Jeff Keltner

Host of What the AI?! podcast. Advisor and speaker helping leaders make sense of the AI moment. Previously: Upstart (founding team), Google, Stanford CS

[Jeff Keltner @jkeltner]

A teen told my co-host she now adds typos to her papers on purpose — so teachers won't think she used AI.

We've made imperfection the proof of humanity. The better your writing, the more suspicious it looks.

[Jeff Keltner @jkeltner]

The real question isn't whether AI coding works. It's whether "a seat for everyone" survives the usage-based invoice.

[Jeff Keltner @jkeltner]

Then GitHub Copilot went usage-based. Heavy users report 10–50x price jumps — $29→$750, $50→$3,000/mo. The power users driving the "gains" are now the expensive ones.

[Jeff Keltner @jkeltner]

A year ago: "AI is 100 interns — fire the interns." Now some tasks cost $1,000 in tokens vs. a $250 junior analyst. Turns out the interns were cheaper.

[Jeff Keltner @jkeltner]

Full breakdown on this week's What the AI?! — link in bio.

[Jeff Keltner @jkeltner]

Same week: Anthropic filed to go public, and Alphabet sold ~$85B of stock to fund its AI buildout. When the company that prints cash has to raise cash to keep up, you've learned how big the bills got.

[Jeff Keltner @jkeltner]

And Florida became the first state to sue OpenAI — naming Sam Altman personally, calling ChatGPT a "dangerous public nuisance." Same theory that took down Big Tobacco.

[Jeff Keltner @jkeltner]

@ItsSnibby @davegirouard @gmail 💯

[Jeff Keltner @jkeltner]

@PineHill_IG Well, glad to know I have a real fan - and I'm sorry you don't like the new crew on Leaders in Lending as well. I have trouble doing the same thing for a long time - I just like building new stuff. I do have another podcast in the works - will let you know when it's ready!

[Jeff Keltner @jkeltner]

We just recorded on AI ROI, and the line I can't shake is from Meta's CTO: "All motion is not progress, and token usage alone is not a measure of impact." Half the AI strategies I see are measuring motion and calling it momentum.

[Jeff Keltner @jkeltner]

@PineHill_IG Which one? Leaders in Lending? It's still around, though with a slate of hosts instead of me...

[Jeff Keltner @jkeltner]

Tomorrow at 6 a.m. my printout will be waiting for me — small and weird and exactly mine.

What will you build?

[Jeff Keltner @jkeltner]

Every morning at 6 a.m. my Mac mini prints out my day.

A small piece of software I wrote (with Claude) pulls my calendar and to-do list, lays them out on half a sheet of paper, and sends it to the printer.

It's waiting for me when I sit down. Paper. No screen. Pen.

[Jeff Keltner @jkeltner]

Of course, none of this is entirely new. People have been writing little automations for themselves for decades.

What's new is who gets to do it. Now it's 10 minutes for anyone with a Claude Code or Codex subscription.

The set of people who can build this just got much bigger.
The skill that matters isn't syntax. It's taste — knowing what's worth automating in the first place.

We're about to live in a world full of small, custom, slightly weird software that exists only for the person who wanted it.

Single-player software.

[Jeff Keltner @jkeltner]

So the open question: is the missing ROI a measurement problem we'll solve — or is the spend already outrunning the value?

[Jeff Keltner @jkeltner]

You can measure lines of code. You can't easily measure whether those lines made the product faster or better for customers. Uber's COO just said the quiet part out loud.

[Jeff Keltner @jkeltner]

This isn't "AI doesn't work." It's that a sophisticated buyer still can't measure what it's getting. Both can be true.