5. On Artificial Intelligence. AI is dead. Long live AI.

Dear Co-creator;

This is going to be a quick one as I will be settling on a once-a-week-on-Tuesday substantial routine.

We had our first board meeting. Participation was low (20%), and the competing resolutions ended up at an impasse. As the chairperson, I must do infinitely better next time.

However we have enough to nibble on and make “some” decisions as we must!

• Edtech is out – our board doesn’t even know what it is.

• ClaimCarbon needs a better story otherwise it is also on the chopping block.

• CitySolar is also out for the sole reason that one respected board member called it shit.

We had some good discussions on our Slack, and they are mostly around healthcare. Let’s dig deeper there because the AI hype is precisely around healthcare. Fintech idea doesn’t produce the public good yet so it needs some work. I want to think a bit more about climate change. Let’s go.

We are not creating an AI company per se. In fact, investing in an AI company is a sucker’s bet. Everybody and their kayınço is doing one. Everybody and their görümce is investing in one. Last I counted, there are 100 AI spreadsheet companies pulling chatgpt functionality while running an Azure servers hoping to differentiate with the data from their 2,000 customers.

There are so many wrongs in this sentence that I’d hate for us to be deluded even to think that we will have the data, marketing, cost structure to take any incumbent head on. 1 billion people use Excel, Microsoft pays a song a year per user for its infrastructure, it sure doesn’t pay OpenAI. If these weren’t true, an incumbent with a nifty feature would still not be able to unseat Excel-it kicks the shit out of Google Sheets when one sits down to do serious spreadsheeting.

While the allure of AI's technological capabilities is undeniable, a prudent assessment of its economic landscape reveals a pattern reminiscent of the mobile revolution where very few pure players made it big as compared to the Internet revolution. Thus, we as prospective investors must exercise caution and recognize the predominant flow of value towards the existing industry leaders.

I wish you and yours a happy weekend, Oltac

ps. Image by Bing with prompt “AI is dead.”