May the 4th be with you

There are productivity stories.
There are AI stories.
And then there’s whatever this was—a four-day arc that started as a helpful experiment and ended as a fully committed, cinematic tragedy… capped off by the most on-the-nose message imaginable on May the 4th:

“You’ve hit your org’s monthly usage limit.”

Naturally.

But here’s the twist: those four days didn’t feel random. They mapped almost perfectly to the original trilogy.

If 2025 felt like the year AI almost became magic and then immediately turned into plumbing, congratulations. You were paying attention.

For a brief and unhinged stretch, models felt AGI-adjacent. Demos were jaw-dropping. Twitter became unreadable. Every startup pitch sounded like a spiritual awakening with a deck. And then something deeply inconvenient happened.

Reality arrived. With a clipboard.

Ten years ago, software companies sold tools.
In the next ten, they’ll sell results.
And if that sounds like semantics, it’s because most people haven’t realized that AI just killed “Software-as-a-Service” and replaced it with something bigger — what Foundation Capital calls “Service-as-Software”.

The Shift No One Saw Coming

In the SaaS era, customers paid for access — a login, a dashboard, an API key.
The responsibility for performance sat with the user.

Read the full paper here (arXiv 2507.18074)

Welcome to the Age of AI That Designs AI (While We Watch, Slightly Nervous)

Remember that time AlphaGo made Move 37 and all the Go grandmasters collectively spat out their tea? Well, buckle up, because the latest paper from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and friends claims we’ve just had an “AlphaGo moment” in AI research itself. Yes, you read that right: the machines are now inventing their own architectures, and apparently, they’re pretty good at it.