Robin Allenson's Linkedin Analytics

We often talk about energy as if it’s a finite resource: coal, oil, gas – burn it and it’s gone. But we’re transitioning more towards energy as a technology. Solar panels and wind turbines are built once and generate power daily, cleanly, for years. And not only is it cost-effective, it means we’re not using natural resources as much as a result. As we transition more towards energy as a technology and advance that technology, we’re actually using natural resources as energy less and less while using different types of resources instead. So what if we started building powerful data centres in a scalable way with that mindset? The ‘negative’ impact of AI on the planet seems to be such a popular discussion, but I would love to explore the possibility that AI, and the development of technology more generally, is going to lead to a very positive change to our environment and planet. Thoughts?

“Do you want a billion-user consumer business or an API company?” “Both.” A few months ago, I posted about how most startups die from indigestion, not starvation. But in a recent podcast episode of Stratechery, Sam Altman made it clear that he wasn’t willing to sacrifice his B2C or B2B. On the one hand, the consumer side (ChatGPT) gives mass adoption and rapid feedback. On the other, the API business fuels enterprise use cases and funds R&D. They’re symbiotic: the API informs the product, and vice versa. But competing on both fronts against deep-pocketed giants (Google, Meta, Anthropic) sounds like a hell of a challenge. You’re innovating AND keeping up with the Joneses, who happen to have (pretty much) infinite capital. It doesn't seem likely it will end well. Then again, I’m not Sam Altman.

Looking back at where AI was a year ago, it’s quite baffling to think about how much has changed. But as they say… Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.  The more things change, the more they stay the same. It reminds me of the early days of mobile. Every year, there was a new iPhone with clearer screens, faster processors and better cameras. But at its core, the ‘smartphone’ aspect of it was still the same. And now it’s happening with AI. Every few months, there’s a new model: faster, smarter, better at some benchmark. Between OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, DeepSeek and others – with a bunch of new names: Claude, Claude 3, Claude 3.5, Claude 4 Mini, GPT-4, GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5, Gemini 2… It’s hard to keep track of everything that’s changing. But what’s interesting to me is also what’s staying the same: Hallucinations. I think hallucinations are going to be the new ‘no signal in this area’ (at least, for those of you who don’t live in advanced countries like the Netherlands). As in, they will be a permanent fixture that becomes a norm and a non-issue. Am I making sense?

The debate around AGI often treats it like a binary milestone – it’s either we have it or we don’t. But AI’s impact is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed. Some tasks are automated better than humans, while others still need a human touch. And, in many cases, we get which is which mixed up. Machines have been beating humans at specific tasks for decades. Calculations, chess, manufacturing. But because they’re no longer “magic,” we dismiss them as just… tools.

Here are 4 reasons you SHOULDN’T automate your keyword research: 1. You’ll have more time to do the more important, strategic aspects of your job 2. Can’t complain about the tedious, boring stuff at work anymore  3. Taking on more clients and scaling will be too easy  4. Clients will be too impressed with the speed and quality of your work Keyword research automation tools don’t replace humans – but they do let humans do so much more with their time by helping them with specific tasks. So you probably shouldn’t try it!

I did an A/B test on increasing internal links, specifically to pages ranking between positions 4 → 15 in search results and here’s what I discovered: ➟ The approach: I used Similar.ai's InternalLinking.io’s Boost Internal Links recipe to systematically increase links to target pages while maintaining a control group for comparison. ➟ The data sources: Botify’s Logfile Analyzer (via API) + Google Search Console. ➟ The methodology: A/B testing with a "difference of differences" approach to isolate the impact.And as seen in the graph below, we divided pages into three groups: 🔶 Boosted (Pink): Received 2x more internal links than usual. 🔶 Linked (Blue): Maintained standard internal linking. 🔶 Unlinked (Green): No additional links from our tool (though these pages links may still exist). There’s no doubt – the results were significant! The performance differences between boosted, linked, and unlinked pages illustrate the considerable benefits achievable by strategically increasing internal links. Internal linking isn’t just about navigation, it’s a powerful ranking tool. And when applied strategically, it can drive measurable improvements in crawlability, rankings, and traffic.

When I started studying AI back in the 80s, pretty much everything we learned or talked about was fictional. And I have to admit – AI today has pretty much been the opposite of what I expected. Firstly because most of what AI can do now was beyond my wildest imagination. But also because if you think about how AI was portrayed in sci-fi films and TV shows back then… AI now is good at the things they were portrayed at being bad at, and bad at the things they were portrayed at being good at. Data, C-3PO, J.A.R.V.I.S. They were all shown to behave much like software – logical and rigid with a lack of creativity. Instead, research shifted and investment in connectionism and neural networks took off. As a result, we have LLMs that: > Hallucinate  > Respond to threats and emotional manipulations  > Aren’t great at logic and reasoning Interesting.

Sam Altman recently said that people typing “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT costs OpenAI millions of dollars in compute, water and energy. And it's led to an increased number of people who use “AI is bad for the planet” as an anti-AI argument. I find this peculiar. We don’t agonise over the energy cost of bingeing Netflix or scrolling on TikTok, even though those services burn through data centres too. We’ve just normalised that waste because it feels invisible. Are we holding AI to higher moral standards than other tech? I spoke with someone at a climate conference recently that asked me if AI is just a terrible waste of energy and resources, and part of my answer was: Perhaps yes, assuming we don’t solve any climate problems with AI. And I don’t mean that we’re necessarily actively working on solving a particular climate problem, but I do think AI is going to break through barriers in fundamental science as it improves.

It’s been a crazy week for AI and tech development. ➤ OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Jony Ive introduced io  ➤ Google launched Veo 3 ➤ Google launched AI-mode in search  ➤ Google made about 100 other announcements at I/O 2025 These are things that used to happen once every 10 years, and lately it seems like there’s an announcement everyday! Some of the things seem to be genuine breakthroughs and are truly impressive — while others look really interesting but the reviews are disappointing. Outside of a hand-picked and curated demo, how good are these tools in reality? It’s similar to OpenAI saying that we will have AI agents that can replace certain jobs by the end of the year, and that AGI is around the corner. Firstly, of course they would say that. And secondly, it’s incredibly vague on purpose. This jagged frontier seems very random to me 🤷🏻‍♂️

ChatGPT knows more about me than I’ve ever told Google. Not just random queries but also stuff about my health and personal life. On one hand, I don't think it would be catastrophic if someone misused that data – it's not exactly nuclear codes. But it does make me uncomfortable how much power is being concentrated in a few hands and it’s got me thinking about the centralisation of power. That’s why I don’t tell OpenAI all my secrets… I split my secrets between Anthropic, DeepSeek and Gemini sometimes too, and hope they don’t tell each other.