AI, Tipping Points & The Great Beyond
I am clearly seeing 1996 all over again. 1996 was the year that we all got the feeling that the tech world was about to change. In those years new websites were popping up left and right. Some were great; others were nothing special. A few were headed in the right direction, but many failed to find a business model. It was a time of experimentation. In 1996 we did not understand like Bezos believed, that e-commerce would be a big thing. My friend who helped start JDate says investors laughed at the concept of people dating over the Internet, saying it will never happen!
Some can imagine the future, some just ignore it.
By 1999 a lot of fortunes had been made, and a lot of money had been invested for good or for bad, because it all headed to over-investing and irrational exuberance by 1999, and the end result was a runaway train. Investing means taking a chance on the potential of the world changing, and heading in some direction, and once that train gets going it almost can’t be stopped without a collision with reality.
I really feel 2024 is giving me that same feeling. Like the Internet had the promise of flipping over entire industries, so does artificial intelligence. It’s no fad, it’s no crypto bros and their BS NFT values. And it’s not a scam, nor a mirage.
If you look at the last 30 years 2 major factors destroyed American businesses, help consolidate to the FANGs, and brought us into the modern era. Those factors are automation (great software) and outsourcing. Those 2 factors make it possible for us to be able to buy $9 pants at Marshalls, and to have had only a 3% cost of living increases until the pandemic under Trump gave producers the incentive to raise prices across the board. Until this necessity (was it really), producers were stuck in a flat pricing world, which if I am right may happen again with the 3rd factor! But these two big factors have not just kept us in some weird pricing models, they continue to both wreck havoc on careers in America as well as keeping pants at Marshall low, and eggs and milk at Aldi’s cheap….
Now we have a 3rd major factor joining the other 2 making a third triumphant ring of factors that continue to change our way of life. That is AI, Artificial Intelligence.
One investor I spoke with asked me if AI was another ruse like blockchain, over-promising and under-delivering. He was skeptical of AI claims. I told him, you better not ignore it, because I think everything will change, and change fast. Whole industries will go away. Whole new industries will now be created. How you do your day to day work will be changing, and soon we will all be familiar with virtual robots working every possible task, optimizing business and our lives. There are so many ways AI can be used both generative (like my new venture PAIGN), to database driven analysis, to to optimizing medical procedures, discovering factors in every type of business, to head-count reduction, even space travel will be impacted. AI will save lives and it will allow us to solve big, big problem. The problem is, it’s a not such a visible trend. Yet it’s already happening. It won’t be till you go to rent a car, and it’s unmanned with an AI who talks to you, till you really understand the impact of AI.
For those who invest in the stock market, it won’t be easy to pick out the winners. The FANGs already control the roost, with monopolies over whole industries like e-commerce, mapping, cellphones, computers, TV shows… The way it almost always works is the incumbants are almost never the innovators. So just take those overpriced FANGs and kiss their futures goodbye. Of course Google is all set. It’s all set like it’s 1989 IBM… See what happened by 2000 to IBM. Amazon, I think is also all set, all set to be broken up. That’s what happened to AT&T in 1983, and that stage is all set. The unknown innovators will use AI in a way that was unexpected creating whole industries that the FANGs could never create, yet they love to acquire, and they will. So, if I am right the stock market will double, maybe triple, because this 3rd factor is so powerful, it is going to optimize any smart company that knows how to harnass the power.
And just like the over-exuberance of 1999 we will see over-investment, mistakes and people jumping at ideas that don’t make sense. We are hearing there are 3,000 new AI projects/startups out there. I don’t doubt it. I just doubt that many will capture marketshare or people’s imagination. I’ve heard that when cigars are really popular, that is when you should get nervous… Also when people who make nothing talk about their stock exploits and crypto exploits, it is also a bad sign over over-investment. Just some myths I have heard.
I am just theorizing here. All of this may not come to pass. I do have my own AI startup called PAIGN AI. You can read more about it at https://cam.paign.ai. It’s in Beta and will take promoted soon to my affiliates… Please get on our mailing list and if you want to try it, let us know.
I also have an AI Pitch Event with networking this week, Thursday, Feb 29th, at The Greenhouse in Boca Raton, near Yamato and Federal. You are invited to attend. I will be pitching PAIGN there and several other companies will be pitching their AI ventures and possibly some other ventures. Click here for more information.
Good luck and keep on reading…
Dan Gudema
dan@startuppop.com
