cobalt.

Founder

CREAL

Business development
Production of marketing materials

Advisor

AI.MAG

Editorial features writer
Covering industry news in Generative AI for the creative industries

Features Writer

aurigin.ai

Product Strategy
Production of synthetic test data

Google

Technical Consultancy for global retail brands, driving increased conversions and profitability within mobile ecommerce.

Technical Specialist, Mobile Ecommerce

Working with teams in Local Search, Shopping, Geocoding.

Program Manager, Geo

Dotted line manager for Google Earth VR vendor team.

Vendor Manager, Daydream - Earth VR

Webmaster for Street View and Geo Imagery related sites. Specific interests in Virtual Reality and spherical photography.

Lead Web Developer, Street View

Bringing rapid prototyping, contextual animation and material design to product front-end.

UX Prototyper, Travel

Webmaster on numerous $M+ budget marketing campaigns across the globe.

Webmaster

AWE (Augmented World Expo)

Master of Ceremonies for the main stage of Europe's largest Augmented Reality Exposition with an audience of 1,000 attendees.

Conference Host

Musemio

Technical advice on UX guidance and product excellence for a mobile app that allows children to explore history and arts through gamified mobile VR quests.

Immersionn

Advisory Board

meepl ⎜ Fision AG

Specialist technical advice and partnership development within the fashion and AR/VR industries. Company successfully acquired by Zalando.

United Nations Office at Geneva

Summit design and delivery outlining the potential uses of Augmented Reality to amplify the UN's external communication strategy.

Advisor – Augmented Reality

Google Technical Specialist | Prompt Engineer | Vogue Photographer | Metaverse Tour Guide – AI Art, VR/AR, Fashion, Architecture

Ex-Google Engineer and founder of the technology agency Cobalt. My team helps companies save time and make money by integrating AI into their existing workflows. Previous clients include Alexander McQueen, Zaha Hadid Architects and the United Nations.

A sought-after speaker, I deliver international keynotes on cutting-edge topics like Generative AI and Digital Transformation. I also provide executive briefings, facilitate workshops, and moderate panels and am a frequent podcast guest.

As an early-stage startup advisor, I help companies refine their value proposition and user onboarding – successful exits include the 'virtual try-on' app Meepl's acquisition by Zalando.

With over 15,000 LinkedIn followers, I'm a trusted voice in AI and have been interviewed by publications such as Vogue, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

---

And if you got this far, ask me about my David Hasselhoff story!

🎉 It's 2027. The AI party is winding down. The music has stopped. And the industry is staring at a bar tab that could ruin a small nation.

---

WHAT JUST HAPPENED

For the past few years, the generative AI boom has felt like a wedding with an open bar. We’ve all been drinking at a heavily subsidized rate.

But the latest financials are sobering.  

OpenAI reportedly lost $8B in the first half of this year alone, even as revenue doubled.  

Why? Of ~800M users, only ~5% are paying.  

And that $20/month? It likely doesn’t even cover the inference cost of a single heavy user. The math doesn’t work.

---

THE BIGGER PICTURE

🚨 The current “freemium” AI economy isn’t a business model. It’s a blitz-scaling gamble fueled by unsustainable cash burn—and the bill is coming due.

AI-driven capital expenditure has recently contributed more to U.S. GDP growth than all consumer spending combined. That makes the AI bubble a systemic risk.

We’re now seeing desperation moves: monetizing Sora, teasing Jony Ive devices, and relaxing “mature content” rules. These are cash scrambles.  

Even worse is the circular financing. Nvidia invests in OpenAI → OpenAI buys Nvidia chips → both report growth in a show of accounting theater.

---

KEY PLAYERS

OpenAI: Dependent on Microsoft’s funding, still chasing viable revenue.
Alphabet Inc.: Most vertically integrated—best positioned for war of attrition.
Anthropic: Backed by giants, but same broken unit economics.
xAI (Grok): High-burn, speculative, but trailing its peers.

INDUSTRIES AT RISK

💸 Venture Capital — concentrated bets on a few “winners” could implode.
☁️ Cloud Providers — footing the bill, but also holding the leverage.
🏦 Institutional Investors — pension plans now heavily exposed via data center bets.
🧩 SaaS — bundling AI features that quietly erode profit margins.

