ICYMI 2026-07-18: Who Owns Your Intelligence?
Our weekly roundup of signals from the AI noise, for humans leading change.
Alex Karp says the quiet part out loud
Tokenizing your business isn’t just expensive, it also makes you dependent on third parties that will own your cognitive tasks. Which is to say, a strategic mistake. Karp sells a remedy, so he’s not objective — but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. My take: for many tasks, lighter models you control plus carefully architected context can take you far. (WSJ gift link)
Replacing software with AI
Starbucks spends $400m/year on software, so they’re using AI to roll their own. The losers: Microsoft, IBM, Oracle. The resulting software might be better-suited to Starbucks’s needs, but they must also tally maintenance and support. More importantly, in-house software needs to be designed and stewarded. Who’ll do that? (Hint: not AI.)
The Reverse Information Paradox
On X, Satya Nadella called for organizations to control their learning mechanisms, which are at risk of being ceded to AI labs. By delegating to the labs, you also pay twice: in cash and in knowledge you hand over to make models work. My sense is that if given a choice between outsourcing all your intelligence to frontier labs and building your own using less-powerful models, the latter gives you greater control. It also requires more forethought and structure — but you own your intelligence.
Information work as responsibility work
Tim O’Reilly, after chatting with Claude: “[AI] has no agency of its own. Humans set it in motion, evaluate its output, and should be held responsible for what it does.” I.e., you can outsource cognition, but not responsibility. What can you do about it? Invest in more upfront architecture, not more compute.
The new ChatGPT superapp
OpenAI launched a new all-in ChatGPT app. I haven’t used it, but it sounds bad. Gruber doesn’t explicitly call it an information architecture problem, but I will. It’s predictable: companies tend to ship their org charts, and OpenAI’s is a mess. AI doesn’t alleviate the need for IA, it amplifies it. New concepts need relatable labels, metaphors, and hierarchies. Who owns the structures your intelligence depends on?