Welcome back, Amplifiers!
You’re reading Amplified Human’s essential weekly guide to new updates about AI, work, and growth across Singapore & beyond.
This Week’s Stories (in order):
- Economic & Workforce – AI start-ups revive “996” culture to race competitors (WP); UN warns AI gains are concentrated, risking global inequality (UNCTAD); communities protest energy-hungry AI data centers in Mexico and Ireland (NYT).
- Industry Disruption & Opportunity – Billionaires bet big on AI stocks as valuations surge toward $10T (Nasdaq); AI-driven chip and memory demand reshapes global supply chains (Straits Times); authors push back against generative AI in storytelling (The Guardian).
- Social & Governance – Platforms introduce parental controls for AI chatbots to protect teens (WP); UNCTAD highlights infrastructure, data, and skills as levers for inclusive AI adoption and urges global governance frameworks.
Featured companies this week: Meta, UN.
Keep reading to get free access to our Agentic AI platform! You can also read about our upcoming live AI workshop at the end!
You Snooze, You Lose – 996 AI Race for Startups
Speed is everything.Start-up founders are reviving the “996” culture, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week, to seize what they describe as a fleeting two-to-three-year window before incumbents consolidate the market.
As The Washington Postreports, some early-stage AI firms are turning back to “hacker house” arrangements and nonstop sprints once symbolic of China’s tech scene. Founders argue the stakes justify the intensity: whoever successfully launches the first agent that scales, wins.
Source: Washington Post
“Companies want to be the fastest in the AI race, but what does this mean for the workforce? The human toll: burnout, attrition, and ethical corner-cutting, may ultimately undermine innovation itself.”
AI Market Valuation Could Hit $10,000,000,000,000 (That’s a Lot of Zeros!)
Billionaires and institutional investors are pouring money into a handful of leading AI stocks, pushing valuations toward what Nasdaqanalysts say could become a $10 trillion market.
That influx of speculative capital has inflated the prices of semiconductor and model-development firms, sparking déjà vu among economists who recall the dot-com boom’s winner-takes-all dynamics.
Source: Nasdaq
“The AI market is booming, but some are concerned of the possibility of a quickly expanding AI bubble.”
Hardware is Back! Memory Chips Demand Surges Following AI Boom.
Behind the software surge lies an equally fierce hardware race. As The Straits Timesnotes, the AI boom has revived demand for once “unfashionable” memory chips essential for model training and inference.
Manufacturers that had pivoted away from legacy memory are now scrambling to boost output. Prices have surged, exposing how dependent generative AI remains on physical supply chains and energy-intensive infrastructure.
Source: The Straits Times
“AI usage has brought back demand for physical memory chips, driving up prices and reviving the industry.”
AI Physical Impact Isn’t Looking Great…
The New York Times reports growing backlash in Mexico and Ireland, where residents are protesting massive AI data centers that consume immense power and water supplies. Local leaders warn that Big Tech’s “invisible factories” are draining shared resources even as governments court them for jobs and tax revenue.
Source: The New York Times
“It’s a reminder that AI’s progress is as physical as it is digital. A new phase of digital colonialism, where developing regions bear the ecological costs of AI’s demands, may contribute to growing environmental concerns.”
“AI Could Never”: Could Human Creativity be Replaced?
As The Guardian highlights, bestselling author Michael Connelly, creator of The Lincoln Lawyer, has joined a growing list of writers voicing concern that generative AI systems trained on their works are diluting creativity and undermining artistic value. “You can’t automate authenticity,” Connelly argued.
Source: The Guardian
“This creative resistance highlights the friction emerging alongside technological optimism, a fight between content ownership, originality, and the human core of storytelling that cannot be replicated by AI.”
Parental Controls… Against AI?
Even as AI expands creative possibilities, its social integration raises new safety questions. The Washington Postreports that Meta has introduced parental controls to manage teen interactions with AI chatbots on Instagram, following concerns about inappropriate or manipulative content.
Source: The Washington Post
“Trust, not novelty, will define AI’s staying power in consumer ecosystems.”
A Divided Future: Insights from UNCTAD’s 2025 Technology and Innovation Report
The UNCTAD Technology and Innovation Report 2025 identifies AI as a general-purpose technology projected to reach $4.8 trillion by 2033 (30% of the global frontier-tech market).
Yet its benefits are dominated by a handful of developed economies with the infrastructure, capitalize, threatening to widen the global “AI divide,” eroding the traditional comparative advantage of developing countries built on low labor costs.
UNCTAD outlines four main economic channels through which AI affects productivity: substitution, complementarity, automation, and job creation. Early data suggest the presence of productivity gains, but also the presence of risks of job displacement, wage inequality, and polarization.
The report calls for a worker-centric approach and identifies 3 leverage points for AI readiness: Infrastructure, Data, and Skills. It also urges strategic partnerships between governments, international bodies, and private firms to make AI development inclusive.
“Digital inequality grows as a small number of highly developed firms control the AI market.”
A race with real-world stakes
Taken together, the threads form an unstable AI boom that is quickly transforming the workforce. While start-ups are sprinting to build the future while workers burn out, investors are inflating valuations that may outpace real productivity.
