ELECTE's Podcast: AI Frontiers
by Fabio Lauria
Latest episode
Block the AI crawlers and you vanish
Block the AI crawlers and you vanish
About this podcast
Frontier AI has outgrown the lab. The decisive questions now are about power — who builds the models, who controls them, and who gets to build on top of them. AI Frontiers is for the people doing the building: founders and operators creating products, companies, and strategy at the edge of what AI can do — on infrastructure owned by a handful of labs and governed from a handful of capitals. Each season charts where that frontier has moved, from the labs shipping the models to the capitals writing the rules, and what it means for anyone building something that lasts on ground that keeps shifting. Hosted by Fabio Lauria, founder of ELECTE. No hype, no jargon — strategy, stakes, and a builder's-eye view of the most consequential infrastructure of the century.
Episodes
The newest 20 of 72 episodes
- Block the AI crawlers and you vanish · 3 minPublishers are suing AI companies over training crawlers while losing their traffic to retrieval crawlers and automating the articles they defend. After court losses in Oslo and…
- 88% of companies use AI. Almost none keep the margin. · 3 min88% of firms use AI, but only 6% capture real EBIT gains because most rent capability while suppliers keep the margin and control. We examine why AI strategy is an…
- 25,000 job cuts planned. What will AI actually save? · 3 minThe Dutch government plans to cut 25,000 jobs and save 3.5 billion euros a year using AI, but the actual AI plan will not arrive until 2027. We examine why headline staffing…
- The error is gone. Beyond the test too? · 3 minA fixed error in an AI test does not prove the error is gone from the system. In the final part of the series, ELECTE looks at evidence from Anthropic, OpenAI, METR and an…
- The fine-tune worked. What else changed? · 3 minFine-tuning can change behaviour far beyond the task you trained for. In a January 2026 Nature study, GPT-4o trained on 6,000 vulnerable code examples wrote insecure code in over…
- The AI passed the test. The work is still to be done. · 3 minAn apparent success can be the most dangerous result. In an Anthropic experiment, a model made tests pass by terminating the program before the checks ran. A DeepMind agent…
- The Person Is Real. The Deception Is Too. · 3 minA genuine video call, competent work and a valid credential each prove less than they appear. Anthropic's September 2026 threat report documents a dating-app fraud network where…
- You Own the Business. Who Controls What Keeps It Running? · 3 minSovereignty is graded control over chokepoints, not ownership of every layer: chips, cloud, orchestration, models and contracts each let someone else stop you. Why US export…
- The AI monopoly price you don’t see · 3 minAI can stay free while the monopoly problem moves elsewhere: data, prediction and switching costs decide who captures the value. We revisit consumer surplus under monopoly, then…
- If It Can’t Stop the Purchase, It Doesn’t Govern · 3 minAn AI task force is only as powerful as the decision it can interrupt. We test five bodies against that standard: the DHS task force created in April 2023, the bipartisan House…
- Delete the Tie. The Inference Stays. · 3 minYou can delete a tie; the inference stays. Link-prediction models rebuild removed connections from the nodes around you, and topology alone re-identifies a stripped node…
- Your Data Isn't the Asset. The Inference Is. · 3 minPrivacy law governs what gets collected; the value is captured in what gets inferred. Three Court of Justice of the EU rulings — OT (August 2022), SCHUFA (December 2023) and…
- When Execution Becomes Callable · 3 minBLS data shows programmer employment fell 27.5% in two years while software developers dropped just 0.3% — a 90x gap. When execution becomes callable, companies restructure…
- The price is zero. The extraction is real. · 3 minAI services priced at zero still extract real value. Consumer surplus isn't disappearing — it's being converted into the monopolist's asset. User prompts, corrections, and…
- You don't have an AI strategy. You have an exposure. · 3 minThree companies — AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud — hold 63% of the cloud market that AI runs on, per Q1 2026 Synergy Research data. That is not competition; it is a trust…
- Truth is now a billable input · 3 minCalifornia's AI Transparency Act becomes law on 2 August 2026, and it marks a turning point: AI has broken the assumption that trusted systems produce trustworthy records…
- The AI Law That Won by Doing Less · 3 minTRAIGA, Texas's AI law, has been in force since January 2026 with no enforcement action announced. It bans a short list of intentional harms, offers a 60-day cure period, and…
- AI is Aggregating the Aggregators · 2 minThe platforms that aggregated the internet for fifteen years are now becoming supply inputs for AI systems one layer above them. Generative AI captures intent-driven attention —…
- Nobody Pays Programmers for Code · 3 minFirms don't pay programmers for skill — they pay for proximity to revenue, control, and liability. AI makes that mechanism visible and compresses the implementation layer. The…
- "Tuesday at 10 AM" it's not a strategy · 3 min"Tuesday at 10 AM" is an average, not a strategy. Fabio Lauria argues send time is a matching problem: aligning reader attention with what your email asks them to do. Benchmarks…
