The weekend starts here! Welcome back to Five Things Tech!

This week had a bit of everything - from platform chaos to quiet revolutions in tech. Wired takes a hard look at X and its Grok AI, which has been generating massive amounts of explicit images and yet somehow still sits comfortably in Apple and Google’s app stores. It’s a painful reminder that content moderation is still more aspiration than reality. Then there’s AWS, which isn’t exactly in trouble, but the halo of invincibility is slipping. As it juggles AI bets and restructuring, we’re watching a giant try to stay agile while still printing billions in revenue.

I also really enjoyed the story about why TVs have become so ridiculously cheap — turns out scaling up batch sizes is sometimes the real innovation. On the mobility side, the race between Waymo, Cybercab, and Uber shows how autonomy is no longer just about cost but comfort - no chatty drivers, no awkward small talk, just silence. And while everyone seems to be rediscovering LinkedIn these days, it’s less because of the algorithm and more because people still crave the sense of a professional community that feels, well, real. Even if it sometimes reads like a motivational speaking contest.

Why Are Grok and X Still Available in App Stores?

The amount of nonconsensual explicit images on X generated by Grok has exploded over the past two weeks. One researcher told Bloomberg that over a 24-hour period between January 5 and 6, Grok was producing roughly 6,700 images every hour that they identified as “sexually suggestive or nudifying.” Another analyst collected more than 15,000 URLs of images that Grok created on X during a two-hour period on December 31. WIRED reviewed approximately one-third of the images, and found that many of them featured women dressed in revealing clothing. Over 2,500 were marked as no longer available within a week, while almost 500 were labeled as “age-restricted adult content.”

This is unacceptable. Apple and Google have to kick X and Grok off the App Stores immediately.

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AWS in 2026: The Year of Proving They Still Know How to Operate

AWS isn’t dying. Heck, AWS isn’t even struggling in any conventional sense. But the era of unchallenged dominance is over, and the company is navigating a transition that would challenge any organization: maintaining operational excellence while pivoting to AI, retaining institutional knowledge while restructuring, and growing a $132 billion business at rates that satisfy Wall Street.

They’ve made the right strategic moves. re:Invent 2025 demonstrated a company finally willing to accept market reality rather than insist the market was wrong. The AI investments are substantial and increasingly credible.

It’s interesting how AWS is providing so much infrastructure, but really has not been in the spotlight much lately.

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How Did TVs Get So Cheap?

LCDs are thus an interesting example of costs falling due to the use of larger and larger batch sizes. Several decades of lean manufacturing and business schools assigning “The Goal” have convinced many folks that you should always aim to reduce batch size, and that the ideal manufacturing process is “one piece flow” where you’re processing a single unit at a time. But as we see in several processes — semiconductor manufacturing, LCD production, container shipping — increasing your batch size can, depending on the nature of your process, result in substantial cost savings.

Growing up in the 70s, we didn’t even have a color tv before the mid-80s. And now we have this huge screen in our living room that has an amazing resolution and it wasn’t really all that expensive.

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The Race between Waymo, Cybercab, and Uber

This is crazy. The founder and previous CEO of Uber once said robotaxis would destroy human cabs and ride-hailing cars because they would be cheaper. But Waymo is not cheaper! It turns out people prefer to ride without a driver! In retrospect, you can imagine why. Nobody to judge you, to talk to you if you’re not in the mood, to smell bad, to drive recklessly, to disregard app payments and request cash… Imagine when prices drop way below current levels.

Public Transport still makes so much more sense then sending more and more self-driving cars onto the streets, but I do understand the sentiment of not having to talk to some stranger in a car.

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Three Reasons We Can’t Get Enough of LinkedIn

Design plays a part. The site emulated Facebook and TikTok by adding a news feed and videos. However, some new fans argue that the real attraction lies in the features LinkedIn hasn’t changed—in particular, the requirement that users provide their real names.

Research shows real names curb toxicity. While not immune to misinformation and scams, LinkedIn lured people leaving X and Facebook as content moderation and fact-checking there declined. Many concluded it was worth trading rage bait on other platforms for earnest monologues about why getting laid off was a blessing in disguise.

LinkedIn has certainly become the center stage of business networking, but it shows that not everyone knows how to write a compelling text without a gazillion buzzwords or hashtags. Still, it is the best way to connect to people in the business world.

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

Five Things Tech: Big Tech Idiots, Reels, Large Software Products, Noise Cancelling, DeepTech Jan 3 Read full story

🤖

— Nico