AI and the next technological revolution

Jerry Neumann comparing AI with previous revolutionary technologies like microprocessor and containers—shipping containers, not software containers—and arguing that money will be made on the applications sitting on top of AI rather than on AI itself.

This doesn’t mean AI can’t start the next technological revolution. It might, if experimentation becomes cheap, distributed and permissionless—like Wozniak cobbling together computers in his garage, Ford building his first internal combustion engine in his kitchen, or Trevithick building his high-pressure steam engine as soon as James Watt’s patents expired. When any would-be innovator can build and train an LLM on their laptop and put it to use in any way their imagination dictates, it might be the seed of the next big set of changes—something revolutionary rather than evolutionary. But until and unless that happens, there can be no irruption.

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