189 | The end of the internet as we know it, Higher education AI crisis, AI avatars influencing court cases, and more important AI news for the week ending on May 16th, 2025

0:00Hello and welcome to a weekend news episode of the Leveraging AI podcast, the podcast that shares practical, ethical ways to improve efficiency, grow your business, grow your business, and advance your career. This is Isar Maitis, your host, and we are going to cover some very profound and interesting topics that happened this past week. The first one we're going to talk about, the first signs of the end of the Internet, as we know it. Yes, I know that sounds big, but that's the reality. The second topic that we're going to talk about is how impactful is AI in higher education right now and how it is going to change higher education and the workforce in the next few years, which is going to impact all of us.

0:39And the third main topic is going to be Trump's visit in Saudi and how that is connected to AI and AI infrastructure. But before we begin, there's two things I want to add. First of all, next week, I'm going to do a special deep dive in the first section of the episode instead of the regular weekly things. I'm going to dive into the AI company of the future. It's a podcast that was released by Dwarkesh, who has an amazing podcast that you should follow if you're not following already. He is a brilliant mind and he's a great interviewer and he has access to anybody he wants in the AI world. But he was doing actually a solo episode talking about the AI company of the future.

1:14You can go and listen to yourself, but I'm going to cover it in depth next week. I wanted to do it this week, but there was too many important things to talk about, which I hope I'll be able to avoid next week and jump into that. And the last thing I want to say before we start is I want to say thank you. So first of all, thank you to all of you for listening to this regularly. But it's amazing to me how close this community is becoming of people following this podcast and engaging with me across multiple channels. We have now several different weeks, more than 20 people every week on the AI Friday Hangouts, which you are more than welcome to join.

1:43We do this at every Friday at 1 p.m. Eastern if you want to join. There's a link to do that in the show notes. But I want to give a special thank to Charlie Hollenrake, Leon Crisp, and Dennis Yuskovic. All three of them heard an episode I released a couple of weeks ago saying that I like to get an access to Maness and I don't have access yet. And all three of them reached out and offered an invitation from them to give me access to that, which I now have and can experiment and try different things, which I will report in an episode in the next couple of weeks. So thank you, all of you, for listening.

2:14Thanks specifically to Charlie, Leon, and Dennis for caring and for offering me madness invitations. And now let's get started with the episode.

2:28So I mentioned the first topic is the end of the internet as we know it. I talked about this in many previous episodes on how AI is changing the way we engage with the internet and how agents and search are going to be impacted by that and how my personal behavior has changed dramatically where probably 85 % of what I'm looking for is not coming from going to Google, but going through different AI tools. But this week, there was a craze on Reddit on the data about the traffic to the top 10 leading websites in the world. This is the first time in maybe the history of the internet, but definitely in recent years, that the traffic to nine out of the top 10 websites has decreased month over month.

3:10And there's only one website that saw an increase in the top 10, and that is ChatGPT, that by the way, was number 15 on the list just a year ago, and now it is in number five and growing. What does that tell us? Well, first of all, I need to say that this is not one data point, but that one data point is very significant. The regular traffic to websites is declining. Apple also reported the overall traffic to websites and browsers is declining with more and more users globally are now using ChatGPT, Gemini and other apps to research things that they're trying to find. This, as I mentioned, again, in previous episodes as well, is going to have profound implications on every online presence of any company.

3:55If the future of your business depends on website traffic, as it looks today, even if it's 30 % of the revenue that you're making, 40 % of the revenue that you're making, if you're not going to make dramatic changes in the next few years, that is going to go away because the internet is going to be browsed through agents. You will talk to whatever applications, whether it's ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, or anything else that will come out in the next few years. And these will do the research for you and will get you back information. And the companies that will understand how to build the backend of their website in a way that will be agent friendly will win.

4:31And anybody who is late to that game will lose potentially their entire business. And I'm having conversations with very senior people in really large companies in the billions of dollars who are not aware of what I just said, and they're not planning yet. That tells me two things. One, the understanding that people at the leading edge of AI has right now that is very obvious to them is not even on the radar of most companies in the world. And the other thing is that there's a huge risk and opportunity of making the right moves to understand how to engage with agents. To be fair, it's not a well-defined path, meaning it's not very clear how that's going to evolve and how it's going to look like in two or three years.

