnect with the larger U.S. venture capital market. AI companies accounted for 86% of all U.S. venture dollars in the first half of the year, according to the PitchBook-NVCA data.

Nationally, it was a record half: U.S. startups raised $412.7 billion through June, already surpassing the full-year record of $358.6 billion set in 2021. But the number is misleading. Deals of $100 million or more accounted for 87.5% of the total, and AI companies captured 86 cents of every venture dollar.

OpenAI and Anthropic alone absorbed roughly 43% of all global venture capital in the first half of the year, by one estimate. The Bay Area, home to both, pulled in $319 billion, about three times its H1 2025 total.

Strip out those two companies and the national picture looks very different. Seed funding fell 27% nationally in the first half, and first-time fund formation is on pace for its lowest year since 2016.

Regional trends: In that way, what’s happening in the Seattle area reflects the current realities of the market. However, the region is also slipping relative to its peers in the latest numbers.

Among the 10 largest U.S. metro areas for venture funding, Seattle ranked seventh by capital invested in the first half of the year, down from fifth in H1 2025. By deal count, the region was last in the top 10.

The data used in this analysis covers the Seattle-Tacoma combined statistical area (CSA), a broader regional boundary that includes communities beyond the core metro region.

Political climate: Washington’s shifting tax and economic landscape adds another variable.

The state now taxes capital gains at up to 9.9%, a new millionaires’ tax takes effect in 2028, and legislators this year floated taxing the federal QSBS exemption that startup founders and early employees rely on when they sell shares at exit. That bill didn’t pass, but generated enough alarm to cause a backlash from startup community leaders and investors.

Looking ahead: Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ Kent-based space company, is reportedly seeking up to $10 billion in what would be its first outside funding round. A deal that size would be larger than every other Seattle-area venture round this year combined.

“Speak softly and carry a big prompt.”

That’s not exactly how Theodore Roosevelt put it, but presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin found herself face to face with an AI-powered version of the 26th president at the newly opened Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, N.D. — and she had questions.

Goodwin is among the high-profile visitors to interact with the lifelike, immersive version of Roosevelt that is able to discuss his life, leadership and legacy.

A week after a visit from President Trump, Goodwin joined Microsoft President Brad Smith at the library to learn how the tech giant’s AI is being used to help the institution — and the Roosevelt avatar — speak directly to future generations.

“Who better to put our avatar to the test than American historian Doris Kearns Goodwin,” Smith wrote on LinkedIn on Sunday, where he shared a video of a clearly giddy Goodwin meeting the digital Roosevelt.

“I’ve been wanting to meet you for such a long time,” Goodwin said. “I feel like I’ve lived with you for 10 years of my life when I wrote a first book about you.”

Goodwin asked Roosevelt questions about his relationship with JP Morgan, the changing will of the country, and how it was presumed that when he neared death, Roosevelt would still be fighting and still be in the arena.

“I never cared how’d I’d be remembered by the historians,” the avatar said. “Still swinging, still loud, still on your feet. If folks say I managed that, well, I’m glad of it.”

A Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer who has written extensively about presidents and American history, Goodwin was moved by the interaction.

“Wow,” she said. “It’s amazing.”

The AI works as part of Box 1, the knowledge base backbone of the museum, powered by technology Microsoft helped create. According to a July 1 Microsoft blog post, the system is loaded with hundreds of thousands of archival documents, and AI is used to “organize, enrich and reconstruct fragmented materials into searchable, contextualized historical records.”

Box 1 and AI also power The Campfire Reading Room, a digital research tool that anyone anywhere in the world can use to search through Roosevelt’s writings, letters, images and historical materials.

Microsoft donated much of its work with the library through its AI for Good Lab. The company said it plans to release a paper documenting exactly how the technology works and to open source the software used in the project.

As technology evolves, the library will evolve with it, Microsoft said. When more documents are added to Box 1 or as generative AI improves, the Roosevelt avatar will automatically update with the additional context.

“That’s why we call it a living library,” said Laura Hoffman, senior director of the AI for Good Lab. “One of the most challenging things for cultural institutions is to continue to keep their experiences feeling relevant and fresh. This is what’s great about AI technology: It will continue to get better and better.”

Augmodo, the Seattle startup that straps AI-powered cameras onto retail workers to track store shelves, has raised $21 million as it pushes its technology beyond grocery aisles and into warehouses, factories, and other physical workplaces.

The new funding, led by existing investor TQ Ventures, values Augmodo at $350 million.

CEO Ross Finman, who told GeekWire he wasn’t even looking to raise fresh capital, said he was motivated by interest in the startup’s technology from customers beyond retail, including automotive settings and hospitals.

“Fundamentally, someone grabbing a wrench at an automotive factory isn’t that different from someone grabbing a Cheerios box,” Finman said. “Turns out the algorithms work pretty well across all of those.”

Founded in 2023, Augmodo builds AI-powered “Smartbadges” — lightweight wearable devices with dual cameras — that store employees wear passively as they move through aisles. The badges use computer vision, 3D mapping, and spatial computing to track shelf inventory in real time, building what the company calls a digital “Realogram” of each store.

Augmodo raised $37.5 million a year ago in a round that came after Australian pharmacy chain Chemist Warehouse — the startup’s first big customer — moved from a pilot to a full contract and validated the technology at scale. Now others want in on the action.

“Our whole mission statement is AI systems for the physical workforce,” Finman said. “Everyone’s focused on the 20% of the workforce that’s knowledge work, and we’re focused on the 80% of the workforce that’s physical work.”

That demand has pulled Augmodo into warehouses, facility maintenance, delivery operations, and even employee training — verticals the company didn’t originally set out to serve. Existing retail customers, Finman said, kept expanding their contracts to cover new parts of their operations, from auditing warehouse pallets to logging maintenance work like HVAC repairs.

