Ex Google, Meta, and 4x founder. Advisor, operator and investor focused on AI, fintech, and emerging markets.
We need to talk about this #AI “steamroll” myth. On a number of podcasts and blogs I am hearing the notion that many AI applications will ultimately be “steamrolled" by the incumbents, be they Google, Microsoft, Apple, or even OpenAI (which has achieved incumbent status in record time). I think this is a bit of a mind virus. I can see why these companies may want people to think that way, considering it is taking a while to roll out mainstream applications. However, history has shown that when a new method of information retrieval is introduced (e.g., Google Search, ICQ, the news feed), it opens up the field to focused players who explore a space on the field that they simply can’t or won’t get to. If people had that mindset in 2002, no one would have funded Yelp, Zillow, or Kayak, and in 2010 no one would have funded Snap or Instagram. Now I can see you thinking – yes, but didn’t Google dominate in search, and doesn’t Facebook dominate in social? Yes, but what we didn’t have back then is a lot of the fundamental technology behind this shift open sourced, and widely used. We also didn’t know the secondary effects of such a concentration of power and data. People want to build themselves now, to lower both their privacy and SaaS costs. This is where Knapsack comes in. I think David Friedberg said it best on the latest All-In Podcast (deep linked to the relevant section): https://lnkd.in/gErCdTs2 “What [ChatGPT] doesn't do yet is take all of our internal data and all of our internal tooling and kind of reconfigure how we use that. So we're still paying for a whole bunch of enterprise software and SaaS licenses for things that we know we don't want to be paying for in the future, and we're now starting to figure out how can we build our own AI based software to replace a lot of the dependency we have on third party software that uses our internal data for our internal consumption. So there's a lot of that still ahead of us. And we're pretty progressive so that's why I know it's early innings because I see the way we're going to use it and I know that we're probably well ahead of a big enterprise companies that are more traditional and so I can see like a couple years from now all these big enterprises are going to figure the same thing out and then you're not necessarily going to need to pay for this ChatGPT stuff if there's an internal tool and an internal LLM that you can run."
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Casie AI
1mo
We couldn’t agree more.
Raj Gajwani
1mo
Well put, thanks for sharing this POV
Great post. I completely agree. The incumbents' size and strength are their weaknesses. To be more specific: - They have a business model to protect. They have to make the Wall St gods happy every three months. - They have a brand to protect, which makes them overthink and slow - Their employees are fat, rich, and happy. The end result is that they are completely risk-averse. They are more worried about being fired than being promoted. - They are all being investigated by the DOJ, FTC, and/or State Attorney Generals. It does not matter if they ultimately win these lawsuits or if they are meritless. They have real consequences for the companies' enterprise value. This presents an opening for the small guys. They can leverage the government for unique business advantage. How? I wrote a paper on it and will publish it shortly.