“I hate it when I see an old person and then realize we went to high school together.” Nothing lasts forever, not top lenders or even computer companies. We may reach the point where only old people remember Tandem Computers, Commodore Business Machines, or Fairchild Semiconductor, all thought to be invincible in their time. Is Intel a measure of our economic health? Intel is laying off 21,000 employees. Now, all the talk is AI (see Thought Piece below). AI, of course, does not create new knowledge. Here’s a study showing that AI search engines invent sources and lie for ~60% of queries. Interestingly, OpenAI and Google are asking the government to let them train AI on content they don’t own. Google is shipping the latest “experimental” features of its Gemini 2.0 Flash AI model to more developers across all regions, and people are finding some concerning abilities that include editing out watermarks from photos. The company’s lightweight localized on-device AI model is now equipped with native image generation that can not only produce pictures from a text prompt but also let you conversationally edit images. Users found that it can also remove watermarks with precision, TechCrunch reports. Is that the right thing to do? (Today’s podcast can be found here and this week is sponsored by nCino, makers of the nCino Mortgage Suite for the modern mortgage lender. nCino Mortgage Suite’s core products unite the people, systems, and stages of the mortgage process. Hear an interview of nCino’s Casey Williams on some of the biggest opportunities lenders have to speed things up during the origination process, and technology’s role in that transformation.)