Cities Decoded

Hi Cities Decoded community🙂

My podcast Mindful Notions has been nominated for its first award. While I focus Cities Decoded on cities x AI, Mindful Notions looks at young professionals x AI.

If you have enjoyed listening to any of my conversations across either podcast, I would be so grateful for you to take a minute to vote for the podcast. Every vote counts towards a potential win!

Vote here: https://podlifeawards.com/vote/the-listeners-lobe-tgl20262

When prompted, paste this RSS link: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/2727113.rss

Voting closes May 4th.

From one show in your feed to another, thank you for listening and watching. As always, more to come.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samlicitiesdecoded.substack.com

Hi Cities Decoded community🙂

My podcast Mindful Notions has been nominated for its first award. While I focus Cities Decoded on cities x AI, Mindful Notions looks at young professionals x AI.

If you have enjoyed listening to any of my conversations across either podcast, I would be so grateful for you to take a minute to vote for the podcast. Every vote counts towards a potential win!

Vote here: https://podlifeawards.com/vote/the-listeners-lobe-tgl20262

When prompted, paste this RSS link: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/2727113.rss

Voting closes May 4th.

From one show in your feed to another, thank you for listening and watching. As always, more to come.

Some things me and Elif cover in our storytime:

* Unforced Error of the Week: the thing we messed up and what it taught us

* Personal operating system check-in: the routines and workflows we’re testing right now

* NYC vs. DC greenspaces!!

* Book / article / creator corner: what we’re reading lately and how its inspiring us

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samlicitiesdecoded.substack.com

Hi Cities Decoded community🙂

My podcast Mindful Notions has been nominated for its first award. While I focus Cities Decoded on cities x AI, Mindful Notions looks at young professionals x AI.

If you have enjoyed listening to any of my conversations across either podcast, I would be so grateful for you to take a minute to vote for the podcast. Every vote counts towards a potential win!

Vote here: https://podlifeawards.com/vote/the-listeners-lobe-tgl20262

When prompted, paste this RSS link: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/2727113.rss

Voting closes May 4th.

From one show in your feed to another, thank you for listening and watching. As always, more to come.

🔗 ChatGPT Cites Half the URLs It Retrieves, and Reddit Is 67.8% of the Rest

Ahrefs analyzed 1.4 million ChatGPT prompts from February 2025 covering 47.1 million retrieved URLs and found ChatGPT cites only 49.98% of them. The citation rate varies sharply by source: Search results hit 88.46% (25.6M data points), News 12.01%, Reddit just 1.93% despite 16.2M retrievals, YouTube 0.51%, and Academia 0.40%. Reddit alone accounts for 67.8% of the entire non-cited pool, meaning ChatGPT pulls Reddit at scale but almost never credits it. On average, ChatGPT retrieves 16.57 cited and 16.58 non-cited URLs per prompt. Cited pages have a median age of about 500 days (1.3 years), while non-cited pages are overwhelmingly very young. Title relevance matters: cosine similarity between prompt and cited URL title averages 0.602 versus 0.484 for non-cited, and natural-language URL slugs get cited 89.78% of the time versus 81.11% for opaque slugs. (Read More)

🫖 TEA For Thought: “I guess almost 70% of the content is from Reddit. That is why Reddit’s CEO is so harsh on AI agent control.”

💸 Anthropic Ends the Flat-Fee Era

Anthropic restructured enterprise pricing. Seat fees now cover platform access only. Claude, Claude Code, and Cowork usage is billed separately at standard API rates. The trigger: GPU rental costs climbed 48%, CoreWeave raised rates 20%, and API uptime dropped to 98.95% over 90 days (well below the 99.99% cloud standard). OpenAI, GitHub, and Windsurf have already made the same move. The subsidized-access era for heavy users is over industry-wide. (Read More)

🫖 TEA For Thought: “The seat charge era might be over soon. Folks will be charged for the tokens they actually consume. More people will direct their work toward open-source, locally deployed models. Get some hardware ready before prices go even further up.”

📊 74% of AI’s Value Goes to 20% of Companies, and the Gap Is Widening

PwC surveyed 1,217 senior executives across 25 sectors. Finding: 74% of AI’s economic gains are captured by just 20% of organizations. The leaders are not deploying more tools. They are using AI to reinvent business models and pursue growth from industry convergence. They are 2.8x more likely to increase decisions made without human intervention, 2.6x more likely to report AI enables business model reinvention, and 1.7x more likely to have a Responsible AI framework. The divide is structural, not technological. (Read More)

🫖 TEA For Thought: “This is the inflection point. The gap between those who use AI and those who don’t is going to grow wider and wider.”

🧠 Sam Altman: Once You See AGI You Can’t Unsee It

After someone threw a Molotov cocktail at his house at 3:45 AM, Sam Altman published a personal reflection on AI, OpenAI, and himself. He calls AI “the most powerful tool for expanding human capability and potential that anyone has ever seen” with “essentially uncapped” demand. He says fear and anxiety about AI is “justified” and that society needs resilience beyond just model alignment. He argues AI must be democratized: “It is not right that a few AI labs would make the most consequential decisions about the shape of our future.” On OpenAI’s drama, he attributes it to the “ring of power” dynamic and acknowledges being conflict-averse “caused great pain for me and OpenAI.” He is proud of resisting demands for “unilateral control” and delivering on the mission: “A lot of companies say they are going to change the world; we actually did.” (Read More)

🫖 TEA For Thought: “Once you see AGI you can’t unsee it.”

