There is not enough ambition or imagination in startups. There is this echo chamber of problems that startups are suppose to raise and solve. What do we mean by ambition and imagination? We mean the full-throated pursuit of a fundamentally transformative vision for the economy or society.

I will doubtless go on to criticize many companies as not being fundamentally transformative. Maybe in quite harsh language too. That is not to say that I don't think the people pursuing these ideas aren't incredibly smart, kind, thoughtful, determined, or successful. Many people pursuing these ideas will doubtless becoming millionaires or billionaires by getting companies acquired or publicly listed. I just don't think that they are fundamentally transformative.

Oh and by the way, if the vision for society the startup espouses is fundamentally dystopian, that really doesn't count.

However, before we go to the status quo in startups, though, let's consider the past.

Each of the Maginificent 7 (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla) had a fundamentally, transformative vision for the economy or society. They had a vision. They had a real vision for the world.

Alphabet imagined the world's information in milliseconds. Amazon imagined online shopping. Apple imagined true excellence in personal computing devices. Meta imagined a revolution in human connection. Microsoft imagined a new operating system for business. Nvidia imagined a paradigm shift in computing. Tesla imagined electric cars.

What are the competing fundamentally, transformative visions for the economy and society today?

We can discard some notions right off the bat.

Discard 1: Empowering lawyers to file and respond to more and more briefs faster and faster. Discard 2: En masse generation or curation of vast corpuses of vaguely artistic music, videos, text, images, voices, or faces. Discard 3: Better robotic process automation to fill out forms and documents and read forms and documents faster and better. Discard 4: AI customer support, call centers, marketing emails, sales calls Discard 5: AI coders.

It's frightenly horrible really how deluded these ideas are or perhaps how absurd the world they reflect are.

My criticism of discard 1: This is clearly a dystopia. It cannot seriously be good to have more litigation, more cases in the courts, more threatening letters, whizzing around back and forth. Please make it stop. And no, the solution isn't for everyone to have a pocket lawyer app. How horrible would that be, if we all needed a lawyer Siri to cite muncipal codes at our neighbors?

My criticism of discard 2: This is also clearly a dystopia. We use AI to flood ourselves with more "art/news/content" and then we use AI to filter it again? Why would we do this to ourselves? -- Ok, ok, let's backpedal, maybe we can just use AI to generate art for our own personal consumption -- I must admit I like generating little pictures to myself on Midjourney and Dalle3, but it seems pretty sad if the world is just people sitting at home pulling the slot machine of generative art for personal entertainment. However, if we admit that generative AI for art is just a tool in the toolbox, then it's hardly transformative.

My criticism of discard 3: Just no. So your saying that there is just an endless paper mill of forms churning back and forth? When do we touch reality. Why do we want AI 1 to write Form A to AI 2 which responds with Form B indicates for AI 1 to reply Form C. The less we think about forms the better. We way too many forms already, saying that we will have AI filling out even more or reading even more is hardly transformative.

My criticism of discard 4: I hate it already. The text chat supports that never actually answer anything, the spam sales calls, the bots on social media, the weird emails, the call centers that are an endless phone tree to get to an AI voice that can't seem to understand anything are just horrible. Why would we want more of this? Just make it go away. I don't care if it takes a supermajority and marching over the bodies of lobbyists.

My criticism of discard 5: I just pity anybody who has to debug a system constructed by AI. There will be god knows how many backdoors snuck in and opened up. There will be thousands of identical apps competing for attention when no one even wants to open an app. How much of our day do we really want to spend in software? Do we really just want more apps? Is an onslaught of ultra-targeted, niche apps really interesting at all? Who do they think will consume this software. Maybe if we just wrap everything in one more VM, one more layer of AI and robots pressing buttons (please don't).

For most all AI ventures these days I see a common theme. Company A uses AI to generate stuff. Company B uses AI to process stuff. Company C uses AI to curate stuff. Company A uses the stuff company C curates to generate more stuff. Company B processes all the stuff generate by company A. And so on.

Where is the value creation here?

It's just and endless loop of internet stuff getting shoveled around in an AI ponzi scheme.

I don't know what a fundamentally, transformative vision of society with AI is, but I know these five ain't it.

P.S.

And before you ask, neither is a glorified AI paired with a speaker and a microphone. Alexa can set my timers and alarms, play music and podcasts -- it's great.

I don't need personalized news. I like any number of morning shows with real people. I listen because I care about what those people think. I don't care what ChatGPT on adderall thinks.

I don't want in-home humanoid robots, even though I think that Figure robots look sick and Boston Dynamics has good dance moves. I want sensible immigration policies, more organized personal habits, and more productive assembly lines. My home is my home. I don't like strangers coming into it, much less drone operators staring out from the eyes of a humanoid robot.

Oh and by the way. I don't think AI is going to replace a conference room full of PhDs in a drug discovery/development program (though it will surely augment decision making). I don't think an LLM hooked up directly to the markets without human supervision is anything but a way to lose money. And I don't think that AI salespeople and doctors are doing anything but turn people away. I do belive in human-AI syngergies though and mutual reinforcement. I just think the human touch has been sorely underrated.