See you soon in our thriving ecosystem!
UPCOMING EVENTS
June 9: Rutgers NJ FoodTech Conference I New Brunswick
PTM: Fireside chat with Tom Szacky, TerraCycle | Princeton
BioNJ: 2026 HR Conference I Union
June 11: FIFA Kickoff Tech Watch Party | Morristown
June 13: TiEcon New Jersey 2026 | Woodbridge
NJ Code & Coffee - June meetup | Newark
June 15: FIFA Tech Watch Partly | Asbury Park
June 20-21: NJx Hackathon Summer 2026 | Skillman
Here’s a reminder that the JTI website offers many resources for entrepreneurs and innovators; there is also a LinkedIn page, so please follow.
Entrepreneurial Support
Government/EDA/SIC Hubs
Capital Resources
University Innovation
Hope to see you soon!
Two good AI related pieces, courtesy of AXIOS:
Build your bionic brain
We're at war. A war for our brains.
This war rages from sunup to sundown, phone on to phone off. While we sleep. It's our Forever War, Jim writes.
Our combatants are social media algorithms and emerging AI systems. Both never tire or relent. They only grow smarter and more sophisticated.
💡 I'm here not to scare or shame you.
I'm here to tell you this war will determine the future of your mind and your intelligence.
It is winnable on your terms — if you understand the nature of it.
In the hours, days and years ahead, you can choose to understand and seize control of your mental inputs, building a bionic brain.
Or you can allow algorithms and AI to do your thinking for you, succumbing to what I call "blah brain."
🎯 Make no mistake: We've entered the age of extreme information inequality. It's the defining divide of the next decade. Bigger than wealth. Bigger than education. Bigger than geography.
You land on the right side of the divide by controlling what information you consume and by using AI to augment — not replace — your learning and thinking.
You will choose. Choose bionic. Reject blah.
Let me start with a confession. I get paid to learn. I get paid to hire people with true subject-matter expertise. I get paid to filter fact from fiction every single day. My business depends on it. And I struggle to stay on the bionic path.
I pick up my phone to check one thing and lose 20 minutes. I tell myself I'm reading the news and scroll away precious time on trivialities. I open ChatGPT to sharpen my thinking and catch myself letting it do the thinking for me.
If I'm losing this battle some days — and I am — no wonder most of America feels like it's getting crushed.
So I want to talk about this war you don't realize you're in — and then show you how to win it.
🔎 Start by understanding the Great Information Paradox of the 21st century.
There is more misinformation, manipulative content and pure mind garbage available to us for free than at any point in human history.
At the same time, there is more high-quality, mind-expanding, life-enhancing content available to us for free than at any point in human history. We all have access to the smartest minds alive via podcasts, YouTube and newsletters.
Greatness and garbage. At the same time. On the same device. In the same five seconds of interaction.
So we face a choice — whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not — all day, every day. And now, AI raises the stakes on that choice by a factor of 10.
That's because AI offers you two new paths — and they look almost identical from the outside. But they lead to completely different places.
💻 Path One: Outsource your thinking to AI.
Let ChatGPT write your emails. Let Claude make your decisions. Let an algorithm or LLM tell you what to believe about Iran, about the economy, about your own job and skills. Stop reading. Stop wrestling. Stop forming your own views. Just ask the machine and ship the answer.
The temptation is enormous. It is easier. It is faster. It feels productive. And it will quietly hollow you out. In two years, you won't have opinions — you'll have prompts. You won't have judgment — you'll have outputs.
🧠 Path Two: Use AI to expand your mind.
Same tools. Same machines. Completely different posture. You make AI argue with you. You make it challenge your assumptions. You feed it the things you don't understand and demand that it teach you at your pace.
Path One shrinks you. Path Two enlarges you. Same machine. Opposite outcomes. The difference is entirely in how you use it. Most people are going to take Path One. They already are. Don't be most people.
Instead, do something radical: Build your own bionic brain. Starting today.
Everybody runs on the same hardware — a human brain that hasn't changed much since creation. The bionic part is what you feed into it and bolt on around it.
📝 I want to give you something concrete. Five moves. You can start every one of them tonight.
Audit your inputs. Be ruthless. Open your phone right now. Look at the last 20 things you watched, listened to or read. Be brutally honest. Is that the diet of someone with a healthy brain? If not, cut three things tonight. Unfollow them. Mute them. The algorithm feeds you what you click on, not what you aspire to. The only way to retrain it is to stop clicking. Your feed in 90 days will be a different feed. Your brain in 90 days will be a different brain.
Pick one anchor reality source. It's impossible to follow the news and know what's real or important. Simplify. Pick one broad source of truth with an established reputation for accuracy. I'd recommend Axios, of course, but The Wall Street Journal or Financial Times are good options, too.
Pick two passions, two areas you want to be smarter in. Maybe it's health or technology or history or literature. Find people with track records of being smart and open-minded on those topics, whether in podcasts, videos or writing. Their backgrounds should demonstrate expertise and curiosity. Follow them. They will lead you to others.
Build your own JimGPT. Use Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini to start building a wise companion brain. Tell it with specificity that you want to learn and be challenged, and to never be flattered or blindly reinforced. Tell it your passions and goals — including resisting the urge to outsource your thinking to AI — and commit that to memory. Ask it to ask you questions to shape its output to how you learn.
Start small: a new 30-minute habit. Replace one half hour a day of doom-or-boredom scrolling with healthy inputs and AI interactions. Listen to that podcast. Read that newsletter. Watch that video. Explore that topic on AI. Ask the AI to steelman the argument against something you believe: "Present the strongest, smartest, most persuasive fact-based case against my view." Thirty minutes a day equals one full week of purging stupid and injecting smarts.
Do these five things and I can assure you, you will emerge a better, smarter, more satisfied person — with what feels like a new bionic brain.
AI's 4 harsh realities
Investors were confronted this past week with four difficult realities that may fundamentally change the way they think about AI the business vs. AI the technology, Axios' Ben Berkowitz writes:
🗑️ It's not paying off nearly as much as companies expected, per a new Bain study.
⛅️ Infrastructure demand is strong — but not as strong as the most optimistic wanted, as Broadcom showed with its "weak" forecast.
🏦 Financing that infrastructure is going to be more expensive for longer, with signs pointing to the Fed raising, not lowering, interest rates.
Why it matters: Those realities challenge assumptions that powered markets to historic heights over the past few years. It's hard to justify chip or memory stocks rising 1,000%+ in a year if the boom isn't what everyone assumed.
🔭 The big picture: The costs of AI are now. The profits are later — maybe. That "maybe" is what's making people nervous.
AI the technology has a bright future. But AI the business is starting to look like a bottomless pit — especially amid news that even some of the world's biggest companies are rushing to sell historic (and dilutive) amounts of stock to justify their expansion.
By the numbers: The market sold off Friday amid those jitters, with the tech-laden Nasdaq having its worst day in 14 months.
Broadcom's tepid outlook wiped $444 billion off its market cap alone in just two days.
🔎 Friction point: Tech selling off weighs down everything else.
As charts expert Matt Cerminaro (a.k.a. "Chart Kid Matt") noted Friday, the S&P 500 was down more than 2%, even though the majority of stocks in the index were actually up on the day.
The last time that happened? April 12, 2000, as the dot-com bubble was collapsing.
The bottom line: Every great new technology has its moment where the business behind it resets, even as the tech itself keeps advancing. We could be seeing the start of that moment for AI.
