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You cant help but feel uneasy when looking at market concentration. Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla now make up more than a third of the S&P 500, more than twice the level seen before the dot-com bust. AI-related capital spending has outpaced the U.S. consumer as the main driver of gross domestic product growth. OpenAI alone plans trillions in data-center investments while exiting 2025 with about $20 billion in annualized revenue. Of course, there are physical limitations to how fast we can build. Data centers require enormous energy, land, and skilled labormore than trade schools produce todaya concern raised in the Trump administrations U.S. AI Action Plan. On top of this is a web of circular financing among major players. Companies are using complex structures to fuel the investment wave, adding opacity and risk. Investors like Masayoshi Son and Michael Burry are heading for the exits. In a new Bank of America survey, 45% of investors cite an AI bubble as the top tail risk for the economy and markets. Many believe AI stocks are already in bubble territory. When a bubble bursts, it is like a balloon losing air. Prices fall, investors pull back, and companies that depended on constant capital inflows often fail. The slowdown can ripple across the industry. But a burst forces a reset, where work with real value continues and the rest falls away. There is one way out: real growth. A record of breakthroughs (and setbacks) There is some consensus among economists that artificial intelligence can become the next general-purpose technology. These are revolutionary innovations with widespread impact that by themselves enable new inventions and change most aspects of our day-to-day lives and work. They do not just improve one industry; they create new possibilities for others. We have seen this before with the steam engine, electricity, and, most recently, the internet. Growth will require diffusion, a fancy way of describing how new tools and ideas spread to lots of people. New tools never disseminate evenly, and AI is no exception. AI has been through more than 70 years of breakthroughs and setbacks since mathematicians and early computer scientists began imagining how machines might simulate human thinking. Breakthroughs were often followed by AI winters, when funding and enthusiasm receded. But since late 2022, when generative AI hit the zeitgeist, we have been on a tear. ChatGPT became the fastest application to reach 100 million users in history and is already used by about 10% of the planets population. Can we continue? The growth plan Lets break this out to understand the source of potential growth. First, there is the consumer segment. For all the excitement around AI, many users still sit in the free bucket. The business challenge now is converting that into durable revenue. Expect a shift from todays generous freemium models toward tighter paywalls, bundled services, and even advertising-supported tiersmoves already being tested. For example, Canva raised its prices, bundling new AI features, which led to widespread backlash and a rollback of some of the changes. Notion moved key features behind higher-tier plans as it included built-in AI, sparking user criticism over value and fairness. Some frontier labs are also exploring something Big Tech once swore off: hardware. To unlock new monetization paths, companies are designing devices such as wearables, home hubs, and the next generation of phones around their proprietary AI interfaces. OpenAI, in partnership with designer Jony Ive, is working on a family of devices that goes beyond phones and computers. Second, there is enterprise adoption, arguably the most important frontier. Enterpriseslarge organizations that buy software and services for thousands of employeespay, stick, and rarely churn when productivity improvements are demonstrable. But this market is splitting in two. Smaller firms are moving fastest, using AI to level the playing field against incumbents. Norm Ai shows how smaller disruptors can move first, using AI agents to rethink legal work, even launching an AI-native law firm. Large enterprises, by contrast, are cautious. Their concerns center on reputational risk, hallucinations, and product liability. Yet once they see quantifiable return on investment in a controlled domain, they will scale quickly and pay premium rices for reliability, compliance, and integration. Barclays shows how major incumbents adopt more cautiously, using AI to support employees, speed service, and personalize banking while keeping humans in the loop. It is a quest for reimagining business workflows and integrating AI into them. Third: There is the government, where modernization is both overdue and unavoidable. Cities and federal agencies are using AI to improve responsiveness, reduce backlogs, and redesign citizen services that have long suffered from paper-era processes. As these systems prove they can cut wait times and improve accuracy, adoption will accelerate. For example, the United States Patent and Trademark Office launched its Automated Search Pilot (ASAP!) program to use AI in preexamination review, with plans to accept at least 1,600 applications across technology centers. On the national security side, the stakes and budgets are higher. Defense agencies are deploying AI for threat detection, mission planning, and intelligence analysis, creating a fast-growing market for companies like Palantir and Anduril, whose surge in government and defense contracts shows the scale of demand. These multiyear defense contracts secure growth over an extended period. A contract Palantir recently entered into with the U.S. Army topped $10 billion over 10 years. Andurils programs exceed $1 billion, in multiple contracts, creating steady demand. Finally, theres global adoption. The geopolitical competition for AI markets is intense. As recently reported, even Silicon Valley companies are quietly reliant on Chinese AI components, while Washington, D.C., is pushing to export an American AI stack as part of its industrial strategy. The geopolitical rivalry is as much about who defines the global interfaces, platforms, and rules as it is about the chips that power AI. Growth is possible, though not guaranteed. It depends on turning early experiments into products people rely on every day. The real race is not about ever-larger models held by a few firms. It is about unleashing competition and letting a diverse market push new ideas into the world. Innovation spreads when many players build, test, and iterate. That is how bubbles become breakthroughs. The moment is here. Lets get to work.
