binary thoughts

Today two things of importance happened.

The first was that I procrastinated finishing up some work by rereading Peter Thiel and Blake Master’s (in)famous book “Zero To One.”

The second was that LLaMA-v2 came out.

In the grand scheme of things, the second matters much more, but it’s funny how timeless the first feels.

Today is the day that having an AI startup just became potentially the dumbest thing 99.99999% of people could be doing.

This revelation is in spite of AI being a technology that will 99.99999% make our world unrecognizable by 2030.

Why?

Competition.

If you were a startup that views AI as a tool that helps you to solve a customer’s problem, like a select few (beehiiv being one of them it seems), then you’ll be fine.

Probably.

However, if you’re like the cleantech companies of the early 2000s who didn’t have any real differentiated technology and no real differentiated market AND were the “current thing”, then you’re screwed.

Royally screwed.

The other reason you’re screwed is that starting an AI startup is cool right now.

Dangerously cool.

Everyone sees that AI is a great idea, no, a phenomenal idea, and that if you’re the one to make a big breakthrough then you’ll make sums of money that could have even Wall Street blush.

Right now is a great place to be if you’re Microsoft, but a terrible place to be if you want to become Microsoft.

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It’s easy (and loser-like) to be a pessimist, so I’m ending this post on two positive notes.

1. Despite it being a terrible (really, horrific) time to do an AI startup, this really is a golden age of AI progress.

   Things that used to be impossible even just last month are now happening, and the benefits from this seem to be decentralizing in a powerful way.

   Our ability to learn, create, and explore are going to be changed forever, and I’m genuinely excited about our new future.

2. Thanks to this new wave of AI innovation, your ability to find new opportunities to change the world just skyrocketed.

   Autodidacts of the world unite!

   If you have the time and the energy, you can learn almost anything at a rate that would’ve seemed fantastical in 2014 when “Zero to One” came out.

   There are so many things that are wrong with the world; as an example, go to any media outlet and you’ll be barraged by how garbage our species is day in and day out.

   Obviously you can’t fix everything right this second, but you can nudge things forward a little bit today.

   Then, tomorrow, do it again, but with a little more force.

   Then again.

   And again.

   And again, until one day the world you started off with is not the world you now live in.

   zero to one.

   do it.