Is AI value shifting from Big Tech to consumers? 1 of 3 forces reshaping brand strategy in 2025
Shift Notes 01. A new format from 33_Zero
Thanks for continuing to open the 33_Zero Newsletter. This month we’re trialling something a bit different in line with the direction the consultancy is taking.
We started with the conviction that net zero is the most significant macro force reshaping culture, creating challenges and opportunities for brands. Even in the short time we’ve been going the changes have accelerated and we have to acknowledge other forces in play, which are meeting net zero like weather fronts meet to intensify a storm. Namely, an unprecedented pace of tech transformation (currently fixed on AI) and continued media fragmentation (and its chaotic impact on culture, community and consensus-building around everything from politics to taste).
So, ’Shift Notes’ will summarise some of the big stuff happening in these three areas every month as it relates to brands’ role in culture:
Acceleration Gap: Where AI and related tech creates new possibilities, price disruption and creative change
Zero Culture: How sustainability pressures reshape consumer values and market expectations
Media Shift: How algorithmic culture and creator economies transform attention, consensus and content value
We’ll lead on the area where there’s the biggest story that month. Hopefully, this will be a useful waypoint for those of you trying to navigate this stuff, like we are. One thing seems certain from the foothills of 2025, we won’t run short on topics.
Let’s get started.
#1/ Acceleration Gap
AI and tech transformation reshaping business and culture
The consumer wins as DeepSeek opens AI
Big moves on the AI chessboard in the past few weeks, the most significant being the release of China’s DeepSeek which reminds us how quickly the stakes can still change here. If China is coming after US hegemony with stolen code and Open Source technology (and Nvidia chips through a backdoor in Singapore) then the race is on. Our favourite take on how to read the implications came from Rob Armstrong, talking on Scott Galloway’s podcast.
He says, what if AI is like aviation or the PC? An innovation that changes our lives beyond recognition but a crappy business model; in other words a form of value that is just hard for business to capture effectively. At least as a language interface for consumer users. We’ve written before about the weird price signals of a Claude 3.5 sub priced at £18 p/month - despite its energy costs - while we get the value of a brilliant Researcher full-time.
“[W]e were living in hope, fear or anticipation that this would be an industry with a competitive structure that looks like other big tech industries. In other words, very much ‘winter take all’. One company dominating. And now we have a vision of the AI industry, where it is much more competitive and the profits are shared, and indeed, much of the value might be captured by consumers rather than companies. So that changes the picture a lot…
[T]he analogy I would point to is something like the airline industry, which is an incredible industry in terms of what it gives us and what it can do for us. The fact it moves all these people around the world you know, tens or hundreds of thousands every day through the air very quickly, very few of them die… And it is a terrible industry economically, because all the value of it has been captured by the passengers…
In the world we lived in last Friday, having a great AI model behind your applications, either involved building your own, having your own data centres at incredible expense, or going to ask OpenAI or whoever the dominant player turned out to be, ‘pretty please can I run my application on top of your brilliantly good AI model?’ Now maybe you can run your applications and you can run the AI model on your own computers. You don't have to ask somebody else for their help. And it's not that expensive.”
Shift Insight
Those with long enough memories will recall a time when social networks had open APIs and brands built cool things like Intel’s Museum of Me. All possible because the platforms were about growth, before they tightened the algorithmic screw and charged brands to access the audiences they’d built. For a while it may be possible to do some very cool, creative stuff in the same way with Open Source LLMs. In fact, it’s hard right now to see a future in which custom applications of this technology are ring-fenced by giant gatekeepers in the same way as the social platforms.
There is an opportunity to ride the tailwind of this growth impulse, before the slick agent solutions start to build moats around their revenues.
As competition is gaining pace OpenAI is actually dropping prices. Technological progress is coming faster than we ever anticipated but we’re still looking for the really significant applications in our daily lives: taking on tasks for us with some degree of independence. In the meantime, Open Source AI will provide creative technologists with great opportunities if they can single out the simple but meaningful problems it can fix for people.