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E-Commerce
Below, Ben Rein shares five key insights from his new book, Why Brains Need Friends: The Neuroscience of Social Connection. Ben is an award-winning neuroscientist who has spent a decade studying the biology of social interaction. He is the chief science officer of the Mind Science Foundation, an adjunct lecturer at Stanford University, and a clinical assistant professor at SUNY Buffalo. He also teaches neuroscience to an audience of more than 1 million social media followers. Whats the big idea? Loneliness is a problem. Many of us feel this, and all of us are seeing it affect society. But why is isolation so harmful? Why are virtual interactions a poor substitute for getting together in person? What does our brain get out of spending time with a friend? The neuroscience underlying our social interactions adds a crucial component to conversations about the loneliness epidemic and what we can do about it. Listen to the audio version of this Book Biteread by Ben himselfbelow, or in the Next Big Idea App. 1. Our brains are wired for connection What does it really mean to be wired for connection? In the ancient world, our ancestors faced tremendous challenges, including food scarcity and predators hunting them. Survival was challenging, but humans work together in groups very well. So, when it came to survival of the fittest, the most social humans were the fittest. As a result, our brains have built-in social reward systems. That means when we connect with others, our brains send powerful signals involving neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin, which make us feel good and want to continue socializing. This was the glue that kept us together millennia ago and, therefore, kept us alive. Our brains still have these systems, which means we have a lot to gain from socializing. This is what it means to be wired for connection. Our brains literally reward us for being around each other. 2. Our neurochemistry faces the challenge of a divided world We are facing a legitimate public health crisis around loneliness. If you look at the data on how much time people spend with others, how many friends people have, how lonely people are, and so on, these metrics are all going in the wrong direction. Between 2013 and 2021, the amount of time the average American spent alone went up by 36 hours per monthalmost a full work week spent in isolation. We are truly becoming isolated. 3. Social isolation is a form of stress When a person is isolated, their body triggers a stress response in which cortisol levels begin to rise. From an evolutionary perspective, this makes a lot of sense. In the ancient world, if you were split off from the group, your chances of survival dropped significantly. Back then, it would have been beneficial to have an alarm system in your brain that warns you of this danger. Our brains still have this system, but in a world where were spending more time alone, thats a problem. Those who are more isolated are 32% more likely to die from any cause. When our bodys stress response systems are constantly being activated, it can result in chronic inflammation and other negative health consequences. Isolation is very bad for us. Studies tracking millions of people have found that those who are more isolated are 32% more likely to die from any cause. Isolated patients with dementia lose their memory twice as fast. And after having a heart attack, the patients who left the hospital and returned to a home where they live alone were more than twice as likely to die in the next three years. This issue needs to be taken seriously. 4. Digital interactions are not the same as interacting in person When we meet face-to-face, many social cues inform our brains about whats happening in the other persons mind. We can hear their vocal tone, read their facial expressions, and feel their body language, thereby understanding their emotions. But when we interact online, whether through texting, FaceTime, or arguing on social media apps, we are not getting the same social cues. I believe that this is impairing our empathy online and leading to undue hostility and aggression. What we know for sure is that interacting online does not provide the same benefits as interacting in person. It turns out social media may not be very social at all. 5. Beyond modern circumstances, our brains have some built-in social pitfalls Research shows that people underestimate how much theyll enjoy social interactions, which can often lead to a night on the couch, even though going out with friends would have been much better for their brains. We also underestimate how much others like us and discount our own social skills. These are just a few of the strange yet perfectly natural biological shortcomings of the human brain that prevent us from connecting with others. Enjoy our full library of Book Bitesread by the authors!in the Next Big Idea app. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
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E-Commerce