5:12But what is very obvious to me is that it's not going to be what we see and know right now or what we see and know and everything we've learned from running web-based businesses in the past 20 years. Now, I said that was just one data point, but the second data point comes from an interview by Eddie Q from Apple, who revealed potential plans to shift Safari search from Apple to AI tools like OpenAI, Perplexity, Anthropic, and so on. That one sentence sent Alphabet's shares down 7%. That's$150 billion in market value that were eliminated because of that. Q's specific quote was, AI services will eventually replace standard search engines such as Google.

5:53Now, he's Apple's vice president of services. He doesn't just say things. I think it was very obvious to him what's going to be the implications of what he's saying. And the other piece of information is that Safari searches fell for the first time in April of 2025. So again, another data point that shows you where is the direction going, A, from the volume of search to traditional search, and B, from the plans of one of the largest companies in the world when it comes to giving people access to data, meaning Apple in all of its devices. Combine that with a US Justice Department lawsuit that is trying to break up Google and potentially disallow Apple to continue using Google as its primary engine, as well as potentially forcing Google to sell Chrome.

6:37And you see that things are going to change potentially faster than we initially thought. Now, if that's not a big enough blow to your brain to think about, I want to add a few more points. And I mentioned those in previous episodes, but I want to touch on them again because I think they're critical and maybe you didn't listen to all the episodes. The first one is what happens to the financial engine of the internet when and if this happens? Meaning the first one is what is going to happen to the internet from a financial perspective when this transition happens? So what I mean by that is, think about it, the internet is the most incredible service potentially the humankind ever had that is free.

7:12None of us is paying for the internet. I mean, we're paying the ISP to get internet access at our house, but we're not paying for the internet itself. And the reason for that is because ads are paying for the internet. But if I'm using Chachipiti or Google or Gemini or Grok or Manus or whatever the case may be to access the internet, it's not seeing ads. I don't see the ads. I just see the answers that I was looking for. It's going to book the tickets for me that I needed. It's going to order the food that I want and so on. And that means there are no ads, no ads, no money, no money. Who pays for the internet?

7:45And I don't think anybody has answered to that yet. The second question is, why would people create new content if there is no incentive? Meaning the incentive to create new content that gave us information was, I create quality content that's going to get found by Google, that's going to send people to my website that will connect with me, my brand, my company, and will buy our products and services. That model is going to change as well, which means the incentive to create new valuable content may or may not be there depending how this evolves. So the question becomes who or what is going to create new content in the future?

8:20And that's another question I don't think anybody has answer to. A lot of it is going to be AI created, but even then you're asking, okay, what kind of content will it create for what purposes based on what information and so on. And the third question, which is maybe the most important question is how do you in your business, in your strategy, are preparing for this future when the facts of how it's going to evolve are unclear? And I think the answer for that is you got to stay. And I think the answer for that is you got to start researching how it's going to impact your industry, your business, your universe.

8:53And in parallel, be on top of what is changing in the agent world to slowly try to figure out and try to make the changes faster than your competition. So you can capture market share as this shift happens. It's not a shift that's going to happen overnight. It's going to be a process. And this process may take 18 months to five years. But during that time frame, there's going to be more and more traffic that is going to be agent-based versus human-based. The second topic that we're going to dive into is the impact of AI on higher education. A very long and detailed article in the New York Times has shared findings on research that they've done on the impact of AI in higher education.

9:32And what is happening in higher education right now is the younger generation that is in colleges and universities in the U.S. right now is using ChatGPT and other AI tools in more and more ways, with more and more students claiming that they're generating 70, 80, 90 percent of their work with AI, with them just adding 10 to 20 percent of the effort in order to complete the tasks that their professors are giving them. Now, this has many different impacts, both on students and professors. First of all, the students' integrity is at question, but it just depends on what the rules are in each university or in each professor, and each one of them defines it differently.

