Hey👋,
I'm Giacomo

As always, the Swiss train bringing me to Italy was fairly on time.
It arrived in Milan with a 15-minute delay. I had to run a bit to catch my next train, but that was no problem.

The next Italian train left right on the minute. It arrived at my destination 5 minutes early.

Enough time for me to jump back on the train to grab the suitcase I had left in the luggage rack 😂.

Unfortunately, not enough time to jump back off with it 😅.
So I had to stay on and get off at the next station.

20 minutes later, I caught another train back. This one was also perfectly on time.

On the way back to Switzerland, I was warned about a large strike causing massive disruptions to buses and trains.

My bus to the train station was perfectly on time.
My train to Milan left with a 5-minute delay and arrived right on the minute.

Turns out, the strike was actually limited to a few selected minor routes.
But of course, it was enough for people to claim that “in Italy, nothing works.”

A lot of negative things are said about Italy. Many of them are false or misinformed.

In the picture: the new shiny EuroCity Swiss train from Zurich to Milan.

How would you feel if your colleague upstairs got a $400k bonus while you received just $4,000?

That is what just happened at Samsung.

And it reveals an aspect of the AI frenzy I had honestly overlooked until today.

Until recently, the AI computing story was all about GPUs, mostly designed by NVIDIA.
We all know this story.

But lately, attention has shifted to memory chips, specifically DRAM.
In simple terms, the 16GB, 32GB, 48GB of your laptop.

Only recently did it become clear there is a shortage of advanced memory chips.

LLMs require increasing amounts of memory to operate, as context windows become larger and models more sophisticated.

Even the most advanced GPU doesn’t work efficiently without enough memory.

The result is a massive surge in demand for memory chips.

And an explosion in memory chip stocks!

• SK hynix stock is up 231% year-to-date
• Micron Technology is up 194%
• Samsung Electronics is up 139%

Beware, these sky-high valuations are not just hype. Profits exploded too.

Q1 2026 net income growth vs. previous year:

• SK hynix: +398%
• Micron: +180%

And Samsung: +476%!!

Samsung obviously makes far more than just memory chips:

Smartphones, TVs etc.

The irony is that the consumer electronics business unit is now struggling because of higher chip prices, which in turn massively benefited the chip divisions.

Unions representing Samsung’s chip business units negotiated an unprecedented profit-sharing scheme worth roughly $400k per employee on average.

At the same time, unions from the consumer electronics division requested a court injunction against the scheme.
Their bonus was mostly untouched 😔.

The AI revolution is creating very strange winners and losers.

Love this quote. It's meant for AI investment, but it applies to everything in life. To a career, relationships, friendships.

The risk of not risking is far greater than the risk of risking 🙂.

Everyone wants to become “strategic”.
They want to leave execution to others.
That is what promotions are for, they think.

But when they do get promoted and become “strategic”, they often lose touch with reality.

They stop understanding how the actual work is done.
They stop noticing quality problems early.
They stop learning.

I was reading Ron Friedman, Ph.D. HBR article on "superteams", and one finding stood out.

After surveying more than 6,000 knowledge workers, Friedman found what superteams do differently:

Superteam leaders stay close to the work.
They roll up their sleeves and contribute alongside their team.

The chart below speaks for itself.
78% of superteam employees said their managers were actively involved in the work, vs. 55% for average teams.

They don't stay close to the work to micromanage or to control every detail, but to understand what is really happening. And most importantly, to keep learning and improving.

It might sound obvious.
But in many corporate cultures, seniority equals distance from execution.
The leader "made it".
Now others do the work.

This culture may have been dangerous before.
In the age of AI, it is disastrous.

Technology is moving so fast that no leader can afford to stay hands-off.

AI makes hands-on understanding more important than ever, because the baseline keeps rising. What used to be complex is becoming easier. So to compete, teams need to keep raising the bar.

Superteams experiment, make mistakes, stay curious, learn from one another and practice continuous improvement. This is mandatory in the age of AI.

But that culture cannot exist if leaders talk about continuous improvement from a distance without practicing it themselves.

HBR article: https://lnkd.in/eKyf8K9U

It took Meta 15 years to build a $200B ad business.

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OpenAI plans to get halfway there in 4. 🤯

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Pinterest has been selling ads for 9 years.

They made $4.2B last year.

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Snap has been at it for 10 years.

~$5.2B in 2025.

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OpenAI plans to reach half of Meta's size by 2030.

Starting from basically zero!

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Here's their roadmap, leaked to investors via Axios reporting:

2026: $2.5B

2027: $11B

2028: $25B

2029: $53B

2030: $100B

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That's a growth curve with no precedent in the history of online advertising.

OpenAI is forecasting a 152% ad revenue CAGR over four years.

More than double TikTok's, the fastest-growing ad platform in history so far, which grew at an estimated 71% CAGR between 2021 and 2025.

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But it gets even more interesting.

I did the math on revenue per user.

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ChatGPT reported 900 million weekly active users as of February this year.

Ads only run on the Free and Go tiers, roughly 95% of users, ~850M.

That means OpenAI would earn around $3 per user in 2026.

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They target 2.75B weekly users by 2030, so ~$40 per user.

For reference,Meta currently earns ~$59 per user.

So OpenAI's 2030 target requires 68% of Meta's current monetisation rate.

