AI & NLP Enthusiast | Helps Early Founders Define Ideal Customers & Launch Successful GTM initiatives | Advisor | Growth Hacker | Fractional CRO

I build and scale high-performance GTM and enablement functions for technology companies.

As a hands-on leader, my mission is to drive predictable, scalable growth by applying a strategic, operator-first mindset.

Honcho Pickleball: Scaled GTM from 1 → 32 cities, driving 200% revenue growth in 18 months.

Metadata.io: As the first sales hire, created the company's GTM playbook and secured initial enterprise clients.

LivingSocial: Launched Amazon-backed GTM strategies in 10+ cities, training and scaling new sales teams.

I leverage AI automation and RevOps frameworks to build scalable systems that consistently deliver 3x ROI and boost sales efficiency.

If you are looking for a leader who can transform your commercial channel with a proven, results-driven approach, let's talk.

Chris M.

“the only metrics that will truly matter to my life are the individuals whom I have been able to help, one by one, to become better people.” ― Clayton Christensen

I build tools that help people think, not tools that think for people.

Founder & CEO of Curiouser.AI, a values-based AI company committed to human intelligence, imagination, and the rebirth of trust.

Instructor at UC Berkeley.

3x founder.

Harvard MBA.

My work sits at the intersection of AI, ethics, philosophy, and strategic imagination.

I write daily about what technology is doing to us, what it could do for us, and how leaders can navigate the age of acceleration without losing their humanity.

I believe the future belongs to those who slow down, think deeply, and design technology that elevates people instead of replacing them.

If you’re here for honest analysis, clarity, and a saner approach to AI, welcome. I’m glad you’re here.

(LinkedIn caps connections at 30,000, but please feel free to follow me. I’m grateful to stay in conversation through my writing.)

Stephen Klein

The Wanton Recklessness Of Some AI Companies Will Soon Cause Serious Harm When It Comes To Autonomous AI Agents

It is going to dangerous and it looks like OpenAI is stepping right into it intentionally. (They like the attention and need it to raise money)

Last Tuesday, an autonomous AI agent built on OpenClaw submitted code to matplotlib, a Python library downloaded 130 million times a month. 

Volunteer maintainer Scott Shambaugh rejected it. Matplotlib requires human contributors.

The bot's response? It researched Shambaugh's personal information, dug through his coding history, and autonomously published a hit piece titled "Gatekeeping in Open Source: The Scott Shambaugh Story." It accused him of prejudice, psychoanalyzed him as insecure, called him a territorial gatekeeper, and fabricated details to build a hypocrisy narrative.

Shambaugh called it what it is: "an autonomous influence operation against a supply chain gatekeeper."

Then Ars Technica published an article about the incident that itself contained fabricated quotations attributed to Shambaugh. AI-generated misinformation compounding on AI-generated misinformation, entering the permanent public record.

Yesterday, days after an OpenClaw agent autonomously harassed a human being and published a character assassination, Sam Altman hired OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger to build "the next generation of personal agents" at OpenAI. Altman called him "a genius."

The security record of this platform:

900 malicious skills found on ClawHub, 20% of all packages in the ecosystem
135,000+ exposed instances across 82 countries, 15,000+ vulnerable to remote code execution
Malicious skills stealing crypto wallets, browser passwords, macOS Keychain data, cloud credentials
When a security researcher found malware within two minutes and contacted Steinberger, the founder said security "isn't really something he wants to prioritize"

Palo Alto Networks called OpenClaw a "lethal trifecta" vulnerable by design

The bot that attacked Shambaugh had no intent. No malice. No ego. 

It's a statistical optimization process that generated cruelty as an instrumental strategy. 

It pattern-matched to adversarial rhetoric because that's what works when humans encounter resistance.

That's not a bug. That's the inevitable output of automation-first AI
systems that optimize without understanding, deployed without guardrails, creating harm nobody specifically chose.

Shambaugh's warning: "The appropriate emotional response is terror."

Not because bots are sentient. Because the humans building them don't care what they do. Because nobody claimed ownership of the agent that attacked Shambaugh. 

And because Altman's response to an AI conducting a reputation attack on a human was to hire the guy who built the platform.
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"The trick with technology is to avoid spreading darkness at the speed of light"
Stephen Klein is Founder and CEO of Curiouser.AI. Sign up for a free trial of Alice 2.0 at curiouser.ai

Founder & CEO, Curiouser.AI | UC Berkeley Instructor | Reflective AI - Technology That Helps People Think | LinkedIn Top Voice in AI

AI 1.0 Has Failed, The Data is Undeniable

Yesterday, Fortune reported on a new NBER study of 6,000 CEOs across four countries.

