AI's Cambrian Explosion

Right now it really feels like the AI hype is overwhelming with new products and companies coming out every day. I’m an avid follower of the technology and have been doing so for about a decade at this point and even I’m tired of all of it sometimes.

The Cambrian Explosion of Ideas

The thing is: we’ve seen this many times before and it’s not going to be forever. The Cambrian Explosion allowed for a whole host of different organisms to emerge from the primordial soup so to say. Many of them were not viable species long-term, however. We can expect this same kind of behavior to happen in the AI market over time—not every idea is going to pan out, not every company will survive, and it’s entirely possible that the ones that do survive don’t look anything like they do today.

Where We’ve Seen this Before

Other places in tech have been the same way and we’ve all survived. One of my favorite examples is the app ecosystem at the start of the iPhone’s life. Apps like Cookie Clicker and the Beer app were effectively useless. They didn’t contribute much to the world, but they were an idea. Someone took advantage of a new outlet for creativity and they tried something out. Nobody’s going to go around making the beer app today, and it’s not still around, but it helped usher in the app ecosystem as we know it.

Conclusion

Ultimately not all of the AI companies that are around today are going to exist in the near-to-mid—term future, but that doesn’t mean that their contributions to the tech world won’t be important. Eventually things will calm down, good sustainable ideas will emerge from the ashes of dumb ideas and the world as a whole will come out of it stronger. Letting it run rampant isn’t a solution, but if we prune the AI industry like it’s a bonsai tree then something really cool can come out of it.

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