AI Isn’t the Thing. It’s the Thing That Enables the Thing

I think people are confused about how money will be won and lost with AI.
Most “AI businesses” will get crushed because only so much tooling is
needed. So that will be a crash.

But there will be a far bigger boom from new companies creating new things
using AI.

I think of AI as a creation and business-enablement technology. It’s not
like infosec, or cloud, or social media, or Marvel movies. It’s not a space.
Or a tech. Or a hype cycle. It’s just intelligence. It’s pure accelerant.

So when I think of AI, I think of the things people will make with it—not of
AI itself.

And this is how I look at the question of whether we’re going to have an AI
crash or an AI boom. The answer is yes.

We’ll have both. And the reason is that there’s only so much room/need for
AI-enablement tools and platforms. At some point there will be a plateuing
of what’s possible and/or even needed there. We’ll have enough tools, and
models, and frameworks, etc. Or they will become invisible and therefore
hard to differentiate and monetize.

That will kill a lot of companies who don’t understand that AI isn’t the
thing—it’s the thing that helps people make the thing.

And once that happens (and even before), the real will be the tiny
startups that bring net-new things into the world. Thousands of new
“companies” and products. And then millions. All making brand new
spectacular things that they never could have made before as a single
person, or as a 3-20 person team.

Sure, they’ll be massively enhanced by AI. Their infrastructure, their
marketing, their sales, most of their development, and pretty much all the
traditional parts of their business will be created/run by AI. And that’s
what will let them have a 1-20 person team but function like a 200-20,000
person company.

But at the end of the day it all reduces to one thing: more stuff.

• More products

• More services

• More art

• More movies

• More games

• More experiences

• More hardware

• More software

• More of everything that provides value today

The best way to think about AI is as a magnifier. A magnifier of human
creativity.

But not just a magnfier. A multiplier as well.

So let’s say at the end of 2022 we had 19 HC (Human Creativity) points on
planet Earth. And most of those were—for various random reasons—centered
around uniquely lucky people in Western countries.

Well that number is about to become 38. And then 100. And then 1,000. And
then 20 million.

Forget the people scrambling to compete with OpenAI or whatever. It’s noise.

The real show is what 8 billion humans will do once more of their
creativity is unlocked.