Every few weeks, another vertical AI startup announces a new mega-round: “$100M to transform [industry] with AI”. The speed at which these startups race through funding rounds, and the sheer scale, is dizzying. Beneath it all sits a question few seem to ask: what is this money actually buying? The answer, upon closer inspection, is startlingly simple. It's buying go-to-market. Not technology. Not…
OpenAI launched an Apps SDK on Monday (see here ). This effectively means that developers can now build apps inside ChatGPT: This was an obvious play by OpenAI and it was only a matter of time until more dynamic experiences made it into chat. After all its very difficult to do some of the most profitable internet activities (ie ecommerece, gaming etc) with text only. The writing was on the wall…
Search, not AI, is still the foundation of knowledge work. The Google search box was not just a necessary precursor to Artificial Intelligence, good search already looks a lot like it. Take the question “what is the boiling point of alcohol?”. AI can work through the physics and derive the answer, or it can just…look it up. In a perfect world, where every question has a ready answer, you search.…
These days innovation is commonly thought of as the job of the small Sillicon Valley startups that have no respect for the status quo. The "Lean Startup" has become the de-facto rule-of-the-land and every enterpreneur has mention "leanness" on their slide decks to be taken seriously. To innovate, you need to be fast, take creative risk and iterate. Yet real veterans of the craft, like Amazon,…