For this week’s Brief, we cover SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic sending mixed messages ahead of IPOs, personal data becoming Siri’s competitive advantage, and Instagram finally letting users control their feed.

I woke up this morning and read the articles of Stanford students walking out of Google CEO Sunday Pichai’s commencement speech, saw Ronny Chieng tell Harvard students to “Destroy AI,” and got my hands on a soon-to-be-public research report from MIT where sentiment on the technology continues to decrease. So, I walked into the MasterClass like Jon Snow preparing for battle in Game Thrones. I get the optics from an AI-dooming pessimist, “here comes another white tech bro mansplaining CoPilot to me!”

What happened in this hour long interactive lecture was the exact opposite of what’s in the news. I had an engaged, curious and forward leaning crowd that asked smart and thoughtful questions. They made me expand my own thinking on AI, as their vertical specific expertise exposed me to the possibilities of the technology for their field. This is where I think the divide lives in AI. Yes, the employees in that room may have fear that parts of AI replace human work, but they also had a willingness to embrace the unknown in the pursuit of bettering themselves.

AI will cause trouble: some good trouble and some bad trouble. But, it’s here for good, and it made me think of a quote I read when I was seven years old on my first trip to Disney World with my father. On a very long line of the now defunct Splash Mountain ride based on the 1946 film Song of the South, there was a sign my father told me to read carefully, as he believed it would hold true for the next thousand years. It said, “you can’t run away from trouble, there ain’t no place that far.”

I believe we have to embrace this trouble, and shape it the best we can to make it the good kind.