AI: a technology in search of a job

AI, from a consumer point of view, is still a technology searching for a job to be done. I’m not in any way a bear on AI. I’m not dismissive of it. But what they call product-market fit hasn’t happened. It has niches, and they’re not consumers. There are individual users and buyers of the technology, and they might be using it on a day-to-day basis, but that’s very early days. It doesn’t have that resonance yet. It needs to be packaged in certain ways.

So how do we get there? I don’t think it’s ChatGPT. That’s like saying TCP/IP. That’s like saying Intel 8088 — something technical. It’s also an interface that’s notoriously low bandwidth. You have to converse in language, in complex language, prompts, as if we’re dealing with a keyboard, the old days of the command line. And I think Apple’s initial attempt, which failed, was to make things like emojis, and image editing, and trivial things. Those aren’t apps either; those are features. The app is not a technology, it’s not a feature. It’s something that packages all those things, and does it in a way that’s easy to discover and to evolve.