---

THE E-SCOOTER PARALLEL

Remember the micro-mobility bubble?

VCs flooded cities with e-scooters, subsidizing every ride to kill competition.

The hardware broke. Cities regulated. The burn rate broke the model.

💥 AI is the same playbook.

We’re just burning GPUs instead of scooters.

---

HOW TO PREPARE

BUSINESSES
Audit your reliance on “free” or cheap AI APIs. Model for a 10× price hike.

INVESTORS
Look beyond foundation models. The durable value lies in efficiency, optimization, and energy infrastructure.

LEADERS
Adopt a multi-model strategy now. Avoid catastrophic vendor lock-in when pricing inevitably shifts.

---

WHAT COMES NEXT

The party may be ending—but the cleanup is where real businesses are built.

💡 The next generation of AI winners will focus on profitability, specialization, and efficiency—not hype or scale at any cost.
  
This isn’t the end of AI. It’s the end of free drinks.

---

THE QUESTION

When the correction comes … which domino falls first?

A major foundation model collapse?
A VC fund implosion?
Or a wave of SaaS companies crushed by rising API costs?

#AI #TechBubble #VentureCapital #OpenAI #SamAltman

Rupert Breheny

I’ve made a career out of identifying emerging technologies, exploring them and turning them into actionable insights and solutions that drive business value. I have maintained this practice throughout my 15 year Google career, as well as sharing these learnings from stages around the world, and in the boardrooms of technology startups in advisory roles in the fashion and architecture space.

Speaks on VR, Metaverse, Virtual Beings, Wearables, AI Art.

An early adopter of generative AI I’ve been listed as one of the Top 100 AI Art Creators and Innovators, and have collaborated with Vogue magazine which featured my fashion designs on their home page. By combining prompt engineering, image generation, animation, sound design and prose writing I’ve created a body of work that explores the intersection of human / machine augmented creativity and am active in building and mentoring the AI Art community more broadly.

As a Technical Specialist I translate highly technical recommendations into milestones that inspire C-level stakeholder confidence and execution. 

As a Program Manager I harness motivated and passionate, cross-disciplinary teams working towards product excellence by breaking down silos, forging alliances and securing funding.

As a speaker I represent Google across the world, presenting coding workshops, tech pitches and Google products to audiences as large as 1,000.

As a Web Developer my work demonstrates a commitment to strictly validating, standards compliant, accessible, semantic, mobile friendly HTML and CSS.

Key Skills: HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, Accessibility, Validation, Responsive Design, AMP, PWA, Vive, Oculus, Cardboard, Daydream.

OpenAI

Alphabet Inc.

Anthropic

Cobalt AI Founder | Google 16 yrs | Keynote Speaker | Writer | Consultant AI

Dr. Kiziltan Yüceil

Tesla’s pause on Optimus robots isn’t just a production hiccup. It’s a reminder that robotics hype always hits reality.

And Elon Musk provides us with yet another case study in over-promising and under-delivering, as evidenced by his premature scaling, in an attempt to shore up an overextended stock valuation.

---

🚨 WHAT JUST HAPPENED

Tesla has temporarily halted mass production of its Optimus humanoid robot.

The reason? Persistent, predictable engineering challenges, especially in the hands and forearms. Reports cite:

⚙️ Motors overheating
✋ Weak grip strength
🔩 Joint failures

In other words, the exact systems that make real-world dexterity possible.

Tesla has reportedly stockpiled hundreds of incomplete robot bodies, now waiting on a fundamental redesign.

This isn’t a delay. It’s a reset.

Because human-like hands are among the most complex mechanical systems ever attempted: high-precision, thermally constrained, and brutally unforgiving at scale. They also represent 25% of the cost of a humanoid robot and 50% of the engineering challenge.

---

💡 KEY COMPETITORS

The complexity of human-level grasping and manipulation remains the single greatest bottleneck in general-purpose robotics. But there are some making strides in this field:

- Boston Dynamics' Atlas - The OG industrial humanoid
- Figure AI - It's new Figure 03 bot impresses
- Unitree Robotics - Its Dex5-1 end effector continues progress

---

🧠 THE BIGGER PICTURE

We’ve seen this pattern before.

