I don’t think “AI” as a market is “winner-takes-anything”. Seriously. AI is not a product, it’s a tool for building other products. The winners will be other businesses that use AI tooling to make better products. Does OpenAI really make sense as a chatbot company?
I agree the market for 10% better AI isn’t that great but the cost to get there is. An 80% as good model at 10% or even 5% the cost will win every time in the current environment. Most businesses don’t even have a clear use case for AI they just use it because the competition is and there is a FOMO effect
There are two perspectives on this. What you said is definitely a good one if you're a business planning to add AI to whatever you're selling. But personally, as a user, I want the opposite to happen - I want AI to be the product that takes all the current products and turns them into tools it can use.
I agree, I want a more intelligent voice assistant similar to Siri as a product, and all my apps to be add-ons the voice assistant could integrate with.
According to the linked Wikipedia article, he did not go broke from the gold rush. He went broke because he invested the pickaxe windfall in land, and when his wife divorced him, the judge ruled he had to pay her 50%, but since he was 100% in land he had to sell it. (The article is not clear why he couldn't deed her 50% of it, or only sell 50%. Maybe it happened during a bad market, he had a deadline, etc.)
So maybe if the AI pickaxe sellers get divorced it could lead to poor financial results, but I'm not sure his story is applicable otherwise.
Basically every tech company likes to say they are selling pickaxes, but basically no VC funded company matches that model. To actually come out ahead selling pickaxes you had to pocket a profit on each one you sold.
If you sell your pickaxes at a loss to gain market share, or pour all of your revenue into rapid pickaxe store expansion, you’re going to be just as broke as prospectors when the boom goes bust.
Great Wells Fargo has an "agent" ... and every one else is talking about how to make their products available for agent based AI.
People don't want 47 different agents to talk to, then want a single end point, they want a "personal assistant" in digital form, a virtual concierge...
And we can't have this, because the open web has been dead for more than a decade.
If there were 2 other Amazons all with similar products and the same ease of shipping would you care where you purchased? Amazon is simply the best UX for online ordering. If anything else matched it I’d shop platform agnostic.
