"Here's a truth from physics that should concern every executive racing toward AI dominance: speed tells you how fast you're moving. Velocity tells you how fast you're moving - and in which direction. A car travelling at 100 mph in circles has tremendous speed but zero velocity. It goes nowhere. It only burns fuel, overheats the engine, and eventually becomes a hazard to everything nearby."
"Sam Altman reportedly issued an internal "code red" at OpenAI in December 2025 - an emergency directive to focus resources on improving ChatGPT whilst delaying initiatives like advertising or Pulse triggered by Google's launch of Gemini 3. The flagship product that triggered the current AI frenzy, deployed to hundreds of millions of users, needed an internal alarm bell. Not because it had fundamentally failed. But because in the race to stay ahead, the product itself required urgent consolidation before it could bear the weight of continued competition."
The distinction between speed and velocity highlights that rapid activity without direction consumes resources and yields little real progress. High-speed motion can be hazardous and unproductive, as with a car circling at 100 mph. Corporate responses to competitive pressure can prioritize acceleration over consolidation, prompting emergency redirects of effort to stabilize flagship products before pursuing new initiatives. An AI race driven by release dates, funding, and model size can lack clear goals or aspiration. When organizations equate product output with strategy, acceleration replaces steering and meaningful, directed outcomes are lost.
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