David Palmer (Web3)

[David Palmer (Web3) @Metaversebizz]

@antibearthesis Crazy the AI bet is bigger in valuation terms than current revenues

[David Palmer (Web3) @Metaversebizz]

@Vivek4real_ U locking business data is key

[Jack O'Holleran @jackoholleran]

Awesome! Welcome Agent Oracle to SKALE

[Zenith @ZenithFdn]

Zenith Co-founder & CBO @HeslinKim will be on stage at the Louvre next week alongside Vodafone's Pairpoint and Republic for a conversation about what it actually takes to deploy regulated institutions on Canton, moving past proof-of-concept into production at scale.

Privacy, selective disclosure, compliance controls, interoperability. @CantonNetwork was built from the start around the infrastructure requirements that most blockchains can't meet.

This is the session worth clearing time for.
Zth.

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔Uber's COO Andrew Macdonald said on Saturday that the company is having a harder time justifying its AI spend. After CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga went viral in April for admitting Uber burned through its 2026 Claude Code budget in four months, senior engineering leaders concluded higher token usage was not translating into proportionally more useful product.
Macdonald said the link between AI consumption and shipped features is "not there yet." CEO Dara Khosrowshahi confirmed on the earnings call that Uber is slowing hiring to fund its AI spend. Duolingo also walked back its decision to include AI usage in performance reviews last month.

My Take
Uber is the first major enterprise where the C-suite has publicly admitted, on the record, that the AI productivity story is not closing for them. That matters because Uber is not a skeptic. The company went all-in on AI tooling, set internal targets, and burned through its annual research and development budget in four months trying to make it work. The conclusion from the people running the experiment is that tokens consumed and value shipped are not the same number, and management is finally noticing.

Duolingo's reversal lands in the same week for a reason. CEO Luis von Ahn said employees were asking whether they needed to use AI just to use AI, which is Goodhart's Law showing up in a performance review system. When usage becomes the metric, employees optimize for usage, not output. Microsoft canceled internal Claude Code licenses, Google AI Pro stripped credits from paid subscribers, and now Uber is admitting the ROI does not close at scale.
The narrative has shifted in the last 30 days from "AI productivity is here" to "AI productivity is harder to measure than we thought." The companies pushing tokenmaxxing internally are now the same companies signaling cost pressure externally. The IPO calendar for OpenAI and Anthropic is going to get a lot more complicated if the largest enterprise customers keep saying this out loud.

Hedgie🤗

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

One of the toughest parts of being a founder is putting your ideas into the world, seeing if anyone cares (usually they don't - or worse, are rooting against you), and then seeing if you can actually pull it off (usually way more setbacks along the way than you thought!).

You have to:
(1) develop thick skin and find a way to ignore the haters
(2) still take advice from people who have your best interests at heart
(3) have the wisdom to know the difference

Then move from one setback to the next with no loss of enthusiasm for longer than you thought. Be borderline delusional, get after it every day for a decade, and turn out to be right. Finally, when your tenth or hundredth approach to a problem doesn't work, just keep coming up with more ideas.

Had a great day at Base Batches yesterday, meeting founders building on @base and hearing about the latest onchain innovations. Shout out to all the founders!

[Nillion @nillion]

AI compute is about to be everywhere, with privacy it stays safe.

[David Palmer (Web3) @Metaversebizz]

My point is that the AI transformation is not only technical there are so many wider factors that will need to be considered. Humans need to be involved in the economy, production and business but now we may get to a point where for some industries/professions Digital AI, and Physical AI (robots) have an absolute advantage. This does not mean we do. It need humans, but rather we need a solid and considered transformation plan

[David Palmer (Web3) @Metaversebizz]

@nillion @web3pairpoint Awesome I really enjoyed this talk with the Nillion team on the potential to turn telecoms towers into distributed, mini AI data centres for collective AI compute

[Nillion @nillion]

Telecom towers will become the next wave of AI infrastructure.

@Metaversebizz, Co-founder of @web3pairpoint (by Vodafone) breaks it down 👇

[David Palmer (Web3) @Metaversebizz]

@dadiomov Stablecoins may be lower cost for micropayments

[David Palmer (Web3) @Metaversebizz]

@organ_danny @coinbase @CoinbaseDev Let’s talk @d12dap

[David Palmer (Web3) @Metaversebizz]

@brian_armstrong @martypartymusic Very interesting…. the world of work is changing……..it is now transactional and employees need to redefine themselves to become individual or collective businesses…

[David Palmer (Web3) @Metaversebizz]

@HHShkMohd Amazing ambition

[David Palmer (Web3) @Metaversebizz]

@jerallaire Machine to machine and machine ai agent to machine ai agent payments will be big!

[David Palmer (Web3) @Metaversebizz]

By 2030 there may be as many as 100m and over 3 billion machines in operation, machines paying for things with and through AI agents. The economy of machines and agents will be bigger than the current economy and trusted, secure payments will be key and stablecoins as well as utility tokens will be a may part of this.

[David Palmer (Web3) @Metaversebizz]

@chainlink @nillion @web3pairpoint Agree being able to verify, secure and transact data will be critical as we build the new AI infrastructure for the new AI digital world! The key here is to bring the edge and distributed capabilities into the architectures for AI compute infrastructure.

[Chainlink @chainlink]

@nillion @web3pairpoint LINK AI 🔗

[Milk Road AI @MilkRoadAI]

This is WILD!

Uber's CEO admitted the company is building the machine that will eliminate its own workforce.

He calls Uber a platform for flexible work, then in the same breath says autonomous vehicles will augment and then replace human drivers.

Uber launched a division called Uber AI Solutions, where drivers are paid to tag images, label road data, and record their voices. That data is the exact fuel used to train self-driving AI systems.

Drivers are literally building the technology that replaces them.

Uber plans to deploy robotaxis in 15 cities by end of 2026, targeting a fleet of 100,000 self-driving vehicles starting in 2027. They are partnered with Nvidia, Waymo, and over 20 autonomous vehicle companies simultaneously.

Over 7 million people drive or deliver for Uber every month. The CEO put a public timeline on the disruption which is 10 to 15 years before drivers are largely replaced.

His offered solution is penny-per-task image labeling during driver downtime, work that pays nearly nothing.

Uber built its empire on contractors who bought the cars, paid for the gas, and absorbed all the risk while Uber kept the margin.

Now those same contractors are feeding the AI pipeline that makes them unnecessary.

Cheaper rides for passengers, higher margins for Uber and no income for the driver.

That is the actual plan.