The Smartbadge itself has evolved, too. Finman said it’s now lighter than an iPhone Air and has grown into what he calls an “everything device,” adding walkie-talkie capabilities, an opt-in panic button, and a digital ID display, on top of its original inventory-tracking function.

“That’s actually become a really big selling point,” Finman said. “You don’t need to buy five or six different devices, you buy one at cost, and then here’s all the different features that you can get out of it.”

The company says it has grown 10x in revenue over the past year and now maps more than 186 million square feet of retail space monthly — a figure it expects to cross 1 billion square feet per month by year’s end. Augmodo is adding 50 to 100 new store locations a month.

The company’s headcount has grown 5x over the past year to more than 50 employees, including new CTO Bradford Snow, who joined in January after previous stints at Axon, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft.

Augmodo is ranked No. 145 on the GeekWire 200 list of top Pacific Northwest startups and was a finalist in the Hardware, Robotics, and Physical AI of the Year category at the 2026 GeekWire Awards.

Beyond TQ Ventures, backers include Lerer Hippeau, Jefferson River Capital, Arena Holdings, Chemist Warehouse, New Fare, Interlace, and Webb Investment Network.

Andrew Marks, co-founding partner at TQ, called Finman an “exceptional” leader and said every board meeting reinforced that demand for Augmodo’s tech was outpacing the team’s ability to serve it.

“When you pair a truly special founder with customers lining up around the door and pulling you into new markets, it was obvious we should propose putting more fuel on the fire,” Marks said.

Augmodo said it plans to use the new capital to expand its global enterprise footprint, invest further in its core AI models, and grow its engineering team — with a particular focus on hiring for computer vision and machine learning roles as the company scales its data processing beyond retail.

Attitudes towards AI differ by country, gender, profession, age, and political affiliation.  A few of those gaps are startling. This article is chock-full of stats. Read it for the surprises, or glance at the bar graph below for a quick overview.

Let’s start with geography, the widest split of all. Ask people in China whether they trust AI and, Edelman finds, nearly nine in 10 say yes; ask Americans and barely a third do. The same chasm shows up, in the Stanford AI Index, on the larger question of whether AI’s benefits outweigh its drawbacks, where most Chinese say it’s good stuff and most Americans have their doubts. 

Here’s a possible explanation. Where economies are young and growing fast, AI reads as a ladder up; where they are mature, it reads as a threat to jobs and more. Trust in AI seems to track two things, confidence in institutions and the expectation of personal gain, and both run higher in many Asian countries than in a wary West.

In the U.S., men are about twice as likely as women to expect AI to be good for society, Pew finds, and the gap is wider still among the researchers who build it. The tempting explanation, that women use the tools less, no longer holds: over the past two years women have drawn even with men in using chatbots, yet they trust them less. Women are also likelier to say AI is moving too fast. 

Adults under 50 reach for ChatGPT at twice the rate of their elders, Pew reports, yet it is the under-30s who are most convinced it will be bad for society. Here, familiarity breeds unease, and for a concrete reason: the young are not only the heaviest users but the most exposed. AI may be coming first for the entry-level jobs they are trying to land, and they sense it, with Gen Z likelier than any older group to expect it to cut into their job prospects, per the Harris Poll. 

Among the AI researchers surveyed, most expect the technology to help the country over the next two decades, Pew’s survey shows; among the public, fewer than one in five do. Some of that is knowledge, since the experts grasp what the systems can and cannot do and fear the lurid scenarios less.

Of course, the people who design AI have their careers and fortunes riding on its success, while the people who answer phones or drive trucks see mainly the threat to their own. The same pattern runs across industries, from technology workers who welcome AI on the job to transportation workers who oppose it. As per Miles’ Law, where you stand depends on where you sit.

The last divide is one that’s moved in recent years, and it’s moved fast. Two years ago Republicans were the AI skeptics; Democrats have since caught up and passed them. Today, just over half of Republicans now trust Washington to regulate AI; barely a third of Democrats do, Pew finds. 

AI companies are now more admired on the right than the left, a Harris Poll shows. Democrats are cooling on companies they once cheered, and Republicans are warming to a boom their side now champions. That said, in both parties more people worry that regulation will do too little than too much; what they split on is whom they trust to do the reining.

Despite some loud voices, there is no single verdict on AI.  Optimism comes from those with the most to gain, in the rising economies and inside the labs; doubts rise from those with the most to lose or the most to fear. Whatever AI turns out to be, it is being built by the people most enthusiastic about it, for a public that is not.

Vinod Khosla has spent four decades building and funding companies around a single idea: hire the right people and get out of their way. He’s one of the most respected and influential investors in Silicon Valley, with a track record of big bets and a habit of not backing down.

On Saturday, a group led by the billionaire venture capitalist and his family agreed to buy the Seattle Seahawks from the estate of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen for a reported $9.6 billion, which would be the highest price ever paid for an NFL team.

Khosla, 71, was born in Pune, India. He earned degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi and Carnegie Mellon before getting his MBA at Stanford, where he landed in Silicon Valley for good. After co-founding Sun in 1982, he spent nearly two decades as a partner at the legendary venture firm Kleiner Perkins before launching Khosla Ventures in 2004.

His firm now manages roughly $15 billion and has backed companies including DoorDash, Affirm, and Opendoor. Khosla was the first VC to invest in OpenAI, putting in $50 million in 2019. Forbes ranked him No. 1 on its Midas List of top tech investors this year and estimates his net worth at $15.6 billion.

But the Seahawks deal isn’t just about Vinod. The Allen estate’s public statement confirming the formal sale agreement described the buyer as “an ownership group led by the Khosla family,” and Vinod’s own quote in the statement was delivered “on behalf of the Khosla family.”

Estate of Paul G. Allen Reaches Agreement to Sell Seattle Seahawks pic.twitter.com/Pmv8i6FEp8

— Seattle Seahawks (@Seahawks) July 11, 2026

An NFL memo sent to all 32 teams Saturday, reported by ESPN’s Adam Schefter and others, identified his wife, Neeru Khosla, as the controlling owner, and said their son, Neal Khosla, “would be expected to have a significant leadership role in the ownership group.”

