Benedict Evans: “The experience, product, value capture and strategic leverage in AI will all change an enormous amount in the next couple of years as the market develops. Big aggressive incumbents and thousands of entrepreneurs are trying to create new features, experiences and business models, and in the process try to turn foundation models themselves into commodity infrastructure sold at marginal cost. Having kicked off the LLM boom, OpenAI now has to invent a whole other set of new things as well, or at least fend off, co-opt and absorb the thousands of other people who are trying to do that.” [via Arnold Kling]
FT: “Are you the person who takes the time to explain to new hires on your team what everyone does? Are you the person who notices when a project is in danger of going wrong because two teams have different ideas of what is actually required? Do you know the name of the person on the third floor who can sort out the fiddly problem that has slowed down your colleague for weeks? If you answered yes to most of these questions, then you are doing “glue work”: you build relationships with people; you can see the bigger picture; you fix the organisational cracks and help to hold projects together…Now is a good time for managers everywhere to ask themselves a few questions. Who is doing the glue work on your team? Are you giving them credit and promotion for it? Are you making sure everyone is learning how to do some of this work? Because in the tech sector, AI hasn’t suddenly made those skills valuable to organisations — they always were. It has just made the fact impossible to ignore.”
Asymco: “As AI has emerged as a technology, we are in a strange position where the interface, born as a chatbot, suggested an infrastructure that is massive in scale. The magic sauce of GenAI isn’t so much the algorithm, which is quite a simple idea. It’s the scale of the data and computation that permits the illusion of intelligence. In developing the commercial idea, investors are imagining the device while investing in the infrastructure. In other words, the investors are poised to put trillions of dollars to work on what amounts to “the grid” without knowing exactly what the motor will be. The cash flows associated with infrastructures are very different from those of devices. Devices are iterated rapidly and evolve to changing tastes and discoveries of behavior. Infrastructures are built once, maintained and perhaps re-built but only after decades. Therefore financing for infrastructures is more likely through bonds (debt) rather than shares (equity). Returns are also much more subdued as the risk for infrastructures is lower. Regulation and relations with labor are also dramatically different.”
WSJ: “When everything from oil prices to ‘Survivor’ is worthy of a wager, everyone needs a bank of screens and a headset…There was a time when this kind of behavior would be called doomscrolling. Now, in the vernacular of our bet-on-anything era, it’s all part of monitoring the situation. People who’ve never worked on a trading floor are moving markets with informed wagers. Some are getting rich.”