As highlighted in the articles above, AI’s promise is vast, but so are its costs. The challenge now is whether humanity can keep up with the speed of its own invention.
In the next section, we’ll show an example of how a specific individual can improve their AI interactions using prompt blocks, structured chunks of text that specify what the AI needs to know before generating output.
Prompt blocks saves you time, reduces effort, and conserves AI credits, and achieves your desired results with minimal revisions.
Our example this week is a Mid Career Professional!
Epic Prompt Card | Reskilling Map
The function of the prompt block is to leverage AI to identify skill and process gaps within your team, then recommend targeted initiatives to improve efficiency, resilience, and budget allocation.
The following video shows how to use the prompt block:
You can expect to receive 4 key deliverables:
- Heatmap highlighting skill and process gaps across the team.
- Top three efficiency plays to optimize workload, budget, and process allocation.
- Risk mitigation idea tailored to your team’s current challenges.
- KPI tracking: Time-to-gap-closure (baseline 6 weeks, target 3 weeks).
Free Prompt Block for You to Try for Yourself!
Copy and paste the text below into the Amplified Human Platform or any LLM (e.g. ChatGPT). Replace the [Square Brackets] with your own information.
ROLE: Strategic Team Efficiency Mapper
OBJECTIVE: Audit my team’s skills and tasks to identify gaps, recommend efficiency plays, and suggest risk mitigations for improved performance.
INPUTS: TEAM SIZE [Number], KEY ROLES [List roles], RECENT CHALLENGE [Describe], PERFORMANCE METRIC [Metric tracked].
FORMAT: Table or list including (1) Heatmap of skill/process gaps, (2) Top 3 efficiency plays, (3) Risk mitigation idea, (4) KPI tracking.
REFUSAL: Do not fabricate gaps, plays, or risks not supported by the team’s actual data.
Next… We’ll combine multiple agents that are in charge of separate tasks into one long workflow to generate one output package!
How to Build a 30-Day Personal Upskilling Plan for Role Resilience (Non-Technical Guide)
What You’re Building:
An individualized upskilling workflow that helps team leads and senior contributors strengthen strategic capabilities. This workflow assesses current skills against organizational goals, identifies gaps, and generates a structured 30-day learning and action plan, complete with auto-scheduled review sessions.
This section provides a step-by-step overview of each component of the upskilling workflow. Each “agent” role is outlined below.
The Agent Blueprint:
Agent 1: Skills & Project Data Importer
- Captures current skills matrix and project data from Excel or API sources. Ensures data completeness and formats it for analysis.
- Output: Validated skills and project dataset.
Agent 2: Strategic Gap Analyzer
- Assesses current skills against organizational strategy goals to identify learning gaps.
- Output: Upskilling gap list for the individual.
Agent 3: Learning & Action Plan Generator
- Transforms gap analysis into a structured 30-day learning checklist with actionable tasks.
- Output: Individualized upskilling plan.
Agent 4: Review Scheduler
- Automatically schedules review sessions based on the generated plan and team calendar availability.
- Output: Calendar invite for check-ins and progress reviews.
Agent 5: Integration & Guardrail Monitor
- Ensures connections with project tracker. Checks for missing skills matrices or incomplete inputs and prompts for self-assessment if required.
- Output: Integration validation log and alert notifications.
Agent 6: Failure Handler & Logging Agent
- Tracks incomplete matrices or workflow failures, triggers manual override prompts, and logs all incidents for review.
- Output: Failure log and corrective action prompts.
Build The AI Agents and Workflow In:
amplifiedhuman.ai → AI Agent (Build Multi-Agents) → Workflow → “Create Workflow”
*The above is a high level overview. Our team can help provide detailed recommendations for agent instruction design, knowledge base, and dashboard output.
*This site is only available to the Amplified Community. Register a free account on the App!
We created an Upskilling AI Agent to help you identify top local and remote jobs that match closely to your profile.
What is the Upskilling Agent?
It is an AI agent on our Amplified Human platform that takes your resume, the role you want to work in, then it does a job market analysis, collects relevant information, and reports back to you with a personalized proposal.
Why is our Upskilling Agent better than what other companies are doing?
It transforms job searching by creating a personalized Comprehensive Skill Gap Analysis and certification suggestions, something other platforms don’t offer. It guides users with clear micro-goal timelines and recommends upskilling opportunities. This approach helps users gain a deeper understanding of how they can better fit market requirements to stay ahead.
Here’s How To Try it For Yourself:
Go to amplifiedhuman.biz → Upskilling Intake Analyst → Start Chat
AH Team Spotlight: Upcoming Workshop – AI for Business Transformation & Creative Growth
Join our live session to see how AI agents can automate your marketing, sales, and customer service!
You’ll learn valuable skills to:
- Create your own AI Agents – NO CODE needed
- Watch LIVE Workflow Automation in Action
- Discover Real SME Case Studies & Time-Saving Tools
Workshop Details:
- Date: 27 Oct 2025 (Monday)
- Time: 2:00 PM – 4:30 PM
- Venue: SIRS @ Lifelong Learning Institute. Eunos
Organized by: SME Marketing Academy & Amplified Human
Supported by: NYP-SIRS
First Come First Serve > Register Now
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Your Weekly AI Brain Juice,
The Amplified Human Team
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