It’s very tempting to imagine that AI turns everyone into a tool-builder - now everyone can just ask the model to make the software they need, and apps as we know them are dead. I think that misunderstands how most people think and where software actually comes from, and more importantly, it isn’t a path to change how companies actually work.
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Many people would like to analyse which jobs, companies and industries are most exposed to AI, and assign scores, build charts, and map that against the progress of LLMs. I think this is mostly impossible: you don’t know how the jobs will change, you don’t know what else will change around this, and you can’t measure work like that anyway.
Read MoreWe’ve had ChatGPT for 18 months, but what’s it for? What are the use-cases? Why isn’t it useful for everyone, right now? Do Large Language Models become universal tools that can do ‘any’ task, or do we wrap them in single-purpose apps, and build thousands of new companies around that?
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ChatGPT and generative AI will change how we work, but how different is this to all the other waves of automation of the last 200 years? What does it mean for employment? Disruption? Coal consumption?
Read MoreZoom is the Skype of video - it turned a technology few people used much into a mass-market product. But next we’ll get the equivalents of Instagram and Snap - products that ask different questions. Zoom solved getting into a call, but why are you in the call?
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Events are a bundle of content, networking and meetings, and aggregate people in one place at one time. When you try to take this online, half of it breaks and most of it makes no sense bundled together. We need new tools and new ways to think about networks, not ‘virtual conferences’.
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Social apps are pop culture, trying to grab some piece of the zeitgeist, and build a product around how people feel. But so too are a lot of the new wave of productivity apps. They’re not just utilities, but theories of how we might feel about work.
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In January, everyone was online, and probably willing to try anything online. Now we don’t have a choice - we’re shut indoors for weeks or months. What does that means for work? Ecommerce? Health and education? And the people left behind?
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There's a wave of companies trying to find new ways to make software for work, building bundles of workflows and networks that capture the spreadsheets, emails and phone calls of some industry or profession and turn them into structure, automation and time.
Read MoreIt's common to say that PCs are for creation and mobile only for consumption, but both parts of this are wrong: most people never created on PCs, and far more is created on mobile.
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