Neal may be the one to watch. He has described himself on his personal website as “an obsessive sports fan” who likes “bringing a quantitative and analytical lens to understanding the game within the game,” the Seattle Times reports.

He and his father have been San Francisco 49ers season ticket holders for 30 years, and Neal has consulted for both the 49ers and the Miami Heat. The Khosla family last year bought a 3.1% stake in the 49ers — the Seahawks’ NFC West division rivals — which they’ll now have to sell.

But Vinod Khosla’s track record is the clearest window into how the family will approach its Seahawks ownership. Here’s what we know about him based on his long career in tech.

He focuses on people and talent above all else. “A company becomes the people it hires, not the plan it makes,” Khosla said in a 2016 Startup Grind interview.

“Experience doesn’t matter. The rate of learning matters,” he told Sam Altman in a Y Combinator interview the same year, using a football analogy (fittingly as it now turns out): “Pick for the best athlete, not the person who’s the most established wide receiver who knows how to run one pattern.”

At Sun, Khosla spent an inordinate amount of his time on recruiting. He personally reconstructed the org chart of competitor DEC to identify talent that the company could poach.

Speaking at Seattle’s AI House in March 2025, Khosla’s main advice for startup founders was that their success will be driven by the people they hire and the questions they ask.

“The single most important decision by far you will make is the team you build,” he said at the time. “The more questions that get asked around your conference table, the better it will go, the faster you will learn, and the faster you will accumulate advantages.”

“Talent drives everything,” he said at another event in Seattle last summer, the Bloomberg Green Seattle conference on climate change.

For the record, the Seahawks’ current leadership is ostensibly locked in: general manager John Schneider is under contract through 2031, and head coach Mike Macdonald, who led the team to its Super Bowl win in February, is signed through 2029, according to The Seattle Times.

Whether the trademark Khosla obsession with talent will translate into getting involved with draft picks and player personnel will be an interesting question to watch.

He’s a Bay Area guy, not a Seattle guy. Khosla has lived and worked in Silicon Valley since earning his MBA at Stanford in 1980. Khosla Ventures is based in Menlo Park. The family’s 49ers ties underscore that this is not a homegrown owner.

Khosla has made a handful of appearances in the Seattle area over the years. His firm led a $11 million round for Seattle-based AI legal startup Lexion in 2021, and a $15 million round in Viome, the wellness startup co-founded by Seattle-area entrepreneur Naveen Jain, in 2017.

But he has no deep roots in the Pacific Northwest, which is a major difference from Seattle native Paul Allen and his family. How quickly the Khosla family builds a connection to the city and Seahawks fans may matter as much as anything they do on the football side.

He supports the people he picks, but tells it like it is. In more than 30 years on startup boards, Khosla says he has never once voted against a management team, even when he strongly disagrees.

“I’ll argue with them, I’ll debate with them, I’ll push them, but I will not vote against them,” he said in the Startup Grind interview. The Khosla Ventures website puts it more plainly: “Once we pick a management team, we back it and don’t second-guess it.”

For a Seahawks fan base that watched Paul Allen’s sister Jody Allen take a largely hands-off approach as chair of the Allen estate, the philosophy may sound familiar, although Khosla’s version would also come with a willingness to challenge leaders behind closed doors.

For example, Khosla has said he deliberately takes positions he doesn’t believe in when coaching founders — not to mislead them, but to force them to think through risks they haven’t considered.

The Khosla Ventures approach, as explained on its site, is “brutal honesty over hypocritical politeness.”

He’s not without controversy. In 2008, Khosla bought a 53-acre property south of Half Moon Bay, Calif., that included the only access road to Martins Beach, a stretch of coastline that surfers and families had used for decades. He locked the gate and blocked public access, setting off a legal battle that has lasted more than a decade and drawn widespread criticism.

The case has gone to the California Supreme Court and back.

“Every Generation Gets the Beach Villain It Deserves,” the New York Times headlined a 2018 story about the dispute. Khosla has argued it’s a private property rights issue. Critics see it as a billionaire putting his own interests above the public.

The takeaway: he doesn’t back down, even when public opinion is against him.

He’s persistent in business, as well. That habit of not backing down has been consistent throughout his tech and investing career.

When Sun was told it had lost a critical early deal to a rival, Khosla flew from San Francisco to Boston and camped out in the prospective customer’s office until the CEO agreed to see him. By the end of the day, the company had signed with Sun, according to The Generalist.

When defective Philips monitors nearly bankrupted Sun, Khosla went home at 3 a.m. and was back by 7 a.m. for months until the crisis passed, he said in the Y Combinator interview.

“Survive long enough in your field to have time to get lucky,” he told founders at one meetup.

During a 2011 appearance in Seattle, Khosla offered this take on betting big: “I don’t mind the low probability of success, but I better be impactful if we do succeed.” He was talking about startups, but the same idea no doubt applies to chasing another Lombardi Trophy.

On this week’s show, we’re on the GeekWire deck for our annual founder open house, where we dig into Microsoft’s latest round of layoffs — including a major Xbox shakeup — and the surprising rise of hardware companies on the GeekWire 200.

Then we sit down with four guests to talk about how AI is reshaping how they build: 

• Jana Schuster of StackIQ, whose AI-native platform helps companies find redundancy in their software spending — like Rocket Money, but for business — with a small team.
• Blake Resnick and David Benowitz of Brinc Drones, whose mechanical engineers are now vibe coding their own prototypes;
• Boaz Ashkenazy of Shift AI, who’s setting up always-on agents and rethinking how we interact with AI tools.

Finally, this week’s GeekWire Trivia Challenge: how a longtime T-Mobile executive got his start in the wireless business, and the star-studded history of T-Mobile celebrity endorsers.

