Every company and their grand mom are now an AI company. If your product has a text input box, insert a button to generate text and Boom. Cynicism aside, Large Language Models are magical in what they do - at least for now. Even as we ride high on this gold rush, Darwinian nature of free markets will leave behind the long game players that wield AI to good use.
Will AI disrupt Big Tech? Will startups overthrow gargantuans? Where will the disruption come from?
My Take
Infrastructure providers are the biggest winners in this phase
We’re still in the basement building phase, and the biggest winners are ones offering power tools and raw materials. This starts from the Silicon with GPUs (Nvidia, Arm), Compute and Network Infrastructure offered by Cloud vendors (AWS, Azure, GCP) or OnPremises, Large Language Models (OpenAI, Anthropic, PaLM2,) and any other tools for Developers to build.
T’is time to build indeed.
Big Tech Software will only get Bigger with AI
If data were Oil, AI is one big combustion engine. Players with most oil burn brighter, bigger and move faster over time. Will big guns like Adobe, Salesforce be disrupted in the age of AI? Actually the opposite, AI acts as a force multiplier making them stronger.
Case in point, while many players with diffusion models struggling with copyright issues. Adobe simply used their massive pile of Stock image data to train Firefly and now has an enterprise offering
Adobe, especially if you’re already familiar with its Firefly AI model. Adobe created Firefly to be safe for commercial use by training it on Adobe Stock images, openly licensed content, and content without copyright restrictions within the public domain
Rise of “Boutique” Software
In a world of ubiquitous restaurant or hotel chains, we still gravitate towards unique and boutique dwellings. And pay a premium for it. With AI, software will get cheap, and there will be many mediocre products. However, there will be products crafted like the Pagani, Ferrari and Lamborghinis that stand out in design, function and more importantly appeal to deeper human senses.
I’m particularly excited for this.