Winners and Losers After DeepSeek - Robert Armstrong on Prof G Markets
Elon Musk’s startup rolls out new Grok-3 chatbot as AI competition intensifies
Introduction to DeepResearch
Fast Takes
The ‘Death of Search’. Is not greatly exaggerated
People are deserting Google to find their answers in AI, largely because - as any decent UX will tell you - it’s easier. And as AI becomes more personalised and more powerful, it will just get ‘easier’. So, with SEO in terminal decline brands with the very best product or service for any given need look, rather gratifyingly, likely to hold an advantage. This moves the heavy-lifting for brands firmly onto top of funnel social content which, as Matt Leaner points out in the above link, will be the key gateway to deeper brand interactions that drive commercial goals
>> Goodbye Google? People are increasingly switching to the likes of ChatGPT
What if AI disproportionately rewards the curious?
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“…AI systems have got so useful that the thing that will set humans apart from one another is not specific hard-won skills for utilising AI systems, but rather just having a high level of curiosity and agency. I'm coming around to the idea that one of the greatest risks lying ahead of us will be the social disruptions that arrive when the new winners of the AI revolution are made - and the winners will be those people who have exercised a whole bunch of curiosity with the AI systems available to them.” (Great observations from
>> Import AI 397: DeepSeek means AI proliferation is guaranteed
How Google could beat OpenAI
Interesting insight in this piece making the case for Google Gemini vs ChatGPT. Google has the ability to synthesise the profiles it has built on users from their search to make a more personalised AI experience. Add to that the extent of Google’s infrastructure from Maps and Calendar to Wallet - here it’s only rivalled by Apple - and as AI layers into apps to start working as a personal agent for users, it starts to play an increasingly valuable role.
>> Alphabet: Why Gemini Will Displace ChatGPT
Music as we know it could "fade into history"
Electronic music producer Max Richter testified to the UK government on AI, saying: “Artists must have the right to determine whether to opt-in to any AI system being trained on their work, and if so, to be properly rewarded for that process.”
>> Max Richter makes impassioned plea for MPs to protect musicians from AI
AI is ‘creepy’ in the movies
Adrian Brody’s Oscar campaign has taken a hit as audiences learn his Hungarian accent in The Brutalist was enhanced by AI tool, Respeecher. As Rex Woodberry points out here, the inhuman AI backlash has begun. (And read on for an interesting take on how AI can bring prices down for essential services like education and healthcare, which have been on a steady upward trajectory for more than a decade).
>> Techno-Optimism and Horizon Expansion
Musk (let’s drop the ‘Elon’ already) released xAI’s Grok-3 claiming it is “across the board… in a league of its own.” >>link
OpenAI launched Deep Research, which if assessed by the ‘Humanity’s Last Exam’ benchmark, is a quarter of the way to surpassing the boundaries of human knowledge. >>link
#2/ Zero Culture
Sustainability pressures reshaping consumer values and markets
Egg raid on MAGA
America is going nuts about the price of eggs. And bird flu is to blame as farmers have to cull their flocks when they discover a single case. RethinkX, an independent researcher on technology disruption, says we have to acknowledge these kinds of zoonotic diseases are “not a bug in the system of industrial animal agriculture; they're a feature.”
They claim - despite bids to vaccinate or engineer resistance with CRISPR gene editing - the most effective solution is disruption of the animal agriculture industry itself. In the case of eggs, the obvious solution comes from precision fermentation, in which animal proteins are created in bioreactors. Costs of this process are falling as eggs - always volatile in price - reach astonishing heights in the US at around a dollar an egg.
About a third of eggs go to processing in liquid, frozen or dried forms for industrial / commercial food manufacturing.
Producing eggs with precision fermentation then, results in 95% less land use, 89% less GHG and 72% less water use, according to claims from Onego Bio who are a leader in the field. All that, before even considering the benefits of bringing price stability to this market.