Stories mentioned:

• Microsoft cuts 4,800 jobs, about 2% globally, revamps salesforce and launches massive Xbox overhaul
• GeekWire 200 update: New unicorns and a hardware surge remake our list of top Pacific NW startups
• Former GitHub CEO’s startup Entire unveils its answer to the crush of AI coding agents
• Chicago software company plants flag in Seattle area as new leadership team seeks AI talent
• T-Mobile exec Mike Katz exits after 28 years, as carrier reshuffles top ranks and taps ex-AT&T leader

Audio editing by Curt Milton.

Ever since its founding, SpaceX has fixed upon a single idea: Elon Musk’s vision of colonizing Mars. Everything the company does is geared to that foundational goal.

Two years ago, Musk posted on X that there could be a city on Mars within 20 years, “but for sure in 30.”

“Civilization secured,” he added, implying that even if our troubled lives here on Earth come to some catastrophic end in the coming decades, don’t worry, humans will endure on Mars.

Musk’s initial steps toward this ambition have produced awesome engineering successes. People have never seen the likes of the light displays that shower across night skies from SpaceX’s rockets and satellites. They watched astounded in late 2024 when the gigantic Starship’s booster rocket first descended gently to nestle into enclosing mechanical arms at the launch site in Texas.

Yet the work of scientists studying Mars suggests that it’s far-fetched, perhaps delusional, to think a human colony could be established there. You don’t need to be a billionaire or a rocket scientist to realize Musk’s timeframe is certainly a fantasy; there won’t be a city on Mars in his lifetime or that of his children or his grandchildren. Think many, many decades at best. But more likely, never.

Retail investors rushed to buy SpaceX stock after the IPO in June. Though the share price has already fallen back below where it was that day, many see it as a long-term investment. The reality is that the improbability of the Mars project shadows SpaceX’s long-term future.

While humans will at some point likely overcome the massively daunting engineering and logistics challenges of getting to Mars and even staying for some time, there’s no technology available to form a permanent settlement there.

Musk may be excused as being playful with his time scale.

“Oh, Elon is famously bad at giving time estimates,” said Erika DeBenedictis, a biological engineer and Mars scientist, founder of Pioneer Labs, which is researching how to grow plants on Mars. “Things always take longer than he says, but they do tend to happen.”

Musk has been quite specific. Last year, he said SpaceX had a 50:50 chance of sending its first uncrewed Starships toward Mars in 2026, with crewed landings to follow “as soon as 2029, although 2031 is more likely,” he posted on X.  

Then, this February, he said SpaceX would build a city on the moon first and start building a Mars city “in about 5 to 7 years.”

While his targets and timing keep moving, the problems go deeper than that. The question is not when humanity will expand beyond Earth, but whether it ever will.

Establishing a city on Mars depends crucially on a concept called “terraforming,” which means physically transforming the planet’s surface environment into something resembling that of Earth, at least partially hospitable for humans.

To DeBenedictis, the sterile science fiction notion of people confined inside glass domes, looking out upon a forbiddingly bleak landscape and living off protein shakes and dried food, is deeply unappealing. “I wouldn’t want it and I wouldn’t want it for my daughter,” she said. “It just seems terrible.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way,” she adds. “I want the planet to be green.”

DeBenedictis concedes at the outset of an interview that this is “probably impossible,” though in the tone of someone who lives to chase the impossible.

In contrast, Musk glibly mentions terraforming as if it were within reach. In truth, science has only highly conjectural ideas about how it might be done. The hypothetical options scientists are researching now, if they work at all, will take many decades if not centuries to make Mars habitable. And they may never work.

A titanic ambition

Despite this, investment bankers and those with pre-IPO access were primed to ride the coattails of Musk’s colossal wealth for a big payout on SpaceX’s Wall Street launch day. Musk supercharged the June IPO by absorbing his xAI project into SpaceX. The IPO filing positioned xAI as a $26.5 trillion market opportunity, dwarfing all the other business segments of SpaceX, which the filing pegged at a mere $2 trillion. What’s an IPO without a transcendent AI promise these days?

The controversies around Musk’s politics and conduct — his embrace of President Trump and other authoritarian leaders, his incendiary rhetoric, his reposting on his X platform of right-wing influencers agitating around immigration and race, his eager wielding of a chainsaw to U.S. government services — were set aside by investors as they scrambled to buy in.

Wall Street weighed only Musk’s entrepreneurial success and his ability to conjure the future and spin financial dreams. The Economist in May called Musk’s risk-taking and mobilizing of resources “capitalism at its most remarkable.”

For Wall Street, that made the SpaceX IPO a surefire winner. The share price duly rocketed up and made Musk briefly a trillionaire. Though he lost that status when the share price subsequently slid, he’s still by far the richest man in the world with a net worth into the $900 billions.

That fortune is built upon the market perception that Musk can turn dreams into reality. Mass-producing all-electric, virtually self-driving cars was once a pipedream. Rockets landing on their tails graced the covers of 1950s science fiction novels. By force of will, Musk made both a reality. Whatever pipe he’s smoking now, shouldn’t we give his Mars dream some healthy respect?

That dream is specified precisely on the SpaceX website: “A permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants.”

Musk designed the huge Starship rocket to go to Mars. And when Musk first unveiled his plan for the internet satellite venture that became Starlink in Seattle more than a decade ago — the satellites are made in Redmond — he told Bloomberg Businessweek he saw it as “a long-term revenue source for SpaceX to be able to fund a city on Mars.”

Nearer term, SpaceX is to provide the lunar lander for NASA’s Artemis project that should return humans to the moon within a few years and lay the groundwork for a permanent moonbase; Musk sees it as a stepping stone to the true goal.

The problem is, Mars is not even remotely habitable. It’s deathly cold. There’s nothing on the surface but dust and rocks, in places some deeply frozen CO₂. Regular dust storms whip the surface. The planet has zero vegetation; not a tree, not a leaf, not a blade of grass. The oxygen-free Martian air is unbreathable.

