What was once the seat of ambition, the home for the crazy ones wanting to put a dent in the universe, has become meek. It's time we turn things around.
What really drove this home for me was this paragraph I read in @stripe's memo to their investors talking about their long-term strategy and how their recent @openrouter acquisition plays into it:
"While it's clear that the changes will be vast, nobody can know with specificity how Al will reshape our world. Many predictions from wise individuals have already been abjectly falsified. With humility about the uncertainty, we have two overarching aims."
(emphases mine). This paragraph perfectly encapsulates why silicon valley is losing its way. And it's especially dangerous because of how insidious it is.
Let's break it down.
"nobody can know with specificity how AI will reshape our world".
This combined with the next sentence talking about how many predictions have been falsified implicitly communicates the message:
Do not try to understand how AI will shape our world with specificity because you can't. Because everyone else who has tried have failed.
You can try to push back at this interpretation at a syntactical level, but if you argue that this would not be a commonly derived implicit meaning, then I don't think you understand human psychology.
Many of humanity's greatest creations have stemmed from making bold, sharp predictions about how the world will change across long periods of time. Many great companies had long-term predictions about how the world would change and plans for what they were going to do about it.
But something about AI feels different doesn't it? Change is accelerating so fast that it's tempting to just throw our hands in the air and give up trying to predict what's going to happen. It's much easier to focus on getting our surfboards polished and ready so that we can ride whatever this wave is, to wherever it takes us. Because, after all, many have tried to predict and have failed. Who are we to think we can do better?
I keep catching myself falling into this mindset. It pisses me off. And I see it all around me. Silicon valley is falling from a culture of definite optimism to indefinite optimism at an accelerating rate. I believe this shift stems from a collective anxiety about the rate at which AI is changing our world, fear of looking like a complete idiot for being wrong (likely outcome), and from being too lazy to put in the rigorous work to actually make sense of all that's going on.
And yet, there has not been a better time to make sharp, long-term predictions about how AI will change our world. In fact, if you don't, you will find it increasingly difficult to create any value.
Those who don't take the time to make sense of how the world is changing will all compete after the most obvious low hanging fruit. It's no wonder the market is currently a bloodbath around the most obvious things. How many agents are competing in each vertical? How many AI personal assistants that connect to all of your apps?
It is a common mistake to think that AI will make our work easier. The truth is that AI will make our work ridiculously more difficult. To a degree we can't fathom. That's because as AI increasingly does the easier, obvious work for us – across the board – it will increasingly challenge each of us to advance the frontier, i.e, to do the kind of work that it can't .
Advancing the frontier is really fucking hard. It will increasingly require dedicating lives to exploring a particular space, and discovering breakthroughs after years if not decades of relentless effort. Just look at the journeys that the cofounders of OpenAI / Anthropic took before they got any traction.
As AI advances and handles the easier problems for us, that will be increasingly be the sort of dedication required to make any meaningful progress.
How can you make such a determined, committed pursuit that may not lead to any results for years without thinking very deeply about how AI is going to change our world? And to look at this from the other side, I'd bet that if everyone took a year-long sabbatical just to make sense of how our AI is changing our world, we would actually accelerate humanity's long-term progress by orders.
Iterating to success only works when the complexity of the problem space is small. A decade ago, if you were building a product analytics company, it would benefit you to shut the fuck up, just talk to users and literally just build what they want. Because by iterating and shipping quickly, you were bound to stumble upon the right product since there were only a limited number of possibilities.
But that doesn't work when the problem complexity is much greater. At higher complexity problems that have massive solution spaces, it's no longer enough to simply iterate quickly. You must choose the right starting point and approach. And as AI rapidly eats up the simpler, less complex problem spaces, it will increasingly take longer to find the right angle. Perhaps years. Maybe even decades!
Therefore, what we need to be doing is the exact opposite of the implied message from the quoted paragraph. Now more than ever, we must try and understand how AI will shape our world in the long-run, with enough specificity to have a worthwhile angle to dedicate many years of our precious lives toward.
Now more than ever, we need courage.
"humility"
The implication of this word (given its placement right after the sentence we just discussed) is that to make predictions with specificity about how Al will reshape our world is an act of arrogance. Not in a positive way, but in an almost condescending way.
I'm especially sensitive to ambition being labeled as arrogance due to my background. I moved to America from India when I was 4, and then I moved back to India when I was 14 for high school, and then back to America at 18 for college and beyond. I've had the opportunity to study these extremely different cultures during the most formative years of my life in ways that few others have.
In India, being overly ambitious is seen as arrogance. You must not dare to dream too big. If you do, you will be ostracized. In India I learned to keep my dreams to myself. Even saying that you wanted to play in the NBA would lead to teammates and coaches scoffing at you. You are subconsciously conditioned in a billion different ways to fall in line, to fit in, to not ruffle feathers, to not think too big. You are conditioned to be "humble".
In America, I grew up in the Bay Area. My dad brought us here right before the dot com crash, drawn by its creative, ambitious energy. In his words, it was magical. There was no dream that was too big to be taken seriously. For anyone who wanted to change the world, there was nowhere else you wanted to be. And unlike India, you didn't have to fall in line. Hell, you were told to step out and draw your own line, and sometimes even shamed for falling into someone else's line.
What a difference!
We must be ambitious enough to try to see the future no matter how difficult it seems. And we must have the courage to risk the most precious years of our lives toward advancing the frontier.
Nowhere else in the world is set up for this. Humanity's descendants will appreciate our efforts. This is what America means to me. And especially what silicon valley means.
"overarching aims".
When you view the world through the lens of indefinite optimism, you must not make any concrete plans. You can only have aims. And they must not be narrowly defined aims, they must be so "overarching" that nobody can sharply critique it.
But it's time to do the opposite. It's only when we stick our neck out with long-term predictions so sharp that they cut, will we have the kind of ferocious debate, and rigorous analysis, that will accelerate our collective progress.
Because we're in this together.
My intention with this post is not to critique a specific set of authors or a particular company. I believe that most of us (and certainly myself) have been infected with meek thinking in the face of the daunting challenge that AI poses. I thank @stripe for providing such a concrete form of what has been bugging me. I don't think I could have expressed this without their help.