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.