SITALWeek #457 Stuff I Thought About Last Week

Summary

Summarized wtih ChatGPT

The technology industry is shifting from selling software to selling intelligence, which could lead to greater demand for AI-driven services. This transition may create new digital economies where AI agents perform tasks on behalf of humans, potentially changing how we interact with technology. As AI capabilities grow, the value placed on intelligent processing is expected to rise significantly.

Key Takeaways:

1. Stay informed about AI advancements and their implications for various industries.
2. Consider how AI could enhance your business processes and decision-making.
3. Explore opportunities in the emerging market for intelligence-as-a-service.

Highlights from Article

the tech industry evolving from selling applications to selling intelligence. T

Moving applications from inefficient, dedicated servers and storage in the 1990s to virtualized workloads to SaaS to the modern, present-day cloud has been a nearly incalculable wave of efficiency gains

While we’ve seen massive efficiency gains and price decreases from AI already, we are still at a price point where an artificial agent is on par with the cost of a human worker, marking a significant change from software sold for a tiny fraction of an employee’s wages

In any technology platform transition, such as the current pivot to commoditized intelligence, there are going to be layers to the tech stack where more money will be made at different points in time than others. What is generally unchanged, cycle to cycle, is that the value distribution across the stack will be barbelled, with the new intelligence cycle being no exception: most money is made at the bottom (semiconductors) and the top (applications).

If this analogy holds, the LLMs – i.e., the operating system of the next wave of compute – may be less valuable than both the applications built on top of them (follow the developers!) and the foundational chips on which they run.

Okta cofounder Todd McKinnon has a contrarian take: there will be so much demand for new projects, the efficiency gains from AI coding will not offset the demand for a growing number of computer programmers.

All material owns to the authors, of course. If I’m highlighting or writing notes on this, I mostly likely recommend reading the original article, of course.

See other recent things I’ve read here.