Venture outside without a space suit and you’ll die within a minute in the poisonous, low-pressure atmosphere. During unpredictable solar flares, cosmic radiation is a separate threat to life.

Martian gravity, one-third of Earth’s, may deform the human body over time. Astronauts on the zero-gravity International Space Station must work out constantly to retain muscle strength. Even then, if they spend too long in space they must be carried from the space capsule after splashdown.

“I don’t see any prospect for there to be permanent settlements,” said senior NASA astrogeophysicist Chris McKay, who for more than 40 years has studied the possibility of supporting human life beyond Earth, and on Mars specifically. “Why would anybody want to live there?”

Bruce Jakosky, professor emeritus at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who has studied Mars his entire career since he worked on the Mars rover Viking mission in the mid-1970s, says he thinks it will happen someday, but adds, “I have no idea when or how.”

“It’s far enough into the future that, once you get beyond, say, 30 years, you can’t tell the difference between that and infinity into the future,” Jakosky said.

That’s scientific realism. Buzz Lightyear talks about getting to infinity and beyond, but he’s a toy.

What’s really achievable on Mars

Despite the cold facts, Musk has so successfully sold the notion that if he put out a call for volunteers for the first Starship mission to Mars, hundreds of space scientists, enthusiasts, adventurers and Musk fanbros would eagerly sign up.

Indeed, he already has a Mars mission volunteer. On the launch webcast of SpaceX’s latest and largest Starship rocket in late May, a presenter introduced cryptocurrency billionaire and civilian astronaut Chun Wang, revealing that he’s been tapped to lead the first crewed flyby mission to Mars at some unspecified future date — a round trip of about two years, going there and back without landing on the surface.

And yes, it’s inevitable humans will get to Mars one day. Crewed spacecraft may land on Mars within a couple of decades.

The first astronauts to land will plan to explore the surface and hopefully return in triumph two years later, the next occasion when the Mars solar orbit again aligns with Earth. DeBenedictis dismissively describes this as the “expensive camping trip” phase of exploration, “mostly for the photo opp.”

Decades from now, humans may take a much harder, more substantive step: establishing a scientific base on Mars; we have such bases in Antarctica today. Researchers could rotate in and out every couple of years.

Creating a permanent colony on Mars is something far different. It implies lifetime commitments and subsequent generations growing up and building their lives there. As Elton John sang, “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids. In fact, it’s cold as hell. And there’s no one there to raise them if you did.”

A child born on Mars — a Martian! — would likely adapt to the low gravity as it developed. We have zero data on the physical consequences. Such a child could grow up so different in muscular and skeletal strength that he or she would be unable to walk on Earth.

“The first mothers that give birth will be guinea pigs,” said NASA’s McKay.

And yet, Musk has laid out a plan he insists can establish a human colony on Mars within his lifetime. After Optimus humanoid robots designed by Tesla do some advance exploring on the Martian surface, eventually “a few thousand” Starship rockets will head off together from Earth orbit to Mars, loaded with people and more than a million tons of equipment, dried food and supplies.

The SpaceX website offers a few images envisioning life in the early days of a Mars colony. A mom and two kids look out from inside a glass dome as a Starship lands nearby. The accompanying text on the website glances over some of the most glaring problems.

The extreme temperature fluctuations, from 70°F to -225°F, with an average of about -85°F? “It is a little cold, but we can warm it up.”

The atmosphere of mostly unbreathable CO₂? That’s good for plants; those don’t need oxygen. “We can grow plants on Mars just by compressing the atmosphere.”

That one-third gravity compared to Earth? “You would be able to lift heavy things and bound around.”

In a speech a year ago to employees at the Texas rocket site — the video is on the SpaceX website — Musk conceded that Mars is inhospitable but said terraforming will provide the solution.

“You can’t really walk around on the surface of Mars, at least as yet until Mars is terraformed to be like Earth,” Musk told the employees. “You need to walk around with a Mars suit and be initially in kind of like glass domes.”

“But it would work,” he added. “And eventually we can make Mars into an Earthlike planet.”

Yes. Terraforming. How exactly could that be achieved? And how long would it take?

The science on terraforming

SpaceX did not respond to requests to grant an interview or to offer comment on the feasibility of Musk’s vision. But Mars scientists have studied the question. Edwin Kite, associate professor of planetary science at the University of Chicago, resident at the Berkeley-Calif.-based Astera Institute that funds futuristic science, is a leading researcher on terraforming Mars. In a paper published in April in collaboration with two dozen other Mars scientists, including DeBenedictis, he assessed the feasibility of the potential pathways currently being studied.

His paper begins with a bracing caveat: “It is unknown whether human civilization can thrive off-Earth.”

But if we want to try living on Mars, the paper says, the first requirement will be to warm the freezing planet or at least regions of the planet. It lays out three possible ways to do so.

Some local regions on Mars could hypothetically be warmed by spreading a translucent, high-tech blanket that would block harmful UV radiation but otherwise allow sunlight through to warm the Martian soil. The solar warmth trapped beneath the blanket, made from a plastic-like biomaterial, would melt ice under the ground. The heat and water would then potentially support primitive life forms, starting with microbes, bacteria and algae and, in time, plants.

However, even warmed, wet Martian soil is salty and laden with bleach-like chemicals hostile to life. No known micro-organism on Earth can survive in such conditions.

That’s where DeBenedictis’s research comes in. Her team — funded in large part by crypto billionaire and space entrepreneur Jed McCaleb, who founded the Astera Institute — is trying through selective breeding and genome modification to engineer new, hardier biological organisms that could get life started in the Martian soil. She is looking to microbes that could digest the bleach and others that could produce more of the bioplastic, allowing extension of the soil-heating blanket to a larger area.

