Elvio Vicosa.
CTO at Jodel, the hyperlocal community that connects you instantly with the people around you.
Thoughts
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When anyone can generate anything, a feed of strangers stops meaning much.
OpenAI closed its own AI video app within months of launch.People already retreat to the places where it still means something, like group chats with real friends, local communities and plans that end with meeting in person.
The money follows, in small rounds for apps that help friends plan, play and meet.The next social network looks less like a stage and more like a table.
Open this thought → -
Everyone asks which jobs AI will take.
Ask which ones it can't reach.
Europe's worst shortages sit in care and health, not in offices, and Germany alone lists 157 shortage occupations.An agent can write the report.
Open this thought →
Someone still has to wire the data centre, nurse the patient and inspect the bridge.
Those jobs need hands, licences and trust, and they take years to learn.
As office work gets cheaper, the person who can show up becomes the scarce one. -
A thin layer on someone else's model, data or users is a feature, not a company.
Huxe, an AI audio app, shut down one day after Spotify launched the same thing.
Jasper's revenue roughly halved after ChatGPT arrived.The platform doesn't need to beat you.
Open this thought →
It only needs to ship the obvious version to the users it already has.
If you're the default in your category, a launch like that grows your market.
If you're not, you have about 90 days. -
For fifty years everyone watched one chokepoint, and it was oil.
The next one is rare earths, the metals inside the magnets that drive electric cars, wind turbines, drones and missiles.
China refines most of them and makes buyers apply for an export licence.
Outside China, the same metal already costs up to a third more.Oil has strategic reserves, many suppliers and decades of practice.
Open this thought →
Rare earths have almost none of that.
Every country that wants to electrify or rearm runs into the same supplier, and new mines and refineries take most of a decade.
Until then, a licence decision in Beijing moves markets as much as a tanker in Hormuz. -
AI agents now do the job of almost every everyday go-between, from the travel agent and the recruiter to the receptionist and the tax adviser.
The agent remembers you and acts for you.But the agent doesn't take the sale.
Open this thought →
Discovery moved into the assistant, and the transaction stayed with whoever owns the supply.
OpenAI scaled back its in-chat checkout in March.
Hotels, marketplaces and banks keep the money, and the middleman's salary disappears. -
Kids have something to look at every waking second.
They never sit with nothing, and they never sit with someone who disagrees with them.
I think that makes them more anxious, quicker to anger and worse at arguing without a fight.Boredom is a skill.
Open this thought →
So is disagreeing with someone and staying friends.
Both take practice, and we removed the practice. -
Europe keeps getting older, hotter and more expensive to run.
Retirees take their skills with them, and nobody trains their replacements.
Europe's labour agency already counts more than 2,600 shortages across its member countries.
Heat cuts how much people can work, and energy costs more every year.Less growth means less to share, and that's when people turn on each other.
Old against young, natives against newcomers, cities against the countryside.
Europe needs migrants for exactly the skills it lacks, and its politics pulls the other way.
Young people see fewer good jobs and higher rents, and stop believing that study or a startup pays off.The economics comes first.
Open this thought →
The division follows. -
Look around any room.
China made most of what's in it, and not only the cheap things anymore.
It makes the cars, the batteries, the solar panels, the ships and the robots.The West called it cheap labour for decades.
Open this thought →
It's organisation.
China builds factories, ports and power lines faster than anyone, and that speed makes it the world's default power.
Most countries will spend the next decade envying it, not matching it. -
We still talk about heatwaves, droughts and floods as surprises.
They aren't.
Last summer Europe had its worst fire season on record, and a strong El Niño is forming in the Pacific.Treat it as the climate, not the weather.
Open this thought →
Plan for the bad summer, not the average one.
Farms will move north and uphill.
Coastal towns will fight the sea, dry regions will fight over water, and food will cost more, more often. -
Most AI today runs in someone else's data centre.
Every question travels to a server, runs on a chip that costs more than a car, and travels back.
That won't last.A third of the laptops and phones that shipped last year can already run a model on their own.
Your own chip costs nothing extra to run, keeps your messages and photos to itself, and answers instantly with or without a signal.So the big AI labs end up a fraction of what investors price them at.
Open this thought →
They assume every question in the world pays them a toll.
Most won't.
The money moves to whoever makes the chip, the phone and the operating system.
Projects
- Four worlds, 2027–2029 ↗Four scenarios for the world economy to 2029, with odds that move with the news.
- Carbon lamination ↗Carbon, epoxy and vacuum bagging, from foam core to the boat.
Previously
Shopify Amazon Startup CTO Thoughtworks
Currently into
Digital
Building software with AI agents.
Experimenting with the future of teams and software development.
Realtime systems, eventual consistency and the chaos.
Monoliths over microservices.
Analog
Running easy miles.
Sailing, and keeping the boat ready for it.
Free-diving on a single breath.
Building carbon parts by hand, under vacuum.
Say hello at [email protected] or on LinkedIn.