We have networks like LinkedIn and Twitter where people are complaining,

oh, a lot of the quote-unquote people posting our bots,

well on the bot network they're complaining,

oh, you know, there's too many people.

And in fact, people suggested a capture, right?

You know, the thing that you were supposed to prove you're human.

They said, we're going to have a capture.

We have to click on something 10,000 times in two seconds to prove that you're a bot.

It's Geekwire co-founder Todd Bishop, and coming up this week, I'll be talking with

computer scientist and entrepreneur Orrin Etzioni about the emerging world of AI and agents. But first, it has been a busy couple of

weeks in Seattle and the broader tech world. The bots got their own social network called

Motebook, where a million and a half AI agents signed up to post and comment and upvote. no humans allowed. And within days, they'd started a

religion, invented their own economy, and began plotting how to hide their conversations from the

people who made them. OpenAI gave a sense for its ambitions by leasing 10 full floors of office

space in downtown Bellevue, basically splitting

the difference between Microsoft and Amazon geographically. That seems about right, given Microsoft's

massive ownership stake and the rumors that Amazon could be in for as much as $50 billion

in the chat GPT maker's next funding round. Meanwhile, down in Olympia, lawmakers proposed new taxes on

high earners and startup exits, attempting to chip away at the state's structural deficit and putting

cracks in the foundation of Seattle's startup economy. That's at least in the view of quite a number

of tech leaders, it seems. Microsoft's financial results

were better than expected, and yet the company lost $357 billion in market value. That was in one

...