Observations · AI and Business Since 2022
Media and design
The cost of producing images, video, and audio fell toward zero — photoreal images in 2023, coherent video in 2024, video with native sound in 2025, and a TikTok-style feed of pure AI content (Sora app) by late 2025. Meanwhile publishers split between suing AI companies and licensing to them.
What drove it
Midjourney, Adobe Firefly, Sora and Sora 2, Veo 3, Runway, ElevenLabs for voice — plus the News Corp–OpenAI licensing template and the SAG-AFTRA consent-and-compensation framework.
The evolution
2022
ChatGPT wrote passable copy on day one — the first warning shot at content mills.
- OpenAI launches ChatGPT — the generative AI era begins
It turned years of lab research into a mass-market product overnight and forced every major technology company to respond within weeks. Google declared an internal code red.
2023
Midjourney v5's pope-in-a-puffer moment and Adobe Firefly made imagery free and commercial, while SAG-AFTRA won the first AI labor protections.
- Midjourney v5 and Adobe Firefly make AI imagery photoreal — and commercial
AI image generation became simultaneously indistinguishable from photography and packaged for professional use.
- Hollywood's AI reckoning: SAG-AFTRA wins digital-replica protections
The first large-scale collective-bargaining settlement over generative AI — consent-and-compensation became the template for AI and human labor.
- Google announces Gemini 1.0, its answer to GPT-4
Google's first credible claimed answer to GPT-4 after a year of being perceived as behind.
2024
Sora previewed promptable video, AI Overviews began draining referral traffic, and News Corp licensed while others litigated.
- OpenAI previews Sora: text-to-video arrives
A step-change in generative video quality — AI was moving decisively beyond text and images into time-based media.
- Gemini 1.5 brings the 1M-token context window
Long context reset expectations for how much information one model could reason over; the image controversy became the year's cautionary tale on guardrail tuning.
- Google puts AI Overviews on top of Search
The most consequential change to the web's front door in years, and Google's direct answer to AI-native search rivals.
- Media's fork in the road: News Corp licenses, others litigate
The media industry split into two strategies — litigate or license — while AI answers began replacing clicks.
2025
Veo 3 added native audio, Sora 2 shipped as a social feed of pure AI content, and 'AI slop' entered the vocabulary.
- Gemini 2.5 and Veo 3: Google returns to the front
After two years trailing OpenAI, Google led on both reasoning quality and generative media in the same season.
- Sora 2 ships as a TikTok-style social app
AI video moved from demo to consumer social product, putting OpenAI in competition with TikTok and Meta for attention itself.
- The AI browser war: ChatGPT Atlas and Perplexity Comet
The browser — the gateway to the web's ad economy — became the new battleground for AI distribution.
2026
Gemini Omni made any-modality-to-video routine; provenance and trust became the scarce assets.
- Google I/O 2026: Gemini 3.5 and Gemini Omni
Google's frontier stack — intelligence with action — pushed across consumer search, developer tools, and enterprise agents in one coordinated move.
- Apple makes the model layer a swappable OS primitive
It commoditizes the model layer at the level of the operating system. A provider-neutral interface baked into the platform SDK turns the model into an interchangeable component and makes the surrounding workflow — distribution, integration, trust — the durable asset.
- RWS grows profit 33% as AI reaches a third of revenue
Profit grew six times faster than revenue while the AI share of the mix climbed — the opposite shape to the compression showing up in customer-experience outsourcing the same month. Two labour-intensive service industries, the same technology, opposite margin directions. Whether AI compresses a service business or expands it is not a property of the technology; it turns on whether the firm bills for the output or for the hours.
- DeepL buys Mixhalo, moving translation toward live interpretation
Machine translation has been encroaching on written work for a decade. Live simultaneous interpretation has held out, because it runs in real time, under social pressure, with no edit pass and no second attempt — the conditions under which tacit skill matters most. Buying a live-event audio platform is a statement about which direction the frontier is moving.
- Premium publisher ad supply falls up to 41% as AI search bites
An ad request is a count of pages actually served, not a modelled estimate of clicks foregone, which makes this one of the cleaner available measurements of what AI-mediated search is doing to the open web. Prices rising on collapsing volume is a yield-led market: publishers are extracting more per impression precisely because there are fewer of them, which is not a durable position.
- Google AI Mode starts acting inside third-party apps
Search has spent twenty-five years as a referral layer: it told you where to go and you went there. Acting inside the destination collapses that step. The visit — the thing publishers, retailers and every content business monetise — becomes optional, and the surface that captures the intent is no longer the one that fulfils it.
Key sources
The papers, announcements, and reports that document this industry's shift. Each also lives in the Library.
What businesses do differently
Studios and agencies restructured around AI-assisted pipelines with human creative direction. Newsrooms negotiated licensing while fighting traffic loss from AI answers. Provenance and verification became product features.
What this means for founders and leaders
When production is free, curation, taste, and trust become the business. Owning a relationship with an audience — not a content library — is the asset that survives.