Every industrial transition hits a “last mile” problem – from the carburetor in combustion engines to early PC storage drives.

In robotics, we’ve largely solved locomotion (walking) and vision (AI perception). But the final frontier is dexterous, reliable manipulation (the hands).

They’re the primary interface between robots and the infinite variability of the human world. Without hands, you don't have a useful general-purpose robot.

Companies obsessed with form before function will keep hitting this wall.

And success won’t be measured by how well a robot pretends to know Kung Fu – but by its Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) on a factory floor.

---

THE QUESTION

If general-purpose robotic hands remain too costly or unreliable, will humanoid robots just stay expensive toys?

#robotics #Tesla #optimus #humanoid #tron

Tesla’s circular financing on unsold Cybertrucks quietly props up its revenue — while likely benefiting from government EV subsidies.

It’s ironic, given Elon Musk’s past criticism of financial “grift” in legacy markets. The DOGE rhetoric promised transparency; this looks more like financial theatre.

---

🚨 WHAT JUST HAPPENED

SpaceX and xAI are reportedly buying hundreds of Tesla’s unsold Cybertrucks to replace their existing fleets.

Framed as an “operational upgrade,” it’s really a balance sheet rescue for a company still trading at a 250× P/E ratio.

Cybertruck sales are hovering around 10% of planned capacity — a major demand gap. This inter-company purchase moves idle inventory off Tesla’s books and generates revenue that isn’t truly market-driven.

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💡 THE BIG TAKEAWAY

Founder-led tech empires are blurring the lines between public valuation and private capital flow.

We’re entering an era where internal demand props up external perception — ecosystems of self-financing growth that mimic success without proving it.

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🔍 THE BIGGER PICTURE

We’ve already seen this in AI: high-burn startups funding one another’s compute and data to maintain momentum.

As hardware demand stalls and software valuations surge, expect more circular financing and deeper distortions in market transparency.

This creates systemic risk in an already top-heavy market dominated by the Magnificent 7, whose valuations increasingly reflect optimism, not output.

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🧭 HOW TO INVEST

✅ Scrutinize related-party transactions, not just top-line growth.  
✅ Prioritize cash flow independence over hype.  
✅ Value hardware stocks on real market demand, not AI adjacency.

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❓ THE QUESTION

If a product’s biggest customer is its corporate cousin, where does real demand end, and financial self-dealing begin?

#Tesla #Cybertruck #Magnificent7 #TechSkepticism #StockMarket #CorporateGovernance

You’re not planning for the future of AI. You’re already in it.

That's what I was presenting last month in San Diego alongside Stanford Health Care VP, Gretchen Brown—exploring how the impact of AI in healthcare is accelerating past strategy and into design philosophy.

This shift is ushering in a new era of personalized, positive health outcomes.

---

As advances in AI transform cancer treatment and diagnostics, The Singularity is no longer a sci-fi concept—it’s an event horizon.

And while in California, I went back to the source—connecting the past to the future.

It started at the century-old “Dragon Tree” outside the Hotel del Coronado. It shared the screen with Marilyn Monroe in 'Some Like It Hot'—a reminder that creative genius, whether in film or in AI, always begins with imagination.

The journey continued to the striking Geisel Library (named for Dr. Seuss) at UC San Diego—featured in 'Rainbows End' by Vernor Vinge, the computing professor who coined the term “The Singularity.” His novel explores rejuvenation, longevity, and extended healthspans.

Vinge’s ideas helped shape how Silicon Valley thinks about the future itself. The landmark 2015 “Future of AI” summit he attended—alongside Max Tegmark, Elon Musk, Demis Hassabis, Ilya Sutskever, Nick Bostrom, Mustafa Suleyman, and Sam Harris—marked the moment our brave new world began to feel inevitable.

---

The takeaway for today’s leaders isn’t just about technology.

It’s about cultivating the exponential mindset required to glimpse what’s coming—and adapt before it arrives.

Next stops: Kansas City and New York.

If you’re there and want to bring a strategic, forward-looking AI perspective to your organization, let’s connect.

