Let’s call it the AI imperative: sound familiar?
Having just arrived in Bilbao on Sunday for the DigitalTek Awards, and thinking about my presentation for today, I came across an article in TechCrunch about what startup founders should consider with respect to AI in 2024, i.e. a rethink of business models.
The first important question is to understand where we are: first came machine learning, and then generative algorithms, two different approaches to scaling models based on the availability of technology and economic resources that will have the same impact as the internet did in the late 1990s, when Andy Grove predicted “in five years, all companies will be Internet companies or they won’t be companies at all”. This was the “net imperative”, companies had to be online, contributing to a fertile fabric that allowed the birth of new business ideas, redefining the old ones or exploiting new possibilities.
I lived through that time, perhaps more focused on what was going on because I taught about new technologies — let’s just say I had more hair then — and I remember very well the reactions, the incredulity and the astonishment many people greeted predictions of this “net imperative”, only to end up finding that, within a few years, if the internet was down, people went home because they could not work.