10:11but it's very, very clear that more and more students are using AI tools in order to do the work for them and not disclosing it as they're doing that. And yes, there are attempts by different universities to have a more holistic approach to this phenomenon, but it's definitely not the norm and it's definitely not a standard with every university and sometimes every professor doing their own thing. Now, to tell you how crazy the situation is, one of the examples is a philosophy professor at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, caught students using AI to write personal introductions for an ethics and technology class.

10:45So I will let that sink for a minute. It's a personal introduction. You're telling about yourself to other students in an ethics class, and there were students using AI to write that piece of information. Now, that's funny, but that's also really, really scary. It is scary because what kind of critical thinking capabilities are these students developing if every task that they need to complete is actually done by AI. Now, it's scarier if you think about that these are the people that are going to come into the workforce two years from now, because in the past two years, every task that they had, they've done with AI.

11:18How are they going to respond when they get into a company in which they cannot use AI for anything? Well, they may not know how to do projects without AI, because that's everything they've done for their four years in college and university that was supposed to prepare them for working the companies? Will they come and work in companies that do not have very open AI policies? What kind of policies you need to have in place as a company once you start receiving these people into the workforce that their solution for everything is ChatGPT or any other AI tool? Now, professors are really frustrated with the whole situation, again, because they don't have a good answer to how to address the current situation.

11:56In many cases, the universities are asking them to grade work of students that was not done by the students themselves, but was done by AI. It's very obvious to them that that is the situation. And yet they still have to grade it because the university currently does not have a better solution. And yes, there are some AI checkers, but it's almost as accurate as flipping a coin. Meaning whether you find that something was done by AI or not with these checkers, you still don't know for sure. And then what are you going to do? You're going to throw somebody off their university degree when it's a 50 % chance, 70 % chance, 90 % chance.

12:27Where do you draw the line in the sand? if you're saying I'm going to mess with somebody's future when I'm not 100 % sure that they're actually cheating. The flip side of that, is it cheating? Are we really preparing them for the future if we're not allowing them to use AI? So I think this is on one hand, a really scary article that raises a lot of concerns and questions. But on the other hand, it is very obvious that it's the biggest opportunity the education system as a whole ever had. Because if you think about how we are teaching students right now, whether in elementary school, middle school, high school, or higher education, it is very, very similar to how we've been teaching for hundreds of years.

13:02I live in Florida, not too far from me, there's a beautiful town called St. Augustine. St. Augustine has the first wooden school in the United States. It was built sometime between 1702 and 1716. So that's a very long time ago, over 300 years. And you know what? It has a classroom with desks and chairs and a blackboard and a place for a teacher to stand in front of the students. that looks and feels very much like what we're doing today. So we have an opportunity to deliver personalized, high-quality training and education to every kid with the teacher and or professor being more of a mentor that can provide the human side, the mentorship, the hand-holding, the moral and ethical support for students versus the actual teaching itself, which I believe AI can personalize and do better than what a teacher or professor can do in front of a class of 30 to 400 students, depending on the size of the class and the specific facility.

13:56How do we then balance between critical thinking, AI tools and other tools that will come up in the future? I don't know, but I think it requires and hopefully will force a complete revolution of our education system. And it doesn't end with students. The problem with professors is as profound, meaning professors are stuck in this weird situation when they themselves are using more and more AI because it helps them create better lessons, faster and cheaper, faster and easier. And on the other hand, they're not allowing their students to use it. But an interesting example came this week from Ella Stapleton, a 2025 Northeastern University graduate who is demanding the university to pay her an$8 ,000 tuition refund after she discovered that her business professor, Rick Arrowwood, used Chachupiti to generate lectures and lecture notes without disclosing it.

14:44So on the student side, there's the same level of frustration, right? I'm paying all this amount of money, in many cases with huge student loans, and now only to find out that my professor, instead of providing me the information that he learned through the years, he's actually using ChatGPT to provide the information that I could have gotten for free. And this obviously doesn't end in the universities because it immediately reflects on internships and entry-level jobs. In a recent report by the World Economic Forum, it was found that AI automation is taking over entry-level jobs and it's reducing traditional internships and opportunities in a very dramatic way.

