I recently joked that, because of AI, everyone now sends you a 50-page PDF for review. Of course, what we all do next is just ask AI to summarize it and help prepare a response. So, the net effect is AI talking to AI.
We're all becoming a kind of intermediary because the volume of information is simply too great for any human to reasonably process. In many ways, this can feel overwhelming. It also makes me feel like it's becoming harder to maintain a long attention span.
But this appears to be where the world is heading. Eventually, we are going to have what is known as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and that is going to have a profound impact on our lives.
Venture capitalist Albert Wenger has been spending a lot of time thinking about what an AGI-level economy might look like, and he recently published a post where he modeled some of the possible scenarios.
I will give you the spoiler here: His intuition is that we're going to need to create an economy that combines competition and redistribution (also referred to as a Negative Income Tax, which provides people with a basic income).
Because without competition, productivity gains will be captured as rent, rather than resulting in lower prices. And without redistribution, we are likely to see an untenable increase in inequality.
If you're interested in this topic, I would encourage you to check out his post.
I recently joked that, because of AI, everyone now sends you a 50-page PDF for review. Of course, what we all do next is just ask AI to summarize it and help prepare a response. So, the net effect is AI talking to AI.
We're all becoming a kind of intermediary because the volume of information is simply too great for any human to reasonably process. In many ways, this can feel overwhelming. It also makes me feel like it's becoming harder to maintain a long attention span.
But this appears to be where the world is heading. Eventually, we are going to have what is known as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and that is going to have a profound impact on our lives.
Venture capitalist Albert Wenger has been spending a lot of time thinking about what an AGI-level economy might look like, and he recently published a post where he modeled some of the possible scenarios.
I will give you the spoiler here: His intuition is that we're going to need to create an economy that combines competition and redistribution (also referred to as a Negative Income Tax, which provides people with a basic income).
Because without competition, productivity gains will be captured as rent, rather than resulting in lower prices. And without redistribution, we are likely to see an untenable increase in inequality.
If you're interested in this topic, I would encourage you to check out his post.
Towards the end of last year, Meta released SAM 3, which stands for the third version of its Segment Anything Model. The way it generally works is that it allows you to detect, edit, and experiment with things in images and videos. For example, if you were looking at a video of a street, you could ask it to find all the scooters (which I did below), count the number of pedestrians wearing black pants, blur all the license plates on the cars, and so on.
This is immediately useful for a company like Meta because it allows for object-level modifications across its content creation platforms. So if you took a video of someone dancing and you desperately wanted to give them a bobblehead, SAM 3, I'm told, would allow you to quickly do that. Other AI models, such as Gemini, can also segment, but supposedly the SAM models are better and more precise at this specific task.
Beyond bobblehead videos, the potential of this model seems enormous for real estate, cities, and, of course, many other things. Using the above image as an example, you can quickly imagine SAM 3 being used to count and track modal splits across a city, and then make planning decisions based on real-time data.
People are also using it for real estate purposes. Pair the model with satellite images, and you can ask it to tell you how many houses have a pool, which houses recently had their roof replaced (and have solar panels), how many cars are parked on a street, how many cars are parked at Canadian Tire, and the average building lot coverage in an area.
You could also use it to swap out finishes in a real estate listing (including in videos), and get material/area takeoffs ahead of a construction project. I don't know for sure, but I would also imagine that this model would make a great building condition inspector. Come to think of it, I'd love a SAM 3 that could walk our construction sites and document every little detail!
Of course, a lot of these use cases are already being tackled. But the models are getting that much better. And that will lead to even more innovation.
What's the future of Instagram in a world of endless AI-generated content?
Sometime last year, Instagram changed its bottom menu bar to the following:
Bookended by the home button and the user profile button are now video reels, DMs, and the explore page. The create a new post button, which was formerly here in the center, was moved up to the top of the screen in a far less conspicuous place. These changes felt weird at first, but they were, of course, based on real user data. What people do on Instagram these days is watch reels and then share them with their friends. The era of posting beautiful square photos with nice filter edits died a long time ago.
But even today's world of video reels and TikTok videos is in massive flux. AI is flooding the system, and it's impossible to know what is "real" anymore. The name of the game with social media used to be authenticity. This is how individuals gained distribution control from institutions and large brands; they were more real and authentic. But today, we are in a world where AI-generated content can be entirely indistinguishable from "real" or captured content.
I have felt this change myself. As someone who has been a hobby photographer since undergrad some 20+ years ago, I have noticed myself grabbing my Fujifilm camera a lot less over the last year. Instead, I've just been using my phone and spending more time playing around with AI. And, of course, it's not just me. I see my architect and real estate friends using AI to test concepts, create presentation renderings, and more. So, where does all of this leave a platform like Instagram that was designed around individuals creating and sharing their own content?
