The equation is fairly straightforward:
Competent employees x AI tokens = Accelerating business & market share gain
Incompetent employees x AI tokens = slop
Companies are now realizing they have a lot of shitty employees.
They aren’t going to permanently cut spend on tokens. They can’t afford to because of game theory.
So instead they will fire the employees they believe are incompetent to make room for higher token budgets for those that are competent.
Lots of orgs however have a managerial class that doesn’t optimize for share gain and winning in general.
Thats fine. A wave of startups and existing platforms who can effectively leverage AI to expand scope of their business will crush the incompetent at a rate that will leave analysts and managers dizzy.
Change is coming. Fast. And reflexively the faster the change the higher the panic the lower the ROI threshold the more revenue and capital accrues to the labs the faster the models improve. And so on.
I'm suspicious of that that whole story about Uber blowing their AI budget and being disappointed in the results - I dug into it and it appears to have been built on very shaky foundations
@daschreiber To all OG Lemonade followers: Has Daniel's essay cadence increased? If so, could this be a sign that things are going very well at Lemonade?
@m_MTG63@jaferinfanteg98 Wow, they focused on a niche and became profitable. Lemonade would be profitable as well if they only focused on pet insurance. There is a reason why compounders like Amazon were unprofitable for so long—they kept reinvesting into new endeavors.
Greats news for US-based investors.
If you're outside the US:
CALL every brokerage you can and ask if they're participating in the SpaceX IPO and if you can get an allocation.
Report back with results.
Country.
Brokerage.
Yes/No?
This will help other investors.
AI is basically the Status Apocalypse for the intellectual class. Look closely at the different viewpoints crystallizing, very few will last another 12 months.
Pangram will not work for much longer, or it will cost thousands of dollars. Slop is a technically solved problem but it's not evenly distributed yet because highbrow prose has tiny economic value relative to coding.
Uniquely stylish and powerful prose will still command a premium, but the best prose writers of the next generation are going to do that WITH AI (to variable degrees in many different production configurations).
Nobody whose identity, status or income derive from highbrow prose production wants to say this aloud because it means that all of their social worth and much of their self-worth is now up for grabs. Of course, the best writers today are well positioned to be some of the best prose engineers of the next generation, but they'd have to reinvent their way of thinking and working, which established careerists resent having to do.
The other big issue that contemporary writers resent is that, in the AI era, to be a "good writer" will require that you have real truths that other people don't have. And you're going to have to take risks to express them. Today, you can hide the lack of these two things with sufficiently advanced erudition and style. The people most freaking out right now are the fancy wordsmiths with fancy positions who have no real alpha and no real courage. It is absolutely rational for them to be stigmatizing AI unconditionally.
(The only reason I can say this aloud is that I've walked away from a successful academic career, so I've already traversed my status collapse voluntarily. I now feel pretty immune to whatever humblings technology has in store for us...)