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Ambitious is an understatement.

But not impossible, given the breakneck user growth ChatGPT has already experienced.

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Plus, OpenAI ads also offer something other platforms don't.

The depth of data it collects about its users is unprecedented, and extremely valuable to advertisers.

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Imagine your personal assistant and mentor selling your conversations to the highest bidder. That's essentially what's happening.

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But the real question isn't whether $100B is achievable.

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It's what happens to the rest of the ad industry when 2.75 billion people are asking an AI instead of scrolling a feed or typing a search query.

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Sources: Axios, Reuters, TechCrunch and full-year earnings report.

Charts courtesy of Claude.

Interesting to see LinkedIn climbing the ranking.

I noticed it first-hand on Google AI Overviews.

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It often cites professional and insightful posts, even those with very little engagement. I saw posts with just one like from small accounts being cited as the top source.

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It seems LLMs get it.It’s not all about virality. Sometimes content quality matters too.

Source: Semrush via Andreessen Horowitz Instagram account

Most ChatGPT vs Claude takes are wrong.

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They ignore the one thing that actually matters.

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It’s not ChatGPT vs Claude.

It’s quota vs quota!

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Opus 4.6 Extended Thinking > GPT 5.4 Extended Thinking.

But to make Opus 4.6 Extended useful, you need Claude Max.

There’s no way around it.

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On Claude Pro ($20/month), the quota is too limited.

For serious work, it makes Opus 4.6 almost unusable.

Claude Max starts at $100/month!

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ChatGPT Pro 5.4 Extended > Opus 4.6 Extended Thinking.

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But again,

ChatGPT Pro is $200/month.😅

And GPT Pro 5.4 Extended is available only there.

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That’s why this is not a model comparison.

It’s a budget comparison.💰

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If you have the budget, ChatGPT Pro is the best option for most tasks, including research, coding, images and videos.

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If you compare $20/month plans like for like, ChatGPT still wins.

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Not because it has the best model.

But because the quota for complex queries is higher.

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And in real workflows, that matters more than people think.

I keep hitting the quota on Claude, I almost never hit it in ChatGPT.

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Few extra notes:

• Claude is better with slides, and pptx files.

• The Claude add-in for PowerPoint and Excel is genuinely excellent.

• Claude Artifacts can build local interactive dashboards, which is cool, but for me it’s still a nice-to-have rather than something I’d use in production.

• ChatGPT wins in marketing because it also handles images and video, and apps.

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For vibe-coding, Claude Code and OpenAI Codex are broadly comparable.

But even there, the same issue comes back.

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If you want the full power of Claude Code, you’ll likely choose Opus 4.6 Extended. And then you hit the quota wall all over again.

Extremely frustrating actually.

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My conclusion:

For most people, the real decision is not Claude vs. ChatGPT.

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It’s how much you’re willing to spend on AI every month.

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That’s it.

Tried Starlink for the first time today.

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On an airBaltic flight, apparently the first (and only?) European airline offering it. And it’s free.

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In fact, I’m writing this post mid-air!

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It’s faster than any complimentary WiFi I’ve ever tried, it feels like normal home internet.

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A real game changer.

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Looking forward to the Starlink IPO. I almost never buy individual stocks, but I might make an exception here.

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Cheers from the Baltics!

I would have never made it to my German exam without ChatGPT.

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For the past couple of months, GPT became my personal teacher.

And honestly, it was the best teacher I’ve ever had.

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Since I moved to Zurich, I’ve tried everything:

group classes, intensive study-abroad programs, private tutors, online learning apps.

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Nothing really worked.

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Until something dawned on me.

I use ChatGPT all the time to learn how to code or improve my writing.

So why wasn’t I using it to learn German?

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I guess my mind was still stuck in the old playbook:

courses, textbooks, learning apps.

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So I created a project.

I gave it detailed instructions about my current level and what I wanted to achieve.

I uploaded exam templates and regulations so GPT understood exactly what exam I was preparing for.

Then I structured the chats like chapters in a book.

Each chat focused on one grammar topic, with tables, examples and exercises.

Not huge conversations. Just quick prompts like:

“Show me the declension of personal pronouns and how to use them.”

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I kept coming back to each chat like a chapter in a textbook.

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Then I created a separate chat just for exercises.

The exact type I would find in the exam.

Except GPT can generate infinite exercises, tailored to the exam format.

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Try doing that with a traditional learning app.

Or even with a human teacher.

Or… with a human girlfriend with limited patience 😅.

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This experience made something very clear to me:

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AI isn’t just a tool.

It’s a 24/7 personal assistant and tutor.

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Use it as such.

You’re not getting hired because ChatGPT doesn’t know you exist.

It became clear to me while sourcing candidates for a new role in our team.

We decided to do active search, but scanning through hundreds of LinkedIn profiles randomly didn't look like a strategy.

So, I turned to ChatGPT.
I asked to map companies in our space and find relevant profiles employed there.

In 16 minutes 🤯, ChatGPT gave me relevant people I would have hardly found otherwise.

And that’s when it really hit me.

What if I was looking for a new job and other hiring managers were doing the same? Would I show up?

What if I was a consultant? This could make or break my business.
And the exact same logic applies to brands.

So, would ChatGPT recommend your profile today, yes or no?