Artificial Intelligence Archives - Gérard Métrailler

June 9, 2026June 12, 2026

The blank canvas and the seasoned eye.

Ten years ago, streaming a movie over Starlink at 30,000 feet would have sounded like fantasy. We are about to be just as wrong about AI, and the people who get the next decade right will not be the ones you expect.

We are reliably bad at imagining ten years out, and we miss in one direction: we underestimate. AI is the next thing we are underestimating. The instinct in most rooms is that the young will lead and everyone else will catch up. That instinct is wrong twice over, and the answer to why is older than any of the tools.

June 2, 2026June 12, 2026

Your AI budget is already gone.

Editorial documentary photograph of a quiet finance executive's desk; a framed editorial illustration above the desk shows a small stack of token-shaped chips with one corner of the stack burning steadily and a thin trail of smoke rising upward, the rest of the stack intact but visibly being consumed.

Three Uber executives, three different seats, told the same story this spring. The cost category most boards govern quarterly is moving to hourly.

By April, Uber’s CTO had blown the AI budget he set in December. Three weeks later, the CEO said he was metering headcount and leaning further in. Two weeks after that, the COO asked aloud whether any of it was producing value. Three quotes, three seats, one cost category nobody had experience with. Here is why token spend breaks the quarterly cadence finance was built on, and the three questions a board should be asking by the next meeting.

May 26, 2026June 12, 2026

Where you work stopped mattering. When your AI resets started.

A close-up of an analog wall-mounted station clock with four colored arc-segments painted on the dial in place of hour numerals: three deep navy-blue segments and one mint-green segment in the lower-left position. The minute hand is slightly blurred, in motion.

The remote-versus-office debate has aged out; now, shifts run on an AI token clock you do not control.

Your AI tool reset now shapes your calendar. Claude meters in 5-hour windows, ChatGPT in 3. A heavy user on a Max plan can use an entire window in an hour, then wait four. This pacing splits your day into four shifts, making your meeting culture count against subscription tokens. Below is a proposed schedule for a modern knowledge worker, with three actions to try this week.

May 19, 2026June 12, 2026

You signed it. You own it. That is the only test that matters.

A tightly framed close-up of a printed page on a light oak desk. Three short clean paragraphs of dark grey serif text are visible. In the margin, a handwritten check mark and the short note "Fully agree!" in dark blue ink. At the bottom of the page, a hand holding a black fountain pen is mid-signature.

The argument over what counts as cheating is the wrong argument. Here is the one worth having, and the three questions that settle it.

A friend asked me last week whether it was cheating to have ChatGPT clean up his English before he sent a client memo. He is fluent, not native; the model fixes a stray preposition, tightens a sentence, lifts the register half a notch. He has been doing this for two years. He has never asked the question out loud before.

I asked him whether he uses Grammarly. He laughed. Of course, he uses Grammarly. Everyone uses Grammarly. Grammarly is not cheating; Grammarly is hygiene.

That is the entire debate, in two minutes.