Signal vs. Noise
Somehow this topic is always relevant. Right now with all the noise about AI it’s come back on my radar. In my interpretation of things, AI is causing a lot of lethargy because people worry their work will be eroded by an AI model that just does the same thing. Possibly. It doesn’t matter. Everything will be replaced by something eventually. Your job as a founder is to keep moving forward. If you stop, you will get eaten alive. But not because of the thing that’s threatening to eat you alive. By yourself. The sensational headlines about companies imploding are junk. They highlight examples of companies that stopped innovating a long time ago, and then use the current noise to make it seem like the two things are correlated. I just saw someone trying to connect the death of legacy media to AI, junk. Legacy media stopped trying years ago, they started using cheap, outsourced writers to produce formulaic content that no one wanted to read. They gamed the Google algorithm to get traffic and sell ads against it with as little effort as possible. They stopped trying years ago. Now AI is the new scary thing to blame their fall on.
I could do the same thing with software companies that are imploding. You say AI has eaten them, I say those software companies falling off the map were selling software for $1,000’s that’s worth $100’s. And in both bases, with the legacy media and with the software companies, they will not be replaced by pure AI plays, they will be replaced by content brands and software companies who actually put in real effort. In the case of content they’ll be replaced by brands who have real personality, and a voice behind their content. In the case of software, they’ll be replaced by companies offer the same utility at 10% of the price, which is possible not just because of AI but because the underlying programming languages have gotten vastly more efficient.
Don’t let fear mongering put you on the sidelines. Move forward with effort and you will stay one step ahead of whatever the latest noise is.
