💼AI's Empty Promise

PLUS: OpenAI Is Ditching Nvidia

Reading time: 5 minutes

🗞️In this edition

  • Sponsored: LLM Portal– Test, compare and built with major LLMs

  • AI boom shadows America's manufacturing death spiral

  • Workflow Wednesday #40 ‘Future of AI’

  • OpenAI bets big on proprietary AI chips

  • In other AI news –

    • China Mobile to triple AI computing power with local chips by 2028

    • Slack upgrades Slackbot into an all-in-one AI assistant

    • Salesforce adds AI voice agents to its customer service platform

    • 4 must-try AI tools

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♨️News – A stark divide is emerging in the U.S. economy. Manufacturing has shed 38,000 jobs since January while AI investment has surged 37 percent. Trump's tariffs aimed to protect factories, but executives from GM, Caterpillar, and John Deere report billions in losses. Meanwhile, AI data centers are getting funded at record levels—but they employ far fewer workers than traditional manufacturing once built. 

👨‍💻Fast facts – 

  • U.S. manufacturing employment peaked at 19.5 million workers in 1979. Today it's under 13 million and still falling.

  • Data center construction requires 1,000+ workers to build but only 100-300 to operate. Traditional auto factories employ several thousand in the same space.

  • Imports of AI hardware servers, high-end chips, power systems jumped 64 percent year-to-date despite tariffs.

  • Manufacturing jobs lost an estimated 78,000 positions in the year ending August 2025.

  • U.S. automakers saw their lowest profit margins since the pandemic in Q2 2025, partly due to tariffs.

  • Biden-era CHIPS Act funding doubled annual manufacturing investment before peaking in 2024, but many facilities aren't operational yet.

  • 🤓Open Tools POV – This isn't just an economic divergence. It's a question of what kind of economy we're building. AI promises transformation but creates fewer jobs once the construction dust settles. Manufacturing offers stable middle-class work but can't compete with tariff chaos and offshoring pressure. If the AI bubble bursts before manufacturing recovers, we're left with neither. The real risk isn't picking the wrong industry to bet on it's that we're betting everything on one that employs almost nobody.

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This Week in Workflow Wednesday #40: Future of AI

Workflow #1: Turn AI headlines into a 90-second audio brief with ElevenLabs.io (free).

Step 1: Sign up. Open Speech > Text to Speech.

Step 2: Save three test voices: Anchor_2030. Documentary_Clear. Friendly_Access.

Then we dial Stability and Clarity, add pronunciation rules, script the brief ………… and finish the build inside Workflow Wednesday, plus 2 bonus workflows

Image Source: Google Images

☕News –  OpenAI is designing its own AI chips for the first time, partnering with Broadcom to develop and deploy them starting in the second half of 2026. The companies will roll out 10 gigawatts' worth of custom processors, enough power to run over 8 million U.S. homes or five times what the Hoover Dam produces. This follows OpenAI's recent 6-gigawatt chip deal with AMD and a $100 billion investment from Nvidia. The move puts OpenAI alongside Google and Amazon in the custom chip race, trying to reduce dependence on Nvidia's expensive and limited processors.

👨‍💻Fast facts – 

  • OpenAI will design the chips while Broadcom handles development and deployment, with rollout completing by the end of 2029.

  • Broadcom's stock jumped over 12 percent in premarket trading following the announcement.

  • The custom chips will use Broadcom's Ethernet networking gear exclusively, challenging Nvidia's InfiniBand solution.

  • Broadcom unveiled a $10 billion custom AI chip order in September from an unnamed customer likely OpenAI.

  • Similar custom chip efforts by Microsoft and Meta have faced delays or failed to match Nvidia's performance.

  • Broadcom's stock has risen nearly six-fold since the end of 2022 on the AI chip boom.

🤓Open Tools POV –  OpenAI is betting big on control. Custom chips mean less dependence on Nvidia's pricing and supply constraints, but they also mean massive risk. Microsoft and Meta tried this and stumbled. The 2026 timeline is aggressive, and the power requirements are staggering. If OpenAI pulls this off, they gain a massive competitive edge. If they don't, they've burned billions while competitors keep training on proven hardware. This isn't just about chips, it's about whether OpenAI can engineer its way out of the GPU bottleneck or get crushed trying.

  • China Mobile aims to triple AI computing power using homegrown chips by 2028 // Accelerating AI infrastructure buildout is expected to be a major theme in China’s 15th five-year plan in 2026

  • Slack is turning Slackbot into an AI assistant // The revamped Slackbot acts more like an AI companion that can help you create plans, schedule meetings, find files, and more

  • Salesforce adds voice calling to Agentforce AI customer service software // Salesforce announced Agentforce Voice, a feature that allows companies to have artificial intelligence agents answer customer service calls

  1.  ReplaiGPT - An AI-powered email reply tool that generates personalized responses using pre-defined context

  2. Vsub - A service that offers video captioning and subtitle generation

  3. BlueWillow - An AI tool designed to help users create logos, graphics, photo-realistic scenes

  4. CoverLetterWrite - Helps users write personalized cover letters quickly

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