Dror Poleg

Empowering more people to perform “creative” work won’t save the middle class. It will turn white-collar work into show business. newsletter.drorpoleg.com/p/ai-doesnt-...

DC has the lowest share of workers exposed to robotic automation. Wyoming and North Dakota have the highest.

Human-in-the-loop is now human-in-the-way.

Whoa. Microsoft is offering 60,000 people the chance to leave now instead of getting fired later. That's more than 25% of its total workforce. "This offer gives eligible employees who may be considering a future outside the company a new choice to make that transition now..."

Fun fact: In 1980, the U.S. prepared to use tactical nukes to secure the Straight of Hormuz from a Soviet invasion.

Employment in AI-exposed jobs started shrinking 12 months after ChatGPT was released. It has now shrunk for 36 straight months.

Drones are now evacuating soldiers where ground robots can't go “The craft was a heavy-lift hexacopter, it said, originally designed as a bomber by a Ukrainian manufacturer.” — Yuliya Talmazan, NBC News

Big Tech's revenue per worker is soaring while everyone else's stays flat.

Anthropic staff expect AI to do most of their work by 2030

Across the economy, waste is no longer a byproduct. It's the fuel. We are heading to a world in which humanity can thrive by empowering most people to fail most of the time. We need to design our institutions accordingly. newsletter.drorpoleg.com/p/slop-is-th...

Anthropic staff expect AI to do three-quarters of their work by 2030 “On average, staff members expect AI to be able to do 75% of their current work by 2030, compared to 28% for US workers overall.” — Szymon Sacher and others, Anthropic

Apprenticeships grew across the past two expansions. In computers and math, they shrank by almost 60%.

AI demand is changing the economics of physical construction. No land? We'll send the chips to space. No labor? We'll pre-build the data center and ship it with walls and wiring.

We know how good AI is at the tasks we test it on. But we only test it on 22% of tasks.

2020: Offline lockdown 2026: Online lockdown

The future is offline. AI just exposed a serious vulnerability in PHP, which powers many popular websites and apps. The NSA just advised companies that can’t patch things up to take their systems off the internet.

Breaking news from 2020.

In 2027, the world builds about as much datacenter capacity as it had built in total through 2024. Fifty gigawatts in one year.

Not anymore.

"If you pick different parts of science, you see the same pattern show up: Progress is accelerating, and it has started to accelerate in the last two years." — Jack Clark

There is a huge market for the absolute best AI. And several reasons why Big Tech may not capture it. newsletter.drorpoleg.com/p/the-bull-c...

It’s useful to think of frontier labs as a protection racket. Many use cases can settle for “good enough” models from other vendors. But cyber defense alone is worth spending a decent % of GDP on a protective swarm of the absolute best models.

Asymmetry on steroids: "Russia had more than 50,000 casualties in Ukraine last month, with as many as 28,000 personnel killed... Ukrainian forces suffered about 5,000 casualties in the same period"

Ukraine just bombed a bot farm.

A weekly collection of things that might matter tomorrow. This week: Geothermal energy, call centers, apprenticeships, software bugs, betting markets, and more. newsletter.drorpoleg.com/p/signals-im...

Solar has gone nuclear.

Does AI follow remote work? States with more remote workers tend to have a higher share of employers using AI.

May I speak to a human please? “call center employment is 5.3% below its December 2023 peak… Major operators are already pursuing AI-driven efficiency.”

Europe is going all in on defense tech. From less than 1% of EU venture funding in 2022 to 15% today.

What can retail employment tell us about office employment? Since 2019, warehouse jobs are up 50% while retail jobs are flat. Data centers & offices may follow a similar path, with 2 differences: data centers need fewer ppl than warehouses, and office jobs will prob decline rather than stay flat.

Data center spending is up 10x. Hiring has slowed to a crawl. Let's talk about it tomorrow. newsletter.drorpoleg.com/p/thinking-a...

Layoffs in software, internet, telecom, and media are up ~20% from their pre-Covid pace. The rest of the economy is laying people off more slowly than it did then.

'An office lease is a forecast. When a company signs a ten-year lease, it is predicting how many people it will employ, where they’ll live, what they’ll do, and how often they’ll need to be in the same room for the next decade. That made sense when more revenue reliably meant more people.'

The most entertaining outcome is the most likely

Over half of AI firms' funding comes from other AI firms

Probably close to 100% by now. From GitHub's developer survey.

"Anthropic stated in September that 'Claude ‘leads’ 26% of Anthropic’s AI R&D work', up from 0–1% in February–March" metr.org/blog/2026-09...

They say the physical world can't change as quickly as the digital one. Well, private construction spending on data centers is up 10X since 2020. Most analysts assumed such growth was simply not possible.

ChallengerGray: Tech companies announced 165,925 job cuts this year, up 54% the same period in 2024. Tech accounts for 29% of all job cuts, "more than any other industry."

US bans the sale of cutting-edge AI chips to China. But... Chinese companies can access these chips by leasing them from US companies.

The K-shaped economy has a K-shaped economy inside it. Avg. real income grew more than 2X for households in the top 20%. But it grew more than 6X for those in the top 0.01%.

More Words That Explain AI

"Most of today’s office stock was built for a linear company. One that grew by adding people, kept them in one place, and could predict what it would need ten years out. That company is getting rarer."

We don't just have too many offices. We have the wrong ones. newsletter.drorpoleg.com/p/whats-eati...

In the nonlinear economy, it's not enough for a CEO to be a "gambler." He has to be a true degen.

Telling an LLM that it is being tested for alignment cuts its willingness to start a war by 13%. arxiv.org/pdf/2609.050...

Rethinking real estate... Google expects space-based data centers to be cost-competitive with Earth-based ones by the mid-2030s.

"The AI boom is already bigger than all the others." Well, not exactly. What the media calls “AI” is actually a few separate investment waves combined: electricity, buildings, hardware, software. This means the AI boom can eat plenty more of GDP before it peaks.

"non-employees already average 36% of Fortune 500 workforces and are expected to reach 50% by 2027" thenextweb.com/news/papaya-...

Why are offices empty during a boom? One reason is that our fastest-growing companies employ far fewer people per dollar of revenue. OpenAI and Anthropic generate about 3× more revenue per employee than Apple or Meta. And even Big Tech employs fewer people per dollar than it used to.