The idea: as the soil improves with this microbial organic matter, more complex organisms could take hold. Eventually, she says, “you could actually do things like grow potatoes in the dirt.”

DeBenedictis is super optimistic about biology turning Mars green. It could have a cover of basic plants “in my lifetime,” she says.

Pioneer Labs has been going for just two years. Its early-stage research is developing lab-grown microbes inside enclosed, stirred, heated, radiation-shielded vessels, like high-tech Instant Pots. It’s a long way from growing potatoes.

DeBenedictis notes that although the lack of oxygen means humans still couldn’t breathe outside, plants grown under these bioplastic blankets would produce oxygen through photosynthesis. That might eventually build up a breathable atmosphere on Mars at some point in the far future. Kite said the timeframe for that would be centuries, at least — “much longer than your civilization-relevant time scales.”

The second warming method outlined in Kite’s paper: large reflecting mirrors in orbit around Mars, beaming down sunlight to warm a contained scientific base and the region immediately around it. The first reflectors would launch from Earth as solar sails, unfurling in space and flying themselves to Mars, propelled by sunlight.

Kite projects that doubling the sunlight reaching an area of less than half a square mile on Mars would require a large constellation of reflectors in sun-synchronous orbit, with a combined surface of nearly 300 square miles.

That’s a huge armada of solar sails heading off to Mars, all of which would have to be managed and maintained from Earth.

The third and most extravagant pathway being studied: warm the entire planet by forcing artificial global warming.

At one time, it was hoped that local warming on Mars would release frozen CO₂ in the ground as a greenhouse gas that would thicken the atmosphere and gradually warm the whole planet, the same process now warming Earth. But a 2018 paper by Jakosky dashed that plan. Analysis of sensor data and imagery from the latest satellites orbiting Mars showed there’s not enough frozen CO₂ on the surface to provide significant greenhouse warming.

That paper concluded that “terraforming Mars is not possible using present-day technology.”

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To overcome that setback, scientists developed a new idea: pumping a few million tons of aerosol particles into the atmosphere, artificial dust manufactured on Mars from material in the soil. These clouds of dust, which would very slowly settle and have to be continuously spewed out, would warm Mars by trapping the solar heat.

But the time scale for this is the longest under consideration. NASA’s McKay, in a 1991 paper, analyzed the timeframe for a greenhouse effect on Mars, based on how much of the solar energy reaching its surface might be realistically trapped. He calculated that it would take 100 years to warm the surface to an Earth-like temperature, and “perhaps 100,000 years” to eventually produce an oxygen-rich atmosphere from plant photosynthesis.

Kite, in an interview, said it would take “decades, at least” just to build the robotically-operated factories on the Martian surface that would manufacture and disperse the aerosols across the planet. His paper projects the cost of the aerosol project at $1 trillion.

DeBenedictis said this enormous investment and the extended time scale of planetwide warming make the more local methods the only practical options.

Yet even if any of these planet-warming methods work, that still leaves the other major problems. While machines can extract oxygen from the CO₂ in the atmosphere and pump it into sealed indoor living spaces, the air remains unbreathable outside. The extremely low pressure and potentially deadly cosmic rays remain unaddressed. Inside and out, the low gravity will still, over time, exert its unpredictable physical impact on human bodies.

In short, even if these wildly speculative, generations-long projects succeed somewhat in warming Mars, the result will fall disappointingly short of Earth-like. Dreams of colonizing Mars could still reach a dead end.

Concluding his summary of the various possible paths toward terraforming Mars, Kite notes that “no approach has been shown to be simultaneously affordable, safe, scalable, and to enable extending life beyond Earth.”

As one might expect from a group of Mars researchers, Kite’s paper urges that terraforming research continue, arguing that “a finding that no approach is viable” would at least curtail the vast expense and bring more realism to plans for large numbers of people to self-sustain anywhere beyond Earth.

SpaceX woos investors

SpaceX’s IPO prospectus relegated such downer conclusions to the “risk factors” section that offers legal cover in any such financial filing. The Mars mission and similar space endeavors, the filing said, “involve significant technical complexity, unproven technologies, or technologies that do not exist or may require significant advancement.”

Outside that CYA boilerplate, the prospectus offered investors a Musk-style sprinkling of high-flown stardust. The SpaceX “mission is to build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.”

In case that was insufficiently inspiring, the prospectus added a dash of fear, stating that humanity needs to spread beyond Earth to survive a potential planetary catastrophe. “We do not want humans to have the same fate as dinosaurs,” it stated.

When Musk addressed employees in Texas as the IPO opened trading on June 12, he gushed enthusiasm for his vision: “There have to be things that make you excited about the future, that make you glad to wake up in the morning because you can’t wait to see what happens next.”

The risk to future funding

For Musk, maintaining such enthusiasm will be essential. For beyond the scientific and engineering challenges of the Mars enterprise, politics and economics could be showstoppers.

After the inspiration of the first human moon landing in 1969, the public quickly lost interest in subsequent Apollo missions. However scientifically interesting, the moon seemed to offer little but dust and rocks.

SpaceX’s stunning rocket launches and the recent Artemis mission that swung astronauts around the moon have reignited space travel enthusiasm in a new generation.

But interest could collapse again.

Kite’s paper notes that “If in the future crew were lost and there were no obvious short-term financial benefits to exploration, society might cease to pay the high costs of sending people to space.”

Orbiting space satellites — chiefly communications, navigation, imagery, surveillance, and missile detection — will continue to rake in cash for SpaceX, much of it from the government. And Musk is well-placed to grab lucrative Pentagon contracts to deploy weapons to kill enemy satellites and defenses to protect ours.

And leveraging the hot-buzz AI trend, SpaceX now plans to build satellites that will act as solar-powered AI data centers in space. The value of this is uncertain; why pay the enormous costs to put data computers into orbit when you can run them on Earth? Still, it seems less of a pipedream than a city on Mars.

