A Shoe Company Became an AI One; The Trap No CEO Can Escape

Two researchers found the math behind why no CEO can stop firing. It's proven again that the market rewards you for pretending.

1. Stanford 2026 AI Index

400+ pages of data on where AI actually stands.

• Generative AI hit 53% population adoption, and organizational adoption reached 88% globally, which are two headline data points.

• The US-China model performance gap has effectively closed. Anthropic’s top model leads by just 2.7%, despite the US outspending China 23x on private AI investment!

• Global corporate AI investment more than doubled. But responsible AI disclosure scores dropped nearly 20%, and documented AI incidents are 50% up compared with the year before. → Stanford HAI

Editor’s take:

As I pointed out in these three points, there are many more interesting conflicts in the report. Comment and let me know if you want me to roast this.

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2. A Shoe Company Said “We’re an AI Company Now.” The Stock Went…

Allbirds — tech bros' most favorite sneaker brand once valued at $4 billion — announced it’s abandoning footwear entirely to become “NewBird AI.”

And instead of producing shoes for humans, now they do it for AI, an AI compute infrastructure company offering GPU-as-a-Service. → Fortune

And their stock price went from

to

Editor’s take:

Struggle with a business? Why not try adding AI to your business card as well?

Joking aside, we’re talking about a ~$20 bump after a nearly 500‑point crash between 2021 and 2023. But it does show how AI hype can briefly shock some life into a dying business.

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3. From Prompt to Paid Product in an Afternoon.

AI app builder Lovable now lets you add Stripe or Paddle payments. No extra platform fees on top of the payment provider. No App Store submission. No 30% cut to Apple. Weee! → Lovable Docs

Editor’s take:

Why did I list this piece?

You’ll keep hearing takes about the ‘end of the App Store’ or even Apple and Google themselves. These are trillion‑dollar incumbents with distribution, defaults, and regulators on speed dial. Read my analysis here (if you haven’t ready).

Moves like Lovable’s are cool, but counter moves from Big Tech usually land faster than we think.

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4. Buying GPUs Like Groceries, Expires Like Ones Too.

The Big Four are spending hundreds of billions on infrastructure that depreciates faster than traditional factory equipment.

The argument: these companies aren’t investing to profit from AI, they’re investing to not lose their existing businesses. → Fortune

Given there is a 2 to 3 year limited shelf life for these chips, this is more like restocking a supermarket shelf than building a factory.

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5. Snap AI Washing

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel announced the layoff of 1,000 employees (16% of full-time staff).

As you’d have guessed by now, they cited “rapid advancements in artificial intelligence” that enable smaller teams to do the same work. The company says 65% of its new code is now AI-generated. Expected savings: $500 million by the second half of 2026. → The New York Times

Editor’s take:

What they really mean is:

We’ve found a story Wall Street likes, while the unspoken KPI is the $500 million in ‘savings’, which mostly comes from people who don’t work there anymore.

This is a trend now. If you want a stock price boost, fire at least 4 digits of staff or add an AI to your name, or if you’re really committed, why not do both?

While a study published in March titled “The AI Layoff Trap” proves mathematically that AI-driven layoffs are a Prisoner’s Dilemma.

In the model, every company automates because they’re scared their competitors will, but together they end up killing the spending power their own revenues rely on, ie, the profits fall alongside wages, so everyone loses.

Things like UBI, retraining, or profit taxes, according to the authors, don’t fix the issue.

The paper coincides with ~99,000 tech workers laid off through April 2026, with 48% explicitly attributed to AI.