Talking to clouds

Exploiting information asymmetry is the foundation that many industries are built on. It doesn’t get enough attention that even though AI raises up the capabilities of the middle majority, it also dramatically flattens the distribution. Most knowledge workers will end up having nearly indistinguishable skills except those outliers 2 or 3 standard deviations from normal. Those that do not use AI will be strongly disadvantaged, while those that deeply implement custom processes will gain superpowers. We all have access to deep knowledge now, imagination and execution (speed x quality) are the leverage points.

Reviews are likely more noise than signal. Consider the people whose taste and context you respect most. Now how many of those people do you think take the time to write public product reviews? Likely not many.

We can fix some of this with more empirical takes made by AI.

I think AI will create a new type of ‘late mover’ companies. Let big companies do the expensive work of innovation and business model optimization. Then just copy that and add a thin layer of niche-specific customization on top. Copying established products in high fidelity will become very cheap, letting indie founders copy a product group in homeostasis, but with a tangential twist. The key is enabling companies to do a frictionless swap from whatever they currently use.

We are deeply hindered in our ability to advance as a species by not having some form of human-to-human API. AIs will have this and that is an exponential unlock.

Rudimentary semantics will be our downfall.

History is written by the victor
History is written by search engines
History is written by model providers
History is written by the human feedback in RLHF
History is written by ???

(??? seems like the trend to invest in)

AI is a new tool, one that offers leverage. New sources of leverage increase available optionality. Additional optionality increases the scale of both good and bad outcomes. More is not better or worse by default. Thankfully, history has shown tools to be awesome at every turn.

There are two types of software companies, those that do the work and those that create something new. Do-the-work companies put together many disparate pieces of software into a usable whole that can be used to perform work (bundling).

It is really annoying that webpages don’t have proper metadata. How often is the page expected to change? What is the basic content type. When was the last time it was updated? What is a paragraph (or 2) summary of the contents (what, who, how much)?

I have never seen so many people building single-point dots, with no idea of whether line will connect them in the future. We need to make imagination cool again, not just ambition.