Inflation warning signs flash in US
Economist Larry Summers has identified the current US moment - in which threats to inflation from tariffs and trade wars are resetting consumer expectations for higher prices - as the “riskiest period for inflation policy since the early Biden administration.”
Shift Insight
High prices lead to high interest rates, which make the funding that early stage innovators in climate technologies depend on - whether they’re trying to solve for a world with less meat agriculture or one with more sustainable energy - harder to come by. If this happens after a sustained period of rate pressure which has left many growth businesses running on fumes, many just won’t make it. It’s a cruel irony if businesses that hold innovative solutions to volatility and high prices - like precision fermentation pioneers - die at the hand of inflation itself. Can’t the industry manage to reframe the dialogue on innovation towards a narrative of cost sustainability?
>> Bird Flu's Breeding Grounds: the path to a safer food future
>> American inflation looks increasingly worrying
#3/ Media Shift
Algorithmic culture and creator economies
Can brands still risk a cultural position?
Janan Ganesh in the FT this week calls out the ‘anti-woke overcorrection’, pointing out the political right - having won the argument against “illiberal dogma” - is now destined to overplay its hand. He points at Kemi Badenoch’s party-rallying speech in London where she picked up MAGA rhetoric, criticising universities for “poisoning minds” against the western legacy. She pounded the table on pronouns and a lack of national pride among the young while, “Russia… she passed over in a sentence, which should establish her essential unseriousness beyond doubt.”
Shift Insight
Have brands that have taken a role on cultural issues become exposed in this environment? A deep dive into what ails Nike at present, with its stock price down 40% in the last two years, will have to wait for another occasion. But factors from lack of product innovation, fractures created by its aggressive push to D2C, loss of sales to the resale market and more general weakening of its brand narrative in a culture that wants authenticity, sustainability and innovation, seem to be far more accountable than ‘woke’ cultural positioning.
What is certain though, is should these culprits remain unaddressed while the brand adopts some sort of strategic ambiguity on its cultural principles, it’ll only compound brand weakness.
>> The anti-woke overcorrection is here
>> Nike’s Reputation Falls Just When It Needs A Strong Brand Reputation Most
Fast Takes
Correlation or Confor-MEH-ty?
The ‘algorithmic drag towards anti-remarkable-ness’ is a phrase that should be inscribed in the tablets of media lore. That’s how
describes a phenomenon she’s been writing about for about a year now, in which a data-led conformity takes hold of culture. Partly because if given the opportunity to try and quantify mercurial creativity, naturally, business will. And partly because we humans find it safer to conform and the algorithm is a technology that celebrates correlation and its cousin conformity. For ‘hive mind’, read ‘crowd mentality’. She says:“It’s depressingly easy to forget you are an individual, with your own taste. A unique person. That contains multitudes. It’s worryingly easy - especially when young, especially when feeling in any way lost or unsure, especially when chronically online - to let the algorithm push you. Away from the edges, towards the middle. Away from anything old, towards anything new new new. Away from the challenging or thought-provoking or controversial or unusual or unknown. Toward the palatable, the familiar, the commercially-safe, the uncontroversial, the known.”
>> Is the algorithm making us LESS stylish, LESS interesting, LESS...ourselves?
>> The medium is the MEH-ssage
McMuskism: it’s McCarthyism on steroids
Investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr, who broke the Cambridge Analytica story, has released a pilot episode for a new podcast called ‘How to survive the Broligarchy’, >> listen here.
YouTube dominates Gen Z viewing time
A new study from media analyst and commentator Evan Shapiro suggests YouTube’s growing dominance of youth screen time is not just a crucial trend for advertisers to adapt to, but even a threat to dominant pay TV services like Netflix as the latter’s share of 16-34 audiences watching across all four major screen types has declined by 10%
>> Mine The Gap: New Exclusive UK Viewing Report
About 33_Zero
33_Zero works with brands large (AWS, Oxfam) and small (Agronomics, Ivy Farm) on brand and comms. Our clients recognise that unprecedented change needn't be a threat but an opportunity. We help your brand show up and participate in this new reality.
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