Right now, we’re all trapped in a bizarre digital loop: you’re using ChatGPT to write an email that your boss is just going to ask ChatGPT to summarize. It’s a massive productivity gain… for the servers.
But here’s the kicker: we’re currently living through a subsidized “inference party.” When the venture capital chips run out and the real bill hits the table, are you really going to drop $200 a month just to generate mediocre cat memes for your Instagram? I doubt it.
It is a common misconception that electricity “happened” overnight. In reality, there was a massive 40-to-50-year gap between the invention of the lightbulb and the point where it actually changed how the world worked. For a long time, its practical effect was just serving as an expensive way to replace candles in wealthy households. It’s not very different from AI today: just an expensive toy that most of humankind doesn’t yet give a damn about.
Inference costs will sink, right? For a while, maybe. But mind you, there are physical laws in place limiting how much computing power you can squeeze out of a square meter of silicon or a gigawatt-hour. Transistor size won’t shrink forever; in fact, they are very close to the theoretical limit, beyond which quantum tunneling causes electron leakage, making them impossible to turn off. Breakthroughs in algorithms are unpredictable, and we’re going to need a lot of them for LLM inference to become a sustainable business.
Besides all that, to reap real productivity gains, the people staring at Excel spreadsheets all day doing real work for real businesses need to figure out how to truly automate large chunks of their daily tasks. We aren’t going to achieve that just by giving them a model subscription and telling them to copy-paste frantically between different applications; the AI needs to be baked into their workflows. Instead of throwing data into a textbox and then manually moving it back into their systems, those systems need to have a button that does it all—or better yet, no button at all, where the work just gets done.
I’d relate AI adoption to the dot-com boom of the late 90s. It took a lot of time and effort from highly competent people to change how the world works and gets things done. For a long time, the internet for “real” business was just mail on steroids—a faster way to run the same old processes. Some places still run like that just fine, by the way; but most had to adapt to the new ways, and many were driven out of business. Amazon’s operations are nowhere near what a bookstore used to be 25 years ago, and 25 years from now, the daily routines of most professions will be unrecognizable in ways no one can currently predict.
Eventually, some folks will find novel ways to do novel things, and the first ones will reap great rewards and a huge competitive edge. Not all risk-tolerant people will succeed, but almost all risk-averse ones will fail.
Keep your mind open and stay safe.