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Is AI Rewiring How We Think?

Who is shaping how we think and buy?

It’s interesting that it may be Sam Altman from OpenAI way more than Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook and Instagram (and more).
Mark Zuckerberg built the web of people.
Sam Altman is building the web of thought.
And what Altman is working on is much bigger… and deeper.

It’s the difference between attention and intention.

Meta runs on who we know and what we click.
OpenAI runs on what we’re thinking about.
And somewhere between those two models… the human mind (not just our data) became the product.

Zuckerberg controls the pulse of global attention.

The infinite scroll of our public selves.
The identity we curate, filter and project.
The algorithm shows us what we want before we know we want it… and keeps us there long enough to forget what we came for.

Altman doesn’t seem to be chasing clicks.

He’s capturing cognition.
Ten percent (and growing) of the world’s adults now talk to ChatGPT monthly.
Not just to write or search… but to think.
We don’t just browse… we offload.
We don’t just consume… we collaborate.

And when the machine begins to draft what we mean… who owns the meaning?

That, to me, is the quiet pivot from Meta to OpenAI.
Zuckerberg mastered the feed.
Altman is mastering the individual’s thinking loop.
Social media turned the world into performance.
AI turns our thinking into better outputs.

Both are mirrors… one shows us to each other, while the other shows us to ourselves.

Now add Nvidia into the mix.
The first company to hit a $5 trillion valuation.
Once a chipmaker for the gamers, now the nervous system of this new cognition economy.
Jensen Huang isn’t selling hardware anymore… he’s selling access to thought.
His chips are the neurons powering both Meta’s feeds and OpenAI’s models.
Every prompt, every scroll, every micro-decision runs through his silicon.

So what happens when every layer of human experience… input, processing, reflection… runs on the same few companies?

It seems like all of them (toss Apple, Google, Anthropic and a few others into the mix) are building tools to anticipate you.
All saying the same thing: “We’re helping you think.”
Together, they’re becoming something new.
Not CEOs, but ministers of thought (a term I’ve been ruminating on since reading the Business Insider article, The Ministers Of Thought).

Because this isn’t just about market caps… it’s about market capture…

Capture of cognition… of curiosity… of consciousness itself.
OpenAI now shapes what we ask.
Meta now shapes what we see.
Nvidia now shapes what we can compute.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth for leaders:

We’re not in the information age anymore.
We’re in the inference age.
The biggest risk isn’t that AI gets it wrong.
It’s that it gets us too right.

So maybe the real question isn’t who wins this trillion-dollar race.

It’s what happens when the power to process reality itself stops being human?
We outsourced memory to the cloud.
Now we’re outsourcing meaning.
And when the machine starts predicting what we’ll believe next…

Who’s really doing the thinking anymore?

This is what Elias Makos and I discussed on CJAD 800 AM.

Mitch Joel · Is AI Rewiring How We Think? – The Elias Makos Show – CJAD 800

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Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.