⚠️The Doomer and the Boomer Who Sparked the AI Race
Shadow AI Agents Surge as Consultants Fight to Stay Relevant Amid Layoffs.
Midweek Team,
This is what we have… The boomer and the doomer who helped build today’s AI landscape set the stage for both the rapid acceleration and the existential fear driving the industry. If Waymo’s driverless cars worry you, wait until semis without drivers hit highways; they are coming faster than expected, literally. Meanwhile, inside corporate America, employees are quietly deploying Shadow AI agents to avoid being replaced by the very agents they’re using.
The Doomer and the Boomer Who Sparked the AI Race
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Shadow AI Agents Surge as Consultants Fight to Stay Relevant Amid Layoffs.
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📰 News and Trends.
The Doomer and the Boomer Who Sparked the AI Race
Two unlikely minds—Peter Thiel and Eliezer Yudkowsky—played pivotal roles in launching the AI revolution. One, a venture capitalist betting on bold futures. The other, a self-taught thinker turned AI doomsday prophet. Their relationship seeded DeepMind, influenced OpenAI, and lit the fuse for the artificial general intelligence (AGI) race we’re in now.
Thiel backed Altman early, funding his first venture and taking cues from his startup picks (Airbnb, Stripe). Thiel’s push for “hard tech” helped Altman reshape Y Combinator—and ultimately inspired OpenAI.
Yudkowsky’s ideas about the Singularity captivated Thiel in the early 2000s. Thiel began funding Yudkowsky’s Singularity Institute, which birthed a rationalist movement focused on AGI safety.
Yudkowsky influenced DeepMind’s cofounders, introduced them to Thiel (their first big check), and indirectly connected them with Elon Musk—setting the stage for Google’s $650M acquisition.
The irony? The same ideas Yudkowsky once used to accelerate AI development eventually led him to become its most vocal opponent. His writings now permeate OpenAI’s culture, and his warnings helped shape the Effective Altruism movement that briefly pushed Altman out of OpenAI in 2023.
Meanwhile, Yudkowsky remains uncompromising. In a Time op-ed, he argued not for a pause, but a total shutdown of AI research. Why? Because he believes building superhuman AI without full alignment guarantees one outcome: human extinction.
“You don’t understand how Eliezer has programmed half the people in your company to believe this stuff.” — Peter Thiel, to Sam Altman
📰 AI News and Trends
Meta shuffles AI team to compete with OpenAI and Google by splitting into 2 teams, AI research and AI products.
OpenAI may soon let you ‘sign in with ChatGPT’ for other apps.
Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai about how AI has the potential to be more transformative than the internet.
Share of Americans who say they want companies to take AI creation slowly to get it right the first time.
Anthropic is rolling out voice mode in beta on mobile.
Ukraine’s ‘drone war’ hastens development of autonomous weapons.
🌐 Other Tech news
Auto Shanghai 2025 Wasn’t Just a Car Show, It Was a Warning to the West. China’s car industry is about to dominate globally with charging rates, ranges, luxury design, technology, and sheer volumes.
SpaceX’s Starship destroyed in 3rd straight fiery test failure.
Apple’s Satellite Ambitions Threatened by Elon Musk, Internal Resistance.
Crypto czar Sacks says the US could ‘acquire more Bitcoin.’
Apple Said It Blocked $2 billion in App Store Fraud Last Year.
Driverless Semi Trucks Are Rolling Out Fast.
Aurora Innovation has logged over 1,000 driverless miles on Texas highways and plans to expand to 20 autonomous trucks by year’s end. The trucks can detect objects 1,000 feet away using 25 sensors and bypass the 11-hour daily driving limit for human drivers. The U.S. trucking industry is short on drivers as cargo demand surges, with 13% of heavy-duty trucks expected to be autonomous by 2035 (McKinsey). Public skepticism remains high, with 61% of Americans fearing self-driving vehicles and 26% unsure (AAA survey).
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Shadow AI Agents Surge as Consultants Fight to Stay Relevant Amid Layoffs.
Generative AI is rapidly transforming consulting, triggering mass layoffs and a quiet revolution among employees. Top firms like PwC (1,500 jobs cut), EY (150), KPMG (333), and Accenture (19,000) are slashing roles as AI replaces routine tasks in audit, tax, and operations. McKinsey is offering senior staff up to 9 months' salary to exit voluntarily, signaling industry-wide disruption.
In response, consultants are deploying “shadow AI” agents, unauthorized, self-built AI tools using Python, OpenAI, Google Gemini, Claude 3, Perplexity, and Colab to automate proposals, financial models, market research, and client analysis. These apps bypass IT bottlenecks and help employees stay relevant amid fears of redundancy.
Follow the numbers:
74,500+ shadow AI apps are currently active across top firms.
Categories include 18,000 financial models, 15,000 research bots, and 13,000 productivity tools.
73.8% of workplace ChatGPT usage is via personal accounts.
AI usage in the workplace has grown 61x in 24 months and 4.6x in the last year.
Prompt Security detects 50 new shadow AI apps/day, already cataloging over 12,000.
Shadow AI has become a parallel delivery stack, accelerating faster than enterprise-sanctioned copilots and chatbots. While firms race to establish AI governance, employees are driven by survival instincts—automating work before they are automated out.
Deployment Tactics:
Custom copilots for proposals and client pitches
Monte Carlo scenario modeling using Gemini + Python
API combinations for real-time data from OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity
Replit, Google Colab, and AI Studio for quick builds and fine-tuning
Dozens to hundreds of Google Search API IDs created per team for tailored search insights
Is regulation coming to the workplace around the dangers that shadow AI apps pose to companies and their data? Layoffs seem inevitable at this point, and those tasks will be replaced by AI anyway, correct? Therefore, firms that try to ban AI outright only fuel underground adoption further.
🧠 Learning Corner.
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Great post. I know agents are The Thing in 2025, but those numbers and those firms listed are still a little shocking to see.