Seven companies. That's how many you have to remove from the S&P 500 before the AI story stops showing up in the numbers. Take out Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla, and according to Apollo's chief economist, the remaining 493 companies have nothing to show for the AI boom: margins flat, revenue per worker flat.
Put that next to the other weekend news and a pattern shows up. It isn't the old argument about whether the models work. It's about who captures the value when they do, and a growing number of people are deciding the honest answer is "not us." A developer community banned AI outright. Publishers spent two years watching Google's AI answers soak up their clicks. And xAI released seven minutes of a technically competent AI film that its own reviewer could barely sit through.
Torsten Slok counted the S&P 493 and found nothing#
The note from Apollo's Torsten Slok, written up by TechCrunch, is short and blunt. Strip out the big tech names and he sees no evidence that AI is improving productivity at the rest of corporate America. His line is that the technology "has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech."
The more interesting part is why. Slok doesn't argue that non-tech firms are just slow adopters who'll catch up. He argues that cheap intelligence doesn't easily turn into revenue, because the thing that actually moves revenue in most businesses isn't intelligence:
"AI may be a great calculator, but in business, intelligence is mostly judgment." — Torsten Slok, Apollo
He goes on to list what AI doesn't understand: accountability, trust, culture, unwritten rules, ethical trade-offs, fairness. I'd push back a little. Plenty of the work I've seen agents take over is exactly the boring, judgment-light stuff that should show up as revenue per worker eventually. But I can't argue with the measurement. A big chunk of the spend so far has gone to pilots, licences and GPUs. VentureBeat's survey last week found most of those GPUs sitting idle half the time. Flat margins are what you'd expect.
The caveat matters, though. TechCrunch's piece is a brief, and it quotes no numbers beyond Slok's qualitative read. Apollo, a private equity firm, also used to own TechCrunch. Treat it as a sharp opinion from someone who watches margins for a living, not as a study.
Still, if you sell AI into non-tech enterprises, this is the slide your buyer's CFO will have open in the next budget meeting. "It saves time" won't survive that conversation. A line item that got smaller will.
r/opensource draws the line at the repo, then keeps drawing#
On Saturday evening the moderators of r/opensource posted new submission rules, and the first one landed like a grenade. As The Verge reports, the post opens: "If your project uses AI, is made by AI, or is intended for AI, it's not welcome on r/opensource."
That's three bans in one sentence, and the third is the widest. Intended for AI would cover a huge share of the useful open-source tooling released this year: MCP servers, eval harnesses, inference runtimes. Commenters were quick to point out that the Linux kernel now contains some AI-generated code, so technically anything built on it is out. A moderator has said there's room for selective enforcement, with things like auto-captioning accessibility features carved out. A rival subreddit, r/trueopensource, appeared anyway.
The rest of the rules got less attention but are arguably worse for the community the sub claims to protect:
Projects must be at least one year old, actively maintained, and have multiple contributors.
No more posts asking for maintainers or contributors.
Non-English speakers are told to find a different community, because the mods "cannot distinguish between AI-written and AI-translated."
That last rule gives the whole thing away. This isn't really a position on AI. It's a moderation team drowning in generated slop and grabbing the bluntest filter it has. I understand the exhaustion. But a rule that turns away the solo developer with a six-month-old project and the contributor who writes through a translator is a rule that shrinks open source to protect a subreddit.
For builders, the practical lesson is narrower: disclosure norms around AI-assisted code are hardening in some communities faster than in your CONTRIBUTING.md. Be explicit about how your project uses models before someone else decides for you.
Google got the clicks; publishers got a toggle#
Emma Roth's Stepback column at The Verge is a retrospective rather than breaking news, but it puts real numbers on the value transfer the Apollo note can't find. DMG Media told the UK's competition regulator that click-through rates fell by up to 89 percent between June and July 2025, citing AI Overviews. Similarweb data reported by the WSJ showed the share of The New York Times' traffic coming from search dropping from 44 percent to 35.5 percent in three years. Google's position is that "the web is thriving."
Lawsuits haven't worked so far. Judge Amit Mehta dismissed the Chegg and Penske Media antitrust case and rejected a proposed class action from Arkansas newspapers. What publishers got instead is an opt-out toggle for AI Overviews and AI Mode, rolled out broadly after a UK order, and a News AI licensing pilot that Google says now includes 400 publishers. So here the AI clearly is producing value. It's just landing on one balance sheet. That's the S&P 493 problem seen from the other side.
Grok's Odyssey is competent, and that's the problem#
xAI released the first seven minutes of an AI-generated Odyssey, made with Grok Imagine together with Wonder Studios and director Dev Walker. TechCrunch's Anthony Ha concedes some shots could pass for real actors on a real sea. Then he spends the rest of the review on how airless it is: long voiceover, stilted dialogue, no reason to care. He was checking the time.
That's Slok's argument in film form. The rendering problem is mostly solved. The judgment problem, what to show and why anyone should watch, isn't, and no amount of compute fixed it here.
Here's my prediction. The next six months of enterprise AI sales will be decided less by benchmark charts than by a single question: whose margin moves? Vendors who can show it moved for the customer, not just for themselves, will win. Everyone else will keep running into what hit Reddit, publishers and xAI's film this weekend: people who've seen what the tool can do, and are now asking what it's for.