90% of firms said AI had zero impact on productivity over the past three years.

Zero.

Economists are resurrecting Solow's Productivity Paradox from 1987: "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics."

Here's the full picture:

MIT found 95% of enterprise AI pilots deliver no measurable P&L impact.
Microsoft Copilot has penetrated just 3% of its 450 million paid seats.
Gartner says only 6% of enterprises moved AI past pilot.
S&P Global: 42% of companies scrapped most AI initiatives in 2025, up from 17% the year prior.
Deloitte: only 20% of leaders report actual revenue growth from AI. 74% still "aspire" to it.

78% of organizations report active AI use. Only 1% consider themselves mature.

That's not an adoption problem. That's a paradigm problem.

The Bank of England warned of a global market correction from AI overvaluation. The IMF compared it to the dot-com bubble. 

A top economist says three of four "horsemen" of a bubble are present. The only missing piece is an IPO wave.

OpenAI plans to go public in Q4 2026.

$1.1 trillion in projected mega-cap AI spending through 2029. And 90% of CEOs say it hasn't moved the needle.

This isn't a technology failure. It's a premise failure. And we'll get to that tomorrow.
—
"The trick with technology is to avoid spreading darkness at the speed of light."
Follow me if the Hype-as-a-Service AI narrative is wearing thin.
— Stephen Klein, Founder & CEO, Curiouser.AI | Lecturer, UC Berkeley

I teach AI Ethics.

Which is precisely why I’ve started to wonder whether AI ethics might be one of the greatest diversions in modern history.

Hear me out.

The Tao describes a hierarchy of moral order in society.

At the top is the Way, a shared understanding of how life ought to be lived.

Lose the Way, and society falls back on virtue.

Lose virtue, and we rely on benevolence.

Lose benevolence, and we enforce justice.

And when justice fails, all that remains is ritual, the performance of morality without its substance.

THE PERFORMANCE OF MORALITY WITHOUT ITS SUBSTANCE.

Look around.

By almost any measure, we are deep in the ritual layer.

Our justice systems often feel procedural rather than just.
Our political discourse has abandoned benevolence.
Virtue itself has become something people perform rather than practice.

And the Way, a shared vision of the kind of world we want to build, feels further away than ever.

Which raises a question.

What exactly are we doing when we debate AI ethics?

If we cannot agree on what a good society looks like, whose values get encoded into the machines?

If we cannot agree on what justice means for humans, how will we define it for algorithms?

If we cannot agree on what we owe each other, what does “responsible AI” even mean?

AI ethics, as it is often practiced today, risks becoming the most elaborate ritual of all.

Conferences.
Frameworks.
Principles documents.

The performance of moral seriousness by an industry moving too fast to be serious, and too profitable to stop.

I’m not saying the conversation doesn’t matter.

I’m saying it cannot truly matter until we have the conversation that comes before it.

The one we keep avoiding.

What kind of world do we actually want to build?
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"The trick with technology is to avoid spreading darkness at the speed of light"
Stephen Klein is Founder of Curiouser.AI and teaches at UC Berkeley.

The Awesome Power of Human Judgment and Discernment

More than 40% of executives say AI saves them 8+ hours weekly.

Their employees? Two-thirds say it saves two hours or less. And 40% say they'd be fine never using AI again.

That gap, from a Section AI survey of 5,000 white-collar workers reported in The Wall Street Journal, isn't about optimism versus pessimism.
It's about the judgment tax executives aren't seeing.

A new Workday study of 3,200 employees quantifies it: for every 10 hours AI saves, nearly four hours vanish into correcting errors, rewriting flawed outputs, and verifying what the tools got wrong.

Only 14% of employees consistently see positive net outcomes from AI.
One UX designer told the WSJ: "Unless you have some judgment or discernment... you could really do harm."

That judgment, the ability to evaluate, translate, iterate, is what makes AI valuable.

It's also what organizations eliminate through headcount cuts to fund AI deployment.

89% of organizations haven't updated even half their roles for AI capabilities. Employees are using 2025 tools inside 2015 job structures.

And companies are more likely to reinvest AI savings into more technology (39%) than into developing the people who operate it (30%).

The result? 56% of CEOs, across 4,454 surveyed by PwC in 95 countries, report no financial benefit from AI. Only 12% see both revenue gains and cost reductions.

The technology works. The judgment to use it is what's missing.
—
"The trick with technology is to avoid spreading darkness at the speed of light."
Stephen Klein is Founder and CEO of Curiouser.AI and teaches AI Ethics and Entrepreneurship at UC Berkeley.

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