15:18Several different professors from known universities around the world in that research are emphasizing the role of preparing students for careers using internships, but they're claiming that it's becoming harder and harder for them to find internships for students in specific areas. So this just amplifies the impact of the education problem itself, meaning on one hand, the students are going to do more and more of their work with AI without actually developing some of the skills they need for the job force. On the other hand, they can't even learn that on the job as part of an internship because internships are becoming more and more rare because companies are saying, I don't need an intern.

15:55I can actually do this with AI. And that obviously stops the entry for the waterfall effect that then needs to become more senior employees in multiple companies. I asked that question multiple times. If you don't need junior developers, how do you get senior developers? How do you get team leads? How do you get CTOs after that? And the same question happens in law firms, et cetera, et cetera. These are a lot of questions that I don't think anybody has answers to at this point. Now, the flip side that I do see is I see a big opportunities for companies to be able to shift to AI usage because they will hire people straight out of university that have significant access and experience to using AI tools across multiple aspects of things that they had to do during the university.

16:34So while you have a lot of employees who are used to doing things the way they're used to doing it, you may have a breath of fresh air when it comes to hiring people out of university who has been using AI every single day for four years, which is probably not the case for people in your business. So there is a light at the end of that tunnel. I just don't know how long the tunnel is. And I'm not sure how long it will take us to all adjust to this new situation because it's shifting very, very fast. and the bigger systems, such as the education system, the medical system, the legal system, and so on, are very slow to act.

17:06And it will be a turbulent time through this transition period. Now, on the same topic of AI impact on the future economy, a very interesting article on Fast Company addressed actually two aspects of what they call the 100 trillion power shift. And they're saying two very powerful things are going to happen in the global economy in the next 20 years. One is the rise of AI that, as I mentioned, they're claiming can drive$100 trillion relocation in global wealth by 2043, basically just short of 20 years, doubling the global economy fueled by automation and innovation. What they're arguing, which we've heard time and time again, that AI is not just going to take jobs, but it's going to actually help offsetting the shrinking workforces in many countries around the world, especially in aging nations like Japan.

17:55So I highly recommend if you haven't read the book, The End of the World is Just the Beginning, that you go and read that book or at least listen to it if you're more of an audiobook kind of person. It's a fascinating book that talks, in addition to a lot of other things, about the shrinking workforce in several different places around the world and the implications it will have on these particular economies. So being able to offset that with AI and then robots is potentially saving these economies and allowing the world economy to continue growing despite less workforce that is available to do traditional jobs and potentially new jobs.

18:28Now, the other two aspects that they're mentioning that are very interesting when it comes to global economical trends, one of them is what they're calling the reverse distribution of wealth that started in the 70s, meaning most of the money is enriching the top 1 % versus the people who are actually doing the work. And they're claiming that access to AI can help reverse that phenomena because people will be able to do more on their own, not necessarily depending on enterprises to support their livelihood. And connecting that to the transition in education that needs to happen, a recent report states that 23 % of the 2024 Harvard Business School grads were still unemployed three months after graduation.

19:08That's very rare. over 4 million members of the Gen Zs in the US are not employed and not in school or any kind of training, joining this new concept called NEET, N-E-E-T, that stands for not in education, employment, or training. These are alarming numbers. And again, it very clearly shows that the need for entry jobs is shrinking. But that being said, the flip side of that is there's a lot of things that AI cannot do yet. And AI cannot repair a busted waterline. It cannot install sonar panels. It cannot build skyscrapers. It cannot fix power lines or build data centers. And this may signal a very interesting shift in our education system where more and more people will go towards these kind of jobs in where the salaries are actually growing dramatically.

19:59I mentioned with you last week that there's a shortage of 100 ,000 electricians to build the power plants that will feed the data centers that are being built in the next few years. salaries of elevator technicians and power plant operators are now crossing the$100 ,000 a year. That was not the case a couple of years ago. Now, combine that with the fact that Gen Zs and millennials are less inclined to work in corporate jobs, mostly because what they see in social media that is reshaping their perception. When they're seeing people younger than them or their age on YouTube and TikTok that are presumably making millions, either flipping houses or selling clothing or doing whatever hassle jobs that they're seeing, or not to mention Kylie Jenner building a billion dollar empire on Instagram, you understand that the drive to do something different than taking a nine to five corporate job is definitely there.

