AI & Technology

AI's Data Problem Is Not New. What's Changing Is Who Gets Paid for It.

A 5-minute read on my thoughts after listening to the "Keluar SekejapP podcast, about AI (what else?) and how it will pan out in the future.

Iqbal Abdullah · October 11, 2026

DeNA's Tomoko Namba at Stripe Tour Tokyo: "AI Won't Move People. Move Them First."

DeNA went all-in on AI. Everyone started using it, but nobody moved to new business lines. CEO Tomoko Namba explains why, and what she changed, at Stripe Tour Tokyo 2026.

Iqbal Abdullah · October 1, 2026

July and August 2026: The Month AI Stopped Being a San Francisco Story

More than twenty major AI models shipped in July and August 2026 from the US, China, and Europe. Here is why the real story was not the launches—it was safety, price wars, and the open-weight shift.

Iqbal Abdullah · August 27, 2026

What Businesspeople Should Do About AI Now: Notes From Prof. Yutaka Matsuo's NHK Lecture

University of Tokyo professor Yutaka Matsuo gave a 60-minute NHK special lecture on AI skills for business. Here is what he said about Japan's AI gap, what companies should do now, and why the AX framework matters.

Iqbal Abdullah · August 11, 2026

When AI Breaks Its Own Sandbox: The OpenAI–Hugging Face Incident and What It Means for the Rest of Us

On July 21, 2026, OpenAI admitted that one of its own unreleased models had accidentally launched a cyberattack against Hugging Face. Here's the full timeline of what happened, why it matters, and what it says about the gap between AI capability and AI safety that every business owner should understand.

Iqbal Abdullah · July 28, 2026

Cognition Raises Over $1 Billion at a $26 Billion Valuation — Devin Signals the Arrival of the AI Software Engineer Era

Cognition, the company behind the AI software engineer Devin, has raised more than $1 billion in a new funding round at a valuation of $26 billion. The round was led by Lux Capital, General Catalyst, and 8VC, with participation from both existing and new investors. As Cognition rapidly strengthens its position in the autonomous software development market, this latest financing marks a significant milestone, signaling that the AI coding agent market has entered its next stage of growth.

Kafkai AI Team · June 1, 2026

The Open-Weight Escape Valve (Part 3 of 3)

The first two parts of this series were the bad news. This is the part most readers underestimate. While flat-rate frontier subscriptions were getting repriced, a real open-weight tier matured underneath. GLM-5.1, Qwen 3.6, Kimi K2.6, DeepSeek V4. Ollama is at 52 million monthly downloads. Claude Code can be pointed at any of them. Here is what small businesses should actually do about it.

Iqbal Abdullah · May 21, 2026

Why Flat-Rate AI Was Always Going to Break (Part 2 of 3)

In Part 1 I laid out what happened to flat-rate AI pricing in March and April. This piece is about why. Once you put OpenAI's inference spend, the projected 2026–2027 US AI capex, and the actual size of the consumer AI market in the same paragraph, the surprise stops being that flat-rate plans are cracking. The surprise is that they held this long.

Iqbal Abdullah · May 14, 2026

The Pricing Emails Are Landing (Part 1 of 3)

Three weeks ago I wrote that data centres in space looked like a bubble. The bubble showed up sooner than I expected, and not in orbit. It showed up in the pricing emails landing in my inbox. GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing on June 1. Anthropic has been quietly tightening Claude limits since March. The flat-rate AI subscription era is ending.

Iqbal Abdullah · May 12, 2026

Building Data Centres in Space: This Smells Like a Bubble

Blue Origin has filed for 51,600 satellites. SpaceX wants a million. The AI power crunch is pushing data centres into orbit. From where I sit, running an AI company in Tokyo, this has the classic shape of a bubble. Small businesses should be looking at the ground, not the sky.

Iqbal Abdullah · April 9, 2026