The World Runs on the Money of Losers
What comes after generative AI (PART II: RENAISSANCE)
You Guys Didn’t Need to Sell AI So Hard (PART I: REQUIEM)
I could summarize the first part of this series by rephrasing the headline as “What comes after this pile of failures?”
Not enough revenue or profits, not enough paying users or enterprise customers, and not enough good ideas to transform into thriving startups are signs of market failure. Add to that skyrocketing valuations and over-investment and you have the symptom profile of an industry-wide bubble. Worst of all, tech companies pitched an AI revolution they had no intent to fulfill and sold wild visions of the future — machine superintelligence — they never truly believed in.
So the constant hyperbole around generative AI was an unjustified burden. We agreed on that much. But not because the tech is useless, as many critics assume, but for the opposite reason: the tech’s untapped potential would have been enough by itself for eager CEOs and wealthy shareholders to realize the succulent treat. I agree with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on this: AI’s upside realizes naturally — almost spontaneously — if we let it.1
But they didn’t.