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samlicitiesdecoded.substack.com

This episode is all about an industry that does affect most major cities: the legal profession! This is probably the pinnacle of knowledge work and a big question is how much AI will actually disrupt the legal profession, and what good, if any can come out of that disruption.

To help me start answering that question, I’m joined by Justin Curl — a 3L at Harvard Law School, a Schwarzman Scholar, and a Princeton computer science alum.

Here are Justin’s two pieces that we discuss:

* AI won’t automatically make legal services cheaper

* AI is just starting to change the legal profession

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samlicitiesdecoded.substack.com

Read about what comes next for Cities Decoded here.

Read the latest from the Daily TEA here.

Read the latest from Elif here.

Read the latest from Jon here.

* See Jon in person at his next speaking event here.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samlicitiesdecoded.substack.com

Over the weekend, I stumbled upon the Interact fellowship.

It is a fellowship of technologists that “come together to collaborate, seek out difficult conversations, and push each other to do good in the world.”

Sounded like a good time!

As someone who slightly missed the age cut off (I am in the age category where applicants are considered “on a case-by-case basis”), I figured why not send in an application for a chance to meet some really cool people.

As I went through the application, I filled out the expected fields (name, email, school).

But when I got to written responses, something unexpected happen.

The questions posed allowed me to genuinely reflect on many cool tech and community experiences I have had in the past few years, rather than simply retelling them in a straightforward and neatly packaged way. In short, if you read my responses, it more so reflects someone who is still figuring out so many things, and having a lot of fun doing so.

Furthermore, I was able to hype up other people in the tech ecosystem who I truly believe in (some of who you see in Cities Decoded🙂).

That revelation, along with my general disdain for the flatness of written applications (how much can you really glean from a person through them?), spurred me to make this quick podcast episode where I could respond verbally and encourage you all to think about what your responses would be to these sharp questions.

TLDR: the Notion community is great and I want to make it greater. Also, elif nisa polat, jonathan bensimon, and magan chin are great and I want to help make them greater.

In short, if you read my responses, it more so reflects someone who is still figuring out so many things, and having a lot of fun doing so.

What I am equally interested in is what responses you have to the following questions:

* Think about your three core interests. Why do you care about these things?

* What has been the biggest change to your beliefs or values in the past two years, and what caused this change?

* Someone gives you $50,000 for a project that explicitly can't be a business. What's the project you work on and why?

* What project or initiative were you proudest of in 2025? What is your primary creative, academic, or work goal for 2026?

* Whose voice should carry more weight in the technology ecosystem (or insert your relevant industry) than it does today?

* Who would you be the most excited to find out was in your Fellowship class? Why?

Want to hear my responses? Watch/listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts!

Deadline to apply to the Interact fellowship is Feb 9th.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samlicitiesdecoded.substack.com

For those who have wanted to know, “what’s the tea with AI?” since the beginning of 2025, there hasn’t been a more consistent source than TEA (The Era Arc).

That’s why I was so happy to announce last month that the creator of The Era Arc would be coming to the pages of Cities Decoded.

Every Monday and Tuesday, I have the privilege of sending out the Daily TEA alongside this creator. Every Friday, I have the privilege of promoting their NEW series where they review the latest AI products. And if you want to know the TEA on Wednesdays or Thursdays…it’s always on the Cities Decoded website!

In addition, I am so excited to announce the monthly TEA where The Era Arc and I break down some of the best stories from the past month of daily TEAs.

For Jan 2026, we have:

🧪 Claude Supercharges Scientific Research Workflows

🪙 Bitmine Bets $200M on MrBeast’s DeFi-Enabled Entertainment Empire

📡 Starlink Helps Iranians Circumvent Severe Internet Blackout

🤖 Humanoid Robot NEO Uses Video AI to Learn New Skills

📱 ‘Are You Dead?’ App Becomes Viral Safety Tool For Solo Dwellers

Want to get the daily TEA and stay up to date with AI? Subscribe here!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samlicitiesdecoded.substack.com

👋Hey Cities Decoded community,

I’ve got news that I’m so excited to share: Cities Decoded is partnering with The ERA Arc for a new 2026 content collaboration.

If you’re here because you want to understand whats happening in AI without drowning in it, this partnership is for you.

Whats changing:

Starting tomorrow, you’ll see two new rhythms from this partnership:

* Weekday: Daily TEA

* A crisp, must-know rundown of AI headlines and signals

* Monthly: a Cities Decoded × ERA Arc podcast recap

* A conversational episode breaking down:

* what mattered this month

* what it means

* what to keep an eye on next

Why it matters (AI × cities)

To me, Cities Decoded exists to translate AI headlines into city-life consequences.