But crewed space missions beyond Earth orbit produce no immediate applications. An investment sinkhole, they demand clear-eyed purpose, not delusion.

In an interview, Jakosky — who like McKay, Kite and DeBenedictis fervently wants humans to be interplanetary one day — said he doesn’t buy Musk’s idea that if, say, climate change makes Earth less habitable, Mars can be a “back-up planet.”

Terraforming Mars is just too far out, he believes.

“It’s an incredible amount of money and resources that would be better spent understanding our own climate here,” Jakosky said. “It’s always going to be easier to terraform the Earth, bring it back to the current conditions, than it is going to be to terraform Mars.”

The realistic future

If the Mars project fades in the years ahead, Musk may try pivoting entirely to AI as the new vision — and investment draw — for SpaceX.

In the meantime, the next big technical milestone, one needed just to reach the moon, never mind Mars, will be refueling rockets in space. If this and other hard-to-pull-off engineering challenges can be met, what’s realistically ahead for Mars exploration?

It would be much easier to build a city in Antarctica than on Mars but we haven’t done so. (Why? Oh yes, no one wants to live there.) Instead, we have scientific bases there, where researchers rotate in and out after a few months. Tourists visit Antarctica in the summer to see the penguins. At the largest U.S. base, McMurdo Station, there’s even a bar and a chapel.

NASA’s McKay foresees such a base as the future human footprint on Mars — at least for a century. Beyond that, who knows?

He has traveled to Antarctica for nearly 40 years, typically staying no more than two months, specifically to study the effects of the cold, dry environment for his Mars research.

But in the long, dark Antarctic winter, those scientific and military research bases largely empty out. There are no nurseries, no elementary schools, and no full-time residents.

“I go there for a season and contribute to the research and then come home,” McKay said. “I don’t want to take my family there.”

McKay, who grew up watching Star Trek, still hopes that the “long, long, long-term vision” of humans on other planets will one day materialize.

“The problem with some of the current thinking is that it jumps from zero, right now, from one or two robotic missions to, OK, let’s set up a million people on Mars, with nurseries and kids and everything,” he said. “That’s crazy.”

“Humans moving into space, I think that is inevitable,” McKay said. “But it might be that it takes thousands of years.”

Which is worse, sailing your superyacht through the city where your company just made mass job cuts, or getting named to a U.S. Federal Reserve panel on jobs and productivity three days after announcing thousands of layoffs?

It might not be a full Zuck, but Microsoft Xbox CEO Asha Sharma is getting lots of attention, and not in a good way, for the latter this week.

Sharma was named Thursday to co-lead a new Federal Reserve “Productivity and Jobs” task force, charged with assessing the economic impact of AI and other new technologies on the labor market. Her co-leaders: Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and vocal AI booster, and Stanford economist Charles I. Jones, who is currently on leave at Anthropic, maker of the Claude AI chatbot.

The gaming press, as you can imagine, is having a field day. The headline from Kotaku sums it up: “Xbox CEO Will Advise Federal Reserve On Jobs After Mass Layoffs.”

PC Gamer, for its part, noted that the task force is supposed to represent a “commitment to price stability and maximum employment.” However, that’s the Fed’s broad mandate, as described by Chairman Kevin Warsh. It’s actually not the specific mission of the Productivity and Jobs task force, which is narrower: assessing what AI and other new technologies are doing to the economy.

In a separate sign of the backlash, Microsoft communications chief Frank Shaw took to X on Friday to knock down claims that the Xbox cuts were made to replace employees with foreign workers, calling it “bad information” and noting that the H-1B visa figures being cited are company-wide renewals, not Xbox-specific. He also pointed out that Sharma is “an American born, raised, and educated CEO, from Wisconsin.”

Also lost in the coverage of the Fed appointment is the fact that Sharma is less than five months into the job, having taken over as Xbox CEO in February with a mandate to turn around and preserve a gaming division that spent more than $20 billion over five years while its core revenue shrank. The restructuring announced this week is a key part of that effort.

What’s more, it’s hard to imagine that this is the timing Microsoft or Sharma wanted. Announcements like this are often outside the control of the participants. The Federal Reserve sets its own schedule.

Still, it’s tough timing for an executive who announced plans this week to cut 3,200 gaming jobs — about 1,600 immediately, with the rest over the coming year — amounting to roughly 20% of Xbox’s workforce. Sharma herself called it the most significant restructuring in the division’s history.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s superyacht Launchpad, for the record, is currently cruising the waters off Juneau, Alaska, a full 900 miles from Seattle.

[Note: Armon Dadgar, a UW computer science alum, was co-founder and CTO of HashiCorp, a cloud infrastructure automation company that was founded in 2013, went public on the NASDAQ in 2021, and sold to IBM in 2025. In his role, he spoke with thousands of companies adopting cloud across a wide range of industries, giving him a unique perspective on technology adoption.]

Pixar released WALL-E in June 2008, almost two weeks before Apple launched the App Store. The film follows WALL-E, a robot left behind to clean up Earth after it becomes an ecological wasteland no longer suitable for life, stranding humanity out in space. The remaining human population is entirely moribund in hoverchairs and completely immersed in a digital reality.

For many years, I’ve jokingly called it a historical documentary from the future and with each passing year we seem to get closer to its dark prophecy. Today, we live in a “WALL-E economy” with apps and services that cater to convenience and human vice, but with an increasing toll to our mental, physical, and emotional wellbeing, as well as our environment. The growing capabilities and prevalence of AI risks accelerating those trends, and moving us further towards the WALL-E dystopia.

The faustian bargain of WALL-E is that we willingly trade comfort for everything, including our free will. We live a bovine existence, where we are endlessly fed content, told what to wear, what to buy, what to think, and how to vote, and in exchange we are kept safe and warm in the proverbial womb. We get our dopamine, but we never ask at what cost.

