Businesses set forty billion dollars on fire
Also T-Mobile still loses the GPS tracker

The $40 Billion Paperweight Program

The great generative AI gold rush is officially turning out to be more like a multi-billion dollar yard sale where everyone bought a fancy snowblower only to use it as a hat rack. Enterprises collectively dumped between $30 and $40 billion into GenAI initiatives, mostly because they were afraid the company next door would get to a new feature first, but a whopping 95% of those pilot programs have failed to show any measurable return on investment, according to a recent MIT report.

The report identifies the issue as the "GenAI Divide," which is a fancy way of saying companies are purchasing highly sophisticated, custom-built large language models and then only using them to draft slightly better email subject lines. Instead of embracing the necessary "friction" of integrating these tools into core workflows, most of the investment is going into generic, high-adoption tools that look great in a demo but are brittle and useless in actual production environments. The five percent who actually succeeded simply used the thing for something difficult, which is, apparently, a breakthrough strategy.

T-Mobile Files Motion to Justify Taking Your Wallet

In news that shocks absolutely no one who has ever used a phone, T-Mobile claimed that selling a customer's real-time location data without their consent was totally legal, a position the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has now decisively rejected. The ruling upholds a hefty $92 million fine levied by the Federal Communications Commission against T-Mobile and its subsidiary Sprint for transferring this sensitive Customer Location Information (CLI) to third-party data aggregators.

The defense was an exercise in pure corporate entitlement; T-Mobile argued the FCC misinterpreted the Communications Act, but the judges found no merit in the claim, basically ruling that denying what happened does not make it not illegal. The company tried to offload the duty to obtain consent onto the downstream buyers, which, unsurprisingly, led to the consent never being obtained. This is less a legal mishap and more an attempt to get caught stealing office supplies and then blaming the janitor for not locking the closet.

The Dorm Room Legend That Out-Earned the Board

A profile on *Counter-Strike* reminds everyone that the biggest successes are rarely planned in a mahogany conference room and usually happen because a college student was bored. The billion-dollar game started as a passion project mod for Valve's *Half-Life*, coded in a Canadian dorm room by computer science student Minh Le and co-creator Jess Cliffe in 1999.

The simple innovation was the permanent death per round, which gave the game a sense of urgency absent in other shooters at the time. The original beta exploded in popularity, leading Valve to buy the rights and hire programmer Minh Le, allowing the project to officially graduate from a side-hustle to the core business. A nice reminder that you, too, could create a world-changing enterprise, provided you completely ignore your degree and do it on your university's dime.

Briefs

• Anna's Archive: The team provided an update on their mission to aggregate the world's knowledge. The document management team wishes its internal knowledge base was this effective.
• Obsidian Bases: The popular note-taking app rolled out a new feature called Bases, which lets users manage and query structured data. Congratulations, the note-taking application is now a spreadsheet.
• Lab-Grown Salmon: Cell-cultured salmon has hit the menu in an Oregon restaurant. The new initiative is called "Sustainable Protein for the Office Catering Budget" and tastes mostly like FOMO.