20:48And to add a completely unrelated to AI aspect to all of that, the Gen Zs and millennials are about to inherit$100 trillion from baby boomers in the next 10 to 15 years, which is the largest wealth transition in history that by itself will have implications on how the global economy works. So we are in for an interesting ride in the next few years. And I will try to keep you posted and educated as much as I can. But you need to think about what's the implication of that to you and the business that you're running or that you're in. Our last deep type topic is Trump's visit to Saudi Arabia, which ended up with a$600 billion investment deal from Saudi to the US.

21:30This includes investment in AI, defense, energy, and potential other aspects that is supposed to create 2 million new U.S. jobs based on the White House fact sheet. Now, if you remember Trump's integration, he had all the who's and who's from Silicon Valley and top companies behind him on stage. If you thought that was just a part of the integration party, then you're absolutely wrong. All these people went to Saudi together with the president, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Jensen Wang, and other people like that. and they all met with the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. And this shows you how this administrator works.

22:07They're all about growing the US economy and the AI in the eyes of the current administration and myself plays a very big role in that. Now, my only problem with this whole thing, or maybe there's a few other problems, but the biggest problem that I have with this whole thing is that means that Saudi will hold significant components of US AI infrastructure, whether it's power generation, data centers, and so on. And I don't know if that's a healthy thing. And I don't know what are the long-term risks of that. All I can tell you is that when I compare this to the chip manufacturing situation right now, US made every mistake possible, allowing Taiwan to become more or less the world's sole supplier of advanced chips.

22:46And if we're now going to have another foreign nation hold components of our entire supply chain for AI, I'm not sure it's a great investment in the long run. but time will tell. And now let's shift to the rapid fire topics. We're going to start with a lot of OpenAI news, like almost every week, they seem to be on fire in the past few months. So OpenAI are still in conversations with Microsoft to approve their new restructuring process. As we mentioned last week, they gave up on converting from a nonprofit to a for-profit. And what they're actually doing is they're converting their for-profit component that used to be an LLC to a public benefit corporation.

23:23I'm not a hundred percent sure, and it's definitely not my field of expertise to say what that means, but it means that it is a for-profit entity that can have shares for different companies, meaning investors can have shares in that entity, but that also has to balance with its mission to advance AI for humanity. And the non-profit board, this PBC, is still going to control the for-profit arm. Microsoft hasn't approved that yet. They are in conversation on exactly how that's going to look like and how many shares in this new entity Microsoft is going to have. It has been leaked that in these conversations, Microsoft is actually potentially looking for less equity, but in return, they want to get access to OpenAI tech beyond 2030, which is the current agreement.

24:07This tells you that Microsoft is a huge believer in OpenAI's ability to achieve its goals and still be the leading or one of the leading companies in this field in the next five years, because otherwise they obviously wouldn't want that. They would want more equity in the company. That's despite the huge investment that Microsoft is making with developing their own AI capabilities. Now, there are more and more rumors and signals that this is just a step on the way for OpenAI for an IPO, which makes a lot of sense to me. This would be the logical thing for many different reasons. A, it will allow them to raise significantly more money than the stupid amount of money they've raised so far, but also will allow the public to be a part of that and get access to more reporting on what's actually happening in OpenAI as it's happening.

24:51The other huge investor in OpenAI being SoftBank, that is now actually a bigger investor than Microsoft is because they're committed to invest$30 billion versus the only$13.75 billion invested by Microsoft. So SoftBank CFO approved that they are giving the thumbs up to this new restructuring of OpenAI and that they're going to maintain their $30 billion investment. So initially, there were questions about that because the$30 billion investment were dependent on their converting from a non-profit to a for-profit by the end of this year. Otherwise, that number would have been cut by$10 billion to only$20 billion investment.