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Greetings! Group chats are definitely having a moment. First, there were the headlines about how Pete Hegseth, the U.S. Secretary of Defense, had participated in private Signal discussion groups with Trump administration officials and family members in which he reportedly discussed upcoming U.S. military operations. Then, on Sunday, Ben Smith at Semafor published a riveting story about the group chats on WhatsApp and Signal where Silicon Valley elite, including right-leaning figures like Marc Andreessen and Joe Lonsdale, have gone to chew the fat over politics and other topics, away from the prying eyes of the uninvited (such as pesky journalists). It’s understandable why group chats like this are getting so much attention. Still, the focus on them misses a bigger point: All of us, not just the rich and powerful, are shifting more and more of our most meaningful conversations into chats and at least partly away from social media. This may explain why it feels like tumbleweeds are blowing through so many of our Facebook feeds, where friends just don’t share the way they once did. Don’t take my word for it—take Mark Zuckerberg’s. The risk that messaging poses to social media—and has for a decade—is a big theme of the ongoing Meta Platforms antitrust trial, in which the Federal Trade Commission is accusing Meta of having bought WhatsApp in 2014 partly to stay ahead of that threat. In a 2013 email to the company’s board of directors, submitted at the trial, Zuckerberg wrote that one of the directors asked him what perils lurked on the horizon for it. “My answer to this is that mobile messaging is the next biggest consumer risk and opportunity,” Zuckerberg wrote. And it’s not just a historic issue. When questioned during the trial, Zuckerberg testified that messaging has been growing dramatically, and sharing with friends in feeds has been declining. At the same time, in his testimony, Zuckerberg downplayed the idea that messaging will totally displace social media, saying the two are complementary and people are still using their feeds for entertainment and to discover new things. He also talked up Meta’s opportunity to eventually make money from messaging—for example, by allowing businesses to pay to message people—but it hasn’t done much of that so far. Even group chat enthusiasts like Andreessen and Lonsdale remain energetic posters to X, which supports Zuckerberg’s defense in favor of a continued role for social media. But for them and so many other people, the most meaningful conversations seem to be migrating to messaging. Here’s your eye-popping artificial intelligence stat of the day: Cursor, the AI-powered software code-editing tool, is now writing nearly 1 billion lines of accepted code a day. That figure comes courtesy of an X post by Aman Sanger—a co-founder of Anysphere, Cursor’s parent company—who added that globally only a few billion lines of code are produced daily. It’s hard to get one’s head around the idea that a startup founded in 2022 is now responsible for a quarter or so of the programming code written daily, so perhaps some skepticism is warranted. For what it’s worth, after I prompted it, ChatGPT spitballed the amount of code written daily in the world at between 4.5 billion and 7 billion lines, including through AI coding tools. As Natasha reported for us in a recent feature on Cursor, the tool is the buzziest among a crowd of AI coding assistants. That implies that the total lines of accepted code AI is producing could be significantly bigger than 1 billion. If that estimate is even roughly accurate, it’s a striking sign of how AI is transforming software development before our eyes. • OpenAI CEO Sam Altman privately expressed a desire to run for U.S. president in 2016 during the presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, according to a biography of Altman excerpted in Vanity Fair. (Altman denied having presidential aspirations to the author.) • OpenAI is incorporating more shopping features into ChatGPT search results, the company said Monday. For web searches, ChatGPT will now include links to products with images and reviews. • Spotify said on Monday that it paid out more than $100 million to podcast creators and publishers globally during the first quarter. • Around 300 employees at Google’s AI research unit, Google DeepMind, in the U.K. are seeking to unionize with the Communications Workers Union, the Financial Times reported. AI Agenda by Stephanie Palazzolo separates hype from reality and explains how AI is transforming industries. The 4x/week newsletter details the innovation and disruption happening in AI, from the AI startup funding frenzy to the major technological breakthroughs that will set the agenda for decades to come. Sign up today. | 
