Five Things AI: Commodity, Jobs, Rebrand, Weaknesses, Data Center Opposition

Everything you need to know about AI this week. Really.

Heya and welcome back to Five Things AI!

This week is all about the shifting tides of technology and its fallout. Chris Messina argues that code has become a commodity, and that’s spot-on — software is now as ubiquitous as water, changing how we build and value digital products. Then there’s a fascinating twist from CNN showing that jobs most exposed to AI actually saw higher wage growth, which completely flips the “AI kills jobs” narrative - and I am not so certain that this will stay this way at all. Over at The Verge, we see the industry’s latest marketing spin — companies now rebranding AGI to dodge overhyped expectations, but hey, lipstick on a pig and all that. Wes McKinney writes brilliantly about LLMs’ strange mix of genius and failure — I can relate, it’s magic until a missing parenthesis breaks everything. And finally, Indiana’s data center gold rush raises the question of who really benefits — locals see big concrete boxes sucking up power and water, not progress. The future keeps getting coded, rebranded, debugged, and powered — all at once.

Enjoy this edition of Five Things AI!