That means helping you:

* track the AI shifts that will actually show up in your city (schools, streets, jobs, housing, public services)

* separate hype from impact so you know what to pay attention to

This partnership makes that mission easier to deliver:

* Weekday signal so you catch the developments that could become the next city pilot or local debate

* A monthly recap to connect the dots: what changed, what cities are likely to do next, and what it means for people on the ground

What I want from you

If you’re excited, heres how you can help:

* Reply with the AI topic you’re most trying to understand in 2026 (work, education, cities, policy, creators, etc.).

* Forward this to one friend who always asks whats going on with AI?

Thanks for being on the journey so far. As always, more to come.

-Sam

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samlicitiesdecoded.substack.com

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samlicitiesdecoded.substack.com

When I joined the AI Collective team at the beginning of the year as Creative Director, DC Decoded was just an idea.

Now, let me make one thing clear. Ideas themselves are not bad. They’re great! We wouldn’t possess anything we currently have without the initial idea.

But ideas are a dime a dozen.

The much harder part is knowing how to execute the good ideas. And boy, did DC Decoded teach me how to do that.

Starting from 0 subscribers and 0 posts at the beginning of February, I am so proud to have led the growth of this podcast to 650+ subscribers (mainly AI professionals in DC) and 20+ episodes with 10+ other pieces of content.

We have had 15 amazing guests on including:

Catherine McMillan | Nate Burola | John Heflin Hopkins-Gillespie (3x!) | Wolf Ruzicka | Erica Shoemate | Ryan Malani | Juan Manuel Contreras (2x!) | Andrew Gamino-Cheong | Monica Lopez | Austin Nellessen | Victor Shilo | Cameron Powell | Allison Shapira | Glenn Parham | The Era Arc

Not only that, we have been fortunate enough to be recommended by eight wonderful tech and non‑tech Substacks out there including:

The AI Collective Community Newsletter | The Era Arc | Faster, Please! | The Influence Model | Mindful Notions | AI Supremacy | The Responsible AI Chronicle | Deborah’s Substack | Paradigm Shift

And of course, we were also very lucky to be backed by companies like Notion to offer free AI to startups and SMBs* and swag/education to interested community members.

This Substack would not have been possible without the DC team including:

Catherine McMillan | Jabari Grubb | Elif Polat | Brian McAbee | Liz Farrell | Brittney Stewart | Noah Frank | Liel Zino | Anna D’Aprile | and more!

Now? We’re expanding the show.

DC Decoded started as a way to highlight the incredible AI talent in DC. A second reason was to dispel the age‑old notions that DC is just policy and law. And I’m pretty confident we are actively doing that.

We will continue to do so with our new host, Elif. Check out her first episode ft. yours truly here: https://samligenaicollective.substack.com/p/the-one-with-sam-li-our-need-for?r=553qru

While I’m very proud that the majority of our subscribers are still members of the DC AI community, I couldn’t help but notice we had a growing group of non-DC based people who were finding us from a variety of sources: Other Substacks, social media, and of course, word of mouth.

What makes this Substack unique is not that we are AI‑focused, or that we are city‑focused, but it’s that we blend both incredibly well. As our audience changes and grows, we want to make sure they get the most value possible!

More specifically: Through a mix of in‑person and online experiences, we make sure that when people tune in to our written, audio, or video content, they receive a nuanced understanding of how AI is affecting the city they are living in.

Until today, the “city” part of our “city and AI” mix has been limited to being DC.

Which is why I’m so excited to announce our new and improved Substack: Cities Decoded.

“What makes this Substack unique is not that we are AI‑focused, or that we are city‑focused, but it’s that we blend both incredibly well.”

As I move to New York (more info next week on LinkedIn), I thought a lot about what I wanted to do with this Substack. Should I just let Elif do DC Decoded and leave it behind? Should I start a new Substack? Should I come back to DC and do episodes when I could?

None of those felt right because they didn’t represent what this audience ultimately wants: To understand how influential cities in America are helping or harming the progress of AI.

To be clear on what is happening on a practical level:

* We have the amazing Elif continuing season 2 of DC Decoded: The AI Collective. Her latest episode is here:

https://samligenaicollective.substack.com/p/the-one-with-deniz-houston-why-ai

* We are starting NY Decoded: The AI Collective, hosted by me, new episodes starting January. DC Decoded subscribers will be automatically added; you are welcome to unsubscribe at any time (though I hope you will give the new show a chance!).

* We are expanding the DC Decoded brand to Cities Decoded, encompassing the separate DC Decoded and NY Decoded podcasts

It’s an exciting time. If you have any interest in helping with guest recommendations/connections/other podcast stuff, my Substack and LinkedIn messages are always open.

Thanks very very very much to all 650+ of you for a wild ride this year through DC and now including NY. I hope to see you at an AI Collective event very soon. And as always, there is so much more to come.

Welcome to the Cities Decoded community. I am beyond happy and grateful that you are here.

Onwards and upwards!

-Sam

*Get 3 months of Notion AI/Business FREE for your SMB/startup. I get a commission for every approved signup.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samlicitiesdecoded.substack.com