Far from being hypothetical, we can see many of these same tradeoffs in the most popular services today. The average American spends around 2.5 hours per day on social media, and for Gen Z it’s even worse, at a stunning 5 hours daily. It feels costless to scroll through memes and share posts with friends, but these services have stolen time from physical activity, connecting with friends, engaging in hobbies, and other activities that foster connection and meaning. We have a crisis of teenage mental health, a loneliness epidemic, rising political extremism, and a “friendship recession.” While correlation is not causation, it’s reasonably safe to admit it’s the phones.

Outside of social media, we have many services of convenience, such as DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Instacart, which are primarily used for food delivery. While you might think they are “luxury services,” data shows that usage is broad across income levels, and in fact disproportionately used by those who can least afford it, even trapping users with “Buy Now, Pay Later” services. The immediate convenience is undeniable, but so is the financial burden to users, damage to restaurant culture as they are forced to adapt to delivery services, and the growing unhappiness that comes with solo dining.

The WALL-E economy often pairs delivering convenience with packaging vice under a shiny application layer. Sports betting services like DraftKings, prediction markets like Kalshi, and retail options trading on Robinhood are prime examples. They are all gambling packaged up and made presentable. Chesterton’s fence reminds us that if we’ve discouraged gambling for millennia, there might be a good reason for it. Unsurprisingly, making these services available 24/7 and putting them in our pockets has led to a rise in addiction, bankruptcy, and suicide.

If the smartphone enabled the WALL-E economy, AI is going to supercharge it. AI is accelerating the ability to collect and analyze data, to highly personalize, and to target algorithmically with precision, with the intent to influence user behavior. This threatens to make the WALL-E economy both smarter and more harmful.

Targeting people who are already lonely and alienated, virtual dating services are one of the most pernicious use cases for AI. Users are willing to believe they’ve found meaningful connection with an AI while getting used to the “frictionless” interaction of chatbots makes the nuanced and ambiguous world of real people that much harder to navigate. It’s clear the cure is worse than the disease, as this only increases social isolation, leading to depression and suicide.

AI will also enable more sophisticated applications of surveillance capitalism and dark patterns that aim to manipulate user behavior. AI-driven customer profiles will determine if you are a price sensitive shopper and use that to inflate prices or apply surge pricing. Betting apps can detect when a frequent gambler hasn’t placed bets recently and give them free credits to lure them back along with a 24/7 AI-bookie that can discuss and encourage bets.

The AI-slop future of social media is clear as Zuckerberg is walking back from the metaverse and pivoting to AI. Social media platforms historically needed users to actually create content, which they could promote based on user interests. The need for content producers vanishes if content can be AI generated, perfectly tailored and personalized, endlessly. This future might increase user engagement, but would likely exacerbate the problems of isolation and alienation that we already face.

We can wax nostalgic for a simpler time, but there is no path back to before smartphones, social media, or AI. We can’t wish it away, and there are staggering amounts of capital being deployed to extend AI to every corner of the economy. While Silicon Valley might argue for “technology inevitability” and the notion that technological progress is inevitable and good, this ignores the fact that people still have agency. Most technology is inseparable from a set of social and political questions, and unfettered use is not inevitable. The recent order banning Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos model is a prime example.

In the movie, WALL-E is given the sisyphean task of cleaning up a ruined Earth. Despite his programming, he imagines a better world and rejects the inevitability of his destiny to fight for something better. Today as we consider the AI-supercharged version of the WALL-E economy, it’s not surprising that most people aren’t enthused. We are suffering from a failure of imagination for what a better future could look like instead.

The rise of “friction-maxxing” as a new trend that rejects convenience as an end to itself is a start. It’s part of the growing recognition that humans need to derive meaning from our lives and work. The growing discourse around the perils of convenience, along with individual behavior changes, help to shift the Overton window. Changing hearts and minds is a crucial step towards new regulations, which are needed to solve the social challenges more broadly. This is a slow process, but we can look to cigarettes as a good historical analogy.

Cigarette companies had a clear incentive to market and sell aggressively, and made a best effort to hide the health impacts of their products, similar to the companies powering the WALL-E economy. Eventually, it became clear that cigarettes pose a major health risk, both to the direct users and the second-hand bystanders, which prompted social changes in how they were viewed and ultimately political changes in how they are regulated. As a result, there has been a dramatic reduction in their usage today.

For the modern WALL-E economy there is no perfect, singular regulation. It requires a democratic process to balance mitigating the harms as we better understand them, with individual rights and autonomy. For digital platforms, countries like Australia and the UK are leading the way in banning the use of social media for children and teenagers, in recognition of the harm they cause. Utah is taking action against “prediction marketplaces” in recognition of them being effectively online gambling. This type of regulatory change is important to solve societal problems but takes time, especially with highly concentrated interests lobbying against a disorganized public.

Beyond just waiting for improved regulation, we can reclaim our individual agency by living with more intentionality. In my personal life, I’ve looked for opportunities to host more regularly, whether a small dinner or a large party to create and foster connections. I’ve worked to reduce the “information noise” by disabling most notifications, limiting time on social media, and spending more time reading on my Kindle distraction free. I consciously avoid eliminating all daily friction to provide a healthy level of resistance. None of these are huge changes, nor will they solve the broader problems, but they help to reshape our environment to avoid depending on willpower alone.

Changing our personal behaviors can help to insulate us from the WALL-E economy, but that isn’t enough. Taxing the profits of AI companies to provide UBI to fund “bread and circuses” couldn’t be more WALL-Esque. We should look to the techno-optimism of the Jetsons, where technology empowered humanity, and build towards a future we are excited about, rather than one we merely accept as inevitable. WALL-E is incredibly dark for a children’s movie, but the struggle of the character ultimately gives hope to a more optimistic future, and brings to mind the old boy scout motto: try to leave this world a little better than you found it.

Special thanks to Josh Kalla, Behzod Sirjani, and Kevin Fishner for their feedback on this post.