My lightly informed thoughts on AI

I’m going back to the time when I blogged for myself. If others wanted to read it, great, but that’s not the goal.

Here are a few lightly informed thoughts on AI. I look forward to reading them in a few years and seeing where I was right and wrong.

1. Very few new AI tech startups will succeed. I don’t think there are many AI tech startups being created today that will be really big ($1b+ in revenue) or who will go public by 2030. A lot of what is being created today will be commoditized, which will drive consumer cost down. And in turn, there won’t be a lot of money to be made by these startups. Where are the moats?

2. Big Tech is going to be the big winner here. They’ll use their massive market advantage to control the AI market. Either through working with legislators to regulate and maintain their monopolies, or by buying up any promising startup before it can really get off the ground.

3. Entrepreneurs shouldn’t add AI to add AI. You shouldn’t add AI features into your product until things shake out and you can really offer something unique and game-changing to your users. We almost added AI tech to help users generate subject lines for their emails, but that’s lame and really not game-changing, so we scrapped it.

4. The government has no clue. Just as we saw with crypto only a few years ago, the US politicians don’t know what to do here. They’re scared, so they’ll likely over-regulate and hurt the future of AI before it can really get started. Here’s the White House’s Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights if you want to browse it. Side note: Stop regulating the Internet. Cookie banners can get f’d.

5. Nobody has a clue. Likewise, anyone who thinks they know how AI will play out over the next decade has an ulterior motive. How many jobs will it kill? How many jobs will it create? What will be the major use cases of AI? We just don’t know the answers right now and everything is speculation.

6. AI will be huge. It’s not a question of if, but a question of when. I’m very bullish on the future of AI and the benefits it will bring to society and all of our lives. 

TLDR: It’s only been able 18 months since OpenAI launched ChatGPT and nobody really has a clue as to how AI is going to play out over the next few years. It’s certainly got some amazing use cases already today — with a lot more to come — but it’s unlikely to be worth diving into head first just yet with a new startup idea. Let it blossom, keep regulation minimal, and let’s see how this plays out.