A few days ago, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, published these twenty slides about how the company sees the world as we head into 2026. They're an interesting read because they mark a shift in messaging. Previously, the narrative was all about connecting the world and empowering creators. Now it's about labeling, mediating, and controlling this new world. In the words of Silicon Valley journalist and entrepreneur Om Malik, "deep down, Instagram is frightened."
But there is a path forward (excerpt also from Malik):
It starts by verifying who is behind an account, embedding provenance in media, and rewarding trust signals. Over time, Meta may tighten control and aim to be an identity broker for everyone. Instagrams want [sic] you to be prepared for this new era of tighter control over identity, authenticity, and content provenance.
One of the most important slides in Mosseri's post for me is this one here:
I've been arguing for years that crypto has an important role to play in a world filled with AI. When nobody knows what is "real" anymore, there's value in being able to say with finality that, hey, this thing over here is authentic and comes from this source. Social media (web2) showed us that people would rather tie something back to an individual instead of a large faceless brand. AI is disrupting this chain of provenance, but I think crypto will bring us back to it, somehow. Whether Instagram will be a part of it, of course, remains to be seen.
Towards the end of last year, Meta released SAM 3, which stands for the third version of its Segment Anything Model. The way it generally works is that it allows you to detect, edit, and experiment with things in images and videos. For example, if you were looking at a video of a street, you could ask it to find all the scooters (which I did below), count the number of pedestrians wearing black pants, blur all the license plates on the cars, and so on.
This is immediately useful for a company like Meta because it allows for object-level modifications across its content creation platforms. So if you took a video of someone dancing and you desperately wanted to give them a bobblehead, SAM 3, I'm told, would allow you to quickly do that. Other AI models, such as Gemini, can also segment, but supposedly the SAM models are better and more precise at this specific task.
Beyond bobblehead videos, the potential of this model seems enormous for real estate, cities, and, of course, many other things. Using the above image as an example, you can quickly imagine SAM 3 being used to count and track modal splits across a city, and then make planning decisions based on real-time data.
People are also using it for real estate purposes. Pair the model with satellite images, and you can ask it to tell you how many houses have a pool, which houses recently had their roof replaced (and have solar panels), how many cars are parked on a street, how many cars are parked at Canadian Tire, and the average building lot coverage in an area.
You could also use it to swap out finishes in a real estate listing (including in videos), and get material/area takeoffs ahead of a construction project. I don't know for sure, but I would also imagine that this model would make a great building condition inspector. Come to think of it, I'd love a SAM 3 that could walk our construction sites and document every little detail!
Of course, a lot of these use cases are already being tackled. But the models are getting that much better. And that will lead to even more innovation.
What's the future of Instagram in a world of endless AI-generated content?
Sometime last year, Instagram changed its bottom menu bar to the following:
Bookended by the home button and the user profile button are now video reels, DMs, and the explore page. The create a new post button, which was formerly here in the center, was moved up to the top of the screen in a far less conspicuous place. These changes felt weird at first, but they were, of course, based on real user data. What people do on Instagram these days is watch reels and then share them with their friends. The era of posting beautiful square photos with nice filter edits died a long time ago.
But even today's world of video reels and TikTok videos is in massive flux. AI is flooding the system, and it's impossible to know what is "real" anymore. The name of the game with social media used to be authenticity. This is how individuals gained distribution control from institutions and large brands; they were more real and authentic. But today, we are in a world where AI-generated content can be entirely indistinguishable from "real" or captured content.
I have felt this change myself. As someone who has been a hobby photographer since undergrad some 20+ years ago, I have noticed myself grabbing my Fujifilm camera a lot less over the last year. Instead, I've just been using my phone and spending more time playing around with AI. And, of course, it's not just me. I see my architect and real estate friends using AI to test concepts, create presentation renderings, and more. So, where does all of this leave a platform like Instagram that was designed around individuals creating and sharing their own content?
A few days ago, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, published these twenty slides about how the company sees the world as we head into 2026. They're an interesting read because they mark a shift in messaging. Previously, the narrative was all about connecting the world and empowering creators. Now it's about labeling, mediating, and controlling this new world. In the words of Silicon Valley journalist and entrepreneur Om Malik, "deep down, Instagram is frightened."
But there is a path forward (excerpt also from Malik):
It starts by verifying who is behind an account, embedding provenance in media, and rewarding trust signals. Over time, Meta may tighten control and aim to be an identity broker for everyone. Instagrams want [sic] you to be prepared for this new era of tighter control over identity, authenticity, and content provenance.
One of the most important slides in Mosseri's post for me is this one here:
I've been arguing for years that crypto has an important role to play in a world filled with AI. When nobody knows what is "real" anymore, there's value in being able to say with finality that, hey, this thing over here is authentic and comes from this source. Social media (web2) showed us that people would rather tie something back to an individual instead of a large faceless brand. AI is disrupting this chain of provenance, but I think crypto will bring us back to it, somehow. Whether Instagram will be a part of it, of course, remains to be seen.
