Dror Poleg
@drorpoleg
I research technology’s impact on work, cities, and markets. Bylines: NY Times, The Atlantic, etc. DrorPoleg.com
"2024 might be very different from 2014... technological innovation might lead to dramatic growth in economic activity and corporate profits while simultaneously reducing overall demand for office space." — Rethinking Real Estate, 2019. Still kicking!
Some companies are leaning HARD into AI. Among OpenAI customers, the top 10% of firms use 17x as many tokens as the typical firm. In some industries, the gap is as high as 32x.
Can inequality decrease and increase at the same time? Yes. Since 2020, the lowest-paid workers have seen the fastest real wage growth. But... hourly pay doesn't capture stock compensation and investment gains.
The extreme inequality of AI usage: The top companies spend $7,500 per employee per month. The median company spends $12. And most companies don’t spend on AI at all.
English vs. Computer Science majors over time. Which would be on top by 2036?
We invented a way to turn electricity into intelligence. And Texas is poised to generate more of it than any other state.
Past: Data centers were counted as a tiny subset of office construction Future: Offices will be counted as a tiny subset of data center construction?
Maritime traffic today vs. pre-October 7: Strait of Hormuz: ⬇️ 90% Suez Canal: ⬇️ 43% Cape of Good Hope detour: ⬆️ 64%
Every Apple & Meta employee generates around $2.5 million in revenue, on average. Anthropic and OpenAI employees generate around 4X more.
Elon's razor strikes again: The most entertaining outcome is the most likely.
The same shift in accounting terms. Through 2019, all of Big Tech's revenue growth came from adding people. Since 2022, almost none of it has.
Big Tech used to grow by hiring more people. Up to 2019, headcount growth explained most of the difference in revenue growth between companies. After 2022, firms grew at roughly the same rate whether they added or cut staff, and the ones that cut became more profitable without sacrificing growth.
Coppola didn’t want to direct The Godfather. But George Lucas convinced him it was a worthwhile compromise that would finance the “real” movies they wanted to make.
Japan “will become the easiest place in the world to develop AI apps, thanks to legal changes that mean organizations won’t need to secure consent to use some personal information.”
Th Four Stages of Offices Grief, finally reaching Acceptance. WSJ: “Landlords and their lenders held on to their office towers for years, hoping for a turnaround after Covid. Now, they are accepting enormous losses.“
The most productive technologies affect the output of the fewest people.
During World War 2, the British secret service employed an astrologer to publish horoscopes that would upset Hitler.
It’s becoming impossible to ignore. The “jobless boom” has been visible for more than two years now. But people didn’t want to believe it.
Bloomberg: Real estate services companies stocks sink “as investors decided they’re next on the AI hit parade as a new crop of applications and tools threatens to disrupt several industries.”
Meta is spending $135 billion on computing infrastructure. That's roughly the cost of rebuilding every single office tower in Midtown Manhattan. In one year.
"The Trumps have generated about $1.4 billion from crypto projects that are new to his second term, a Bloomberg analysis shows."
As I said at the time: Open source AI models like DeepSeek are a bigger threat to China than they are to America. Publicly, the Chinese government celebrates them. But privately, it is scrambling to plug a hole that cannot be plugged. Lines of code always find their way out.