When work was drying up for freelance writer Megan Carnegie, she found herself compulsively hopping between apps and social media. LinkedIn, WhatsApp, emailsand it was just terrible for my focus, she says. I was anxious about getting work. On a whim, Carnegie (whos also contributed to Fast Company) popped into a store selling secondhand computer equipment and bought an old Nokia burner phone. During the workday, she would use the burner for calls, and in the evening, switch back to her smartphone. With no access to apps and one fewer way to access the internet, her urgency and anxiety dissolved. I just loved the quiet, she says. The effects of social media on mental health have been a popular topic of conversation in 2025. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidts best-selling book, The Anxious Generation, describes the effects on adolescents, including being a significant contributor to anxiety and depression among young adults. Whats less-frequently studied is how it affects people at work. But a new report begins to demonstrate how what we see online can bleed into our professional lives. The new study out of Rutgers University, published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior, found that what you see on social media while at work can shape your mood, motivationeven how you treat your coworkers. Social medias effect on your work Researchers surveyed 133 workers twice a day for two weeks. They asked them to describe the most salient, or memorable, post they saw that day, then describe how they felt and how productive they were at work. Later, the survey was repeated with 141 new participants, this time including their coworkers, who would also rate the subjects behavior and productivity. The researchers segmented posts into four categories: attractive (thirst traps), family (kids first day at school), contentious (politics or rage bait), and accomplished (job promotions). They then measured how these content types affected employees self-assurance, anxiety, productivity, and social withdrawal. They found that while posts about family or friends tend to boost confidence, political rants spike anxiety and make people withdraw. Posts about accomplishments can either spur you or kill your drive, depending on your personality. Those with competitive natures are prone to feeling motivated by achievement-related content, while those who arent particularly competitive are more likely to feel demotivated. The results indicate that some workers might benefit from limiting their social media use at work. But for those whose job involves regularly scrolling social feeds, breaking the habit can prove difficult. The LinkedIn star who barely scrolls, and the PR person who just can’t help it Alison Taylor is an author and professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business who writes about corporate ethics. Despite being named a LinkedIn superuser by the Financial Times thanks to her more than 60,000 followers, she spends very little time on the platform. I wake up, I have coffee, I write the post, I dont worry about it being perfect, I correct typos later, she says. Taylor knows better than to feed the trolls, but she loves a good argument, and cant help but respond to some followers who needle her. While she might come back throughout the day to comment, she goes in and gets out quickly. Its not worth the distraction. As for those whose job involves spending time on social medialike PR reps, marketers, and social media managersthe stress can be inescapable. Some 77% of people who work in social media are burned out, says a reader survey by Rachel Karten, who writes the popular Link in Bio Substack newsletter. Nicholas Budler, who works in public relations for enterprise tech companies, scopes opportunities for his clients all day. The LinkedIn doomscroll has only gotten more endless for me. And its open at work 9-to-5, he says, noting that when engagement is high, it feels good. But when its not, he questions whether social media is worth his time at all. I think you get a bit stressed in general to have social media open at work, Budler says. While he used to do a lot of social media strategy for clients, he does less and less these days, saying, I consider it brain rot. Doomscrolling can carry Budler down a deep, dark rabbit hole of looking through peoples job updates and news. And a lot of that news is not good, right? Especially in media, there are a lot of layoffs, he says. Those leave him anxious. Cutting back on ingrained habits The anxiety and malaise social media can cause is a common problem: In one small survey by the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, 45% of adults reported being stressed at least once a week because of social media, and 16% reported being stressed every day. Frequent social media use has already been linked to increased irritability in adults, as well as worsened depression. Some researchers have even submitted the idea of meta-stress, that is, stressing about the stress generated by social media. Thats made worse by the fact that most adults in the U.S. use social media: 68% use Facebook, 83% use YouTube, and 47% use Instagram, according to the Pew Research Center. Yet theres money to be made in keeping people away from these platforms. Apps like Freedom, AppBlock, and SelfControl block access to certain apps for periods of time. Some cant be disabled until a set timer expires. Many workers told Fast Company that they rely on these apps to keep them from doomscrolling. But even those tools may nt be enough to cut back on deeply ingrained habits. Budler is a prolific social media user in his personal life, with accounts on Instagram, the running app Strava, reading platform Goodreads, and TikTok, the latter of which he says is most addictive. His latest screen-time report on his phone recorded just over 20 hours on his phone in the past week, with 9 of those hours on social media. Rebecca Greenbaum, a coauthor of the Rutgers study, isnt against social media. I think it can be a fun break. It can be a useful break. It can add interestingness to a persons day, she says. But to avoid the mindless, automatic scroll, treat it like the smoke break of the 1980s, she says. Get up from your desk, go elsewhere, and devote a limited amount of time. Its a strategy that works for Megan Carnegie. Im trying to be more intentional about how I use those platforms. The burner has been a good exercise in that. Now Im a bit less anxious about work.
Category:
E-Commerce
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