#AIinHealthcare #TechLeadership #SpeakersBureau #keynote #KeynoteSpeaker

From crystal radios to Apple Watches: The Disappearing Interface.

A recent rummage through the family attic turned into a time capsule of personal technology — a reminder of just how far we’ve come in just a few decades.

I’ve always loved long walks with music, and my personal audio journey looks something like this:

📻 1982 – Crystal radio set (single earphone, no battery)
🎶 1990 – Grundig Beat Boy 120, cassette player
💾 1999 – Samsung Yepp MP3 (32 megabytes, not gigs)
🎧 2007 – Creative ZEN Stone Plus (still my favourite)
🍏 2008 – iPod Shuffle
📱 2010 – Various Android phones  
⌚ 2025 – Apple Watch

Each device marks a little milestone — from fiddly wires and AA batteries to music that just floats around us. The iPod, of course, was the real turning point: your whole CD collection in your pocket, no moving parts, and those iconic silhouette ads that made earbuds look like freedom.

But the iPod was more than a device; it was the dematerialization of sound itself. The wires are now gone. The screen is next.

---

I’m currently rereading one of my favorite novels, 'Rainbows End' by Vernor Vinge, where the older generation struggles to keep up in a world of teens wearing AI-enabled contact lenses. It hits a bit close to home — especially every time I try (and fail) to explain to my mum how to “just swipe up!” on her phone.

The next frontier isn't about miniaturization, it's about zero interface. We’re moving from AI in your pocket to AI in your perception—assistants whispering through bone-conduction and fully ambient computing that just knows what you need, before you even ask.

💡 How prepared is your business model for a world where the interface disappears entirely? What core function of your product is still clinging to the "screen"?

---

🎵 Here’s to staying curious, staying connected, and just a little bit nostalgic.

#KeynoteSpeaker #AmbientComputing #ZeroInterface #FutureOfTech #DigitalTransformation

💥 Power, Politics — and now, Crypto. A new strategic line is being crossed in global finance.

Earlier this year, I helped organize the AI Crypto Summit at Davos during WEF, where I saw first-hand a fundamental challenge from the collision of political power and decentralized assets.

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⚡ THE SCENARIO

Imagine a major political figure, perhaps a head of state, holding a billion-dollar stake in a parallel financial system—meme coins, stablecoins, DeFi platforms.

This is an emerging reality that raises profound questions about transparency and conflicts of interest.

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🏛️ THE HISTORICAL PARALLEL

This echoes the Medici family’s rise in 15th-century Florence. They were bankers who turned financial dominance into political control, blurring the line between their private wealth and state power.

We may be witnessing a digital-age version of that same story.

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🌍 THE BIGGER PICTURE

If public and global trust in U.S. economic impartiality and the independence of the Federal Reserve falters because of these potential conflicts, the dollar’s reserve status could come under threat. This represents a seismic shift in global power dynamics.

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💡 THE LEADERSHIP IMPERATIVE

The question isn't just how to regulate this new landscape, but who can lead us through it. Navigating this intersection of technology, finance, and geopolitics is one of the most critical challenges leaders face today.

#FutureOfFinance #Geopolitics #DigitalAssets #RiskManagement #Leadership #USDollar

Source:
https://lnkd.in/esXnr-kJ

There are two ways to face the future: 1) Get out ahead and define the narrative. 2) Hide your head in the sand and pray it goes away.

Ryan Reynolds nails it again by doubling down on authenticity, mixing creativity with timely execution to stand out from the crowd and generate earned media.

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Mint Mobile's new advertisement features Reynolds and a real human actress, Natalie "Tilly" Norwood. This campaign strategically capitalizes on the recent Hollywood controversy surrounding an AI-generated actress also named Tilly Norwood, aiming to highlight authenticity while promoting Mint Mobile's 5G Home Internet service.

The ad cleverly leverages the industry backlash and concerns—including those from SAG-AFTRA and various actors—regarding the AI-generated actress, who sparked fears of human talent being replaced by artificial intelligence.

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Are you taking notes?

This is how you do it!

In a world obsessed with AI, human creativity still wins.

#tillynorwood #hollywood #